FreeFlarum: looking for passionate partner

Sanguine

Hi! As you may know, I am the founder of FreeFlarum.com, a popular service to launch a new Flarum install in seconds. It's been running steadily since 2017 and hopefully for the years to come. I would be happy to keep it up and running as it is, however I feel there is a lot of untapped opportunity. So I am looking for a passionate partner who wants to help build it into a successful SaaS.

Stats

4416 forums created since Nov 2017.
80K+ posts
20K+ forum users
First page at Google when searching for "flarum"

Vision
I believe people are increasingly wary of tech giants controlling our communication, and want to move communication into their own hands. Creating a new forum should be just as common as it is today for eg Chinese to install a VPN service. With localized support (translations, login methods) I believe that FreeFlarum has the potential to power hundreds of thousands of small forums around the world. Because small forums (<20 users) require nearly no resources, it is possible to serve them for free. The next segment (20-200 users) appear willing to pay $5-$10 monthly for an unbranded forum and can provide a solid financial basis to support operations.

Technical
Basic maintenance requires at most a few hours per month. Nearly all devops is automated. It currently runs on a single $20/m server at Hetzner with off-site backups but can be scaled easily, if required. Recovery is automated too, so in case of hardware failure, a new server can be live within 2 hours. The control panel is written in Python/Flask. Simplicity first. There's just a single database table for administration. Forum owners are authenticated against the admin account of their own Flarum install. Outgoing mail is routed through a (free) Mailgun account. All sites are behind (free) Cloudflare. Server monitoring via (free) StatusCake.

Cool features
It has clever multi-tenancy using symlinks, so all forums run on single code base but have separate access control.
It has auto-SSL for new forums.
It supports custom domains out of the box (also with auto-SSL).
It is very fast due to some custom optimizations.

Opportunities

migrate all forums from beta7.1 to beta9 (single codebase)
implement simple SaaS payment (I think $7 per month is viable) to remove the "powered by FreeFlarum banner"
launch a Chinese and Turkish version (lots of interest from that region)

Are you the right person?
The ideal partner should have some technical experience (Linux, programming) and have an entrepreneurial mind. If you want, I'd be happy to provide some coaching (I built and sold several companies in the past). I put of lot of my spare hours and love into building this, so am looking for someone who appreciates quality but is result driven first.

If interested, please mail me (info@freeflarum.com) a short bio and your plans with FreeFlarum. Ideally, am looking for a 50/50% partner agreement, but am open to discuss other opportunities as well.

Looking forward to your proposal!

Take care
Willem @
FreeFlarum

DeepGlue

Sanguine

I would be interested to discuss this further.

Other than what you’ve already mentioned there is a lot of business potential for blogs and static sites looking for both commenting and forum solutions. Though there is lot of competition only muut.com has this full solution. Talkyard is another one entering this space. I expect static site based blogs to eventually beat Wordpress because of speed and the latest builder tech.

If if this can be done using the flarum base then we are looking at a much larger business potential.

Turgut

Sanguine You should find ways to pay differently for Turkish users. PayPal is no longer in turkey.

nanowhiz

@Sanguine This is interesting. Just sent you an email regarding this. 🙂

Cheers.

User31

Hell yeah!

I was thinking about this earlier.

FreeFlarum could achieve significant commercial potential by offering higher tier paid options.
Perhaps this might be something to consider after Flarum 2.0 maybe.

The way I see things, as FreeFlarum currently exists, literally doing this for free.
FreeFlarum-(in a sense as a Flarum proxy)-is a direct challenger to the big brands.

None of these big name brands provide any free services themselves nor by proxies.

This alone is a major advantage over the others.
As Flarum develops & evolves, imo, at some point inevitably Flarum is going to become a major commercial competitor.
Yet even if FreeFlarum were to provide higher paid teirs comparable to Flarum's competitors, as long as FreeFlarum also continues offering the free tier to small forums under <20 members, FreeFlarum—(& by extension also Flarum)-could stand to begin dominating that particular section of the consumer market.