What is your stance on a broken partnership from your forum?

If you had a vision to create a forum, found a partner to help with the creation of your vision, how do you solve the dissolution of the partnership?

Do you preplan this demise before you start the creation of the forum by creating contracts, buy out options and terms?

I think this is an important question because there is always the potential to become a healthy competitor for sites like Sitepoint, Warrior Forum or Wickedfire, with this in mind there is alot of money to be made. If the partner decided to go their own way, created an almost carbon copy of your forum and achieved a greater success than your own how would you personally handle it? It's an interesting viewpoint when you consider the millions being generated in advertising income alone.

 

Non-Disclosure, Non-Compete agreements work miracles at times such as these.

 

When providing the non compete agreement or any agreements between yourself and the partner, how much research do you do to verify their identity before working with them?

I know this may seem like a complete " blonde" question but the internet provides a certain level of protection allowing anyone to become a persona of their own ego. I know there are few brilliant " weekend" internet entrepreneurs but do you require the information to be sent back to you notarized ? With the non compete, do you also outline the information required for buyout of the partnership?

 

All legal documents should be signed in front of and stamped by a Notary Public. They require multiple forms of proof of identification.
You can also have them filed with the court but that costs money.
The rule of thumb in all legal matters is if it isn't in writing it didn't happen.
You want to spell out in detail every element of the agreement, including but not limited to any dissolution agreement.

 

Never done anything like this. Closest I've done is agree to create a forum with friends; with my current site most of them dropped out initially which was really annoying.

 

After being a successful businessman for many years, I would recommend that you get any partnership tightly covered to protect yourself.

It is sometimes necessary to have a partner, but I have always subscribed to the theory that I will not put my money into any venture where I do not directly control it.

A bad partner can do a lot of damage to your venture, if he or she is not bound by good contracts. Unless you are prepared to spend a lot of money if things go wrong then any contract is only as good as the people who sign it.

You may be well covered, but how much time effort and money are you prepared to spend to enforce a contract?

 

This happens frequently when they discover a forum is hard work. Forums don't build themselves by osmosis. There is no magic secret.

 

Exactly. I think non of them expected the amount of work that was required, unfortunately.

 

Personally i like to do forums by myself as i know then no one can wreck the forum unless someone hacks me of course, and doing it by myself allows me to have alot more control on what happens in the forum, the closest i have to a partner is a moderator.

 

Same here, as much as I would enjoy to have a partner and be able to share the work load I wouldn't know who to choose to partner up with or who to trust.
When setting up a new site I do like to do it myself so I have the say in how it runs, looks and progresses, I don't know how I would be if someone else was there doing their own thing to it as well.

 

Guys do you mind if I rant just a bit on this subject? LOL.

I had this actually sort of happen to me. It wasn't a brand spanking new forum but it was a merging to create an evolution of my forum as well as a resurrection of my former partner's dead forum. My site merged with his site, Stormverse.com to create Storm Chaos.

Here's Where it all went wrong​

What happened was basically I decided to do a partnership and merge my site this guy named Ty from stormverse.com who has been writing online for a decade now. He is twice my age(I'm 17 and he is in his 30s I believe).

My community was already an established book forum and we were going to use my community to more or less give his site an already established audience so he could get more eyes on his story and traffic to his story because his forums had been dead for awhile and he more or less hadn't bothered to really try and fix them. So I offered him the idea of merging and we went on with it.

Big mistake.

I also changed my site's name from therisingchaos.com to Storm Chaos, which was a hybrid of his blog's name and my forum's name. I did this because I didn't want my site's name to be the unified name for us all. I figured this is a new evolution and a new beginning so let's give it something fun and fresh.

Initially it proved to be a good idea and I bent over backwards trying to appease his members and I had no issues with him choosing 2-3 people he trusted being staff members. I did have a small issue with his staff because in my mind I thought we were trying to unify both our sites as ONE NATION, ONE COMMUNITY when his people had the mindset of more or less ignoring my members and solely focusing on their area of the site which I thought was a bit stuck-up. Mind you these are grown men who more or less were acting like stuck-up high Schoolers in a clique. I had to put up with the whining of one of his staff members(Zeta)who instead of attempting to try and learn stuff on his own, he whined and complained about every little thing.

It even got worse when the guy i was doing the partnership and his team begin to try and criticize my staff members for their work ethics and he accused me of not really listening to him which was not the case as I had desperately wanted some help of my own and I told him that since Day 1 if he thought something was best that he can do it. He was equal to me and I even stated as such that the site was ran by its Co-owners Micah(Me) and Ty(him).

What pissed me off and what ultimately broke up the parternship was the fact that Ty eventually went behind my back and tried to formulate ANOTHER partnership with another site. He initially tried to lie and say that he was just more or less networking and that he was still all in with our partnership.

This is the direct Quote about our Merger "Storm Chaos" from his Blog and his new merger with another site called "Awesome Dude"

The other thing I have been trying to do, is build relationships with an extended community. StormChaos was part of that. Building alliances is also part of that. It will probably come as no surprise to some of you, that our alliance today is with AwesomeDude.com. AwesomeDude is one of our own. You’ll also see a lot of interaction between our communities in trying to build a larger greater one together, much the same as I’ve tried to do with StormChaos. We’ll have some joint promotions, and will likely interview each other as well. You can’t do it all alone. We’re stronger together. So, this will be great. Another great step in what is turning out to be a great year.

Again notice the use of past tense words such as "was" when discussing our Merger for Storm Chaos. This was around the same time one of his staff members also removed all links and info about my forum from their blog as well.

Yet when I asked Ty about it he claimed he had no idea what was going on. Mind you he is the owner of his blog and He is the one I made the partnership with and not his staff members. So how do you not know what is going on with your own team?

Eventually he more or less broke the merger but he told me I could always merge my members with his new forum that he created.

So you mean to tell me that you want me to go from using premium software like IPB and Xenforo and move back to free software like mybb. You want me to move almost 1000 members over and more or less start over on YOUR NEW SITE? Because i wouldn't be able to move the posts from Xenforo to mybb(there's no importer)

Come to find out, the issue was essentially he had an issue with not being top dawg and being equal to a 17 year old such as myself. It doesn't matter how much I preached that we were equal partners, if he wasn't the top dawg of the site he didn't want to be apart of the partnership any longer.

He now has his own forum which is a bit bare and sad looking.
It's riddled with spambots and spam all over the forum. It's nearly dead.

I'm a bit pissed about it till this day and it has definitely made me a bit wary about ever trying to do partnerships or mergers in the future but i'd like think that there are some people who are team players and don't let their egos dictate their actions and are willing to work together to build a unified community together.

I never really got much of an apology for my time wasted. This merger lasted all of 3 weeks and I spent so much time trying to make it perfect his site and I wasted cash to try and make the site welcoming and it does piss me off a bit. This was about 3-4 months ago when the merger happened.

I am a bit annoyed but I don't wish him negatively and I've actually begun rereading his story as I was a fan before we even thought of merging. I just have no respect for shady people but I do wish him and his community well even if I do feel a bit used and ultimately discarded to the side like trash.

As for now, I am perfectly fine on my own and I can't see me attempting a partnership anytime soon.
@andyred @thebrad @ConfabIt @ProSportsForums @Big al @Glcameron

 

I've avoided a lot of problems by being a "my way or no way" kind of forum owner and administrator. I certainly don't know everything but I do know that I always begin with a vision and so does everyone else. No one else exactly shares my vision and I firmly believe that half my way and half your way is half-assed and no way to run a site. It always sounds like a great idea to have twice the admin and twice the staff and twice the members until it becomes ten times the hassle. I avoid it like the plague it is. I've never known a site with more than one owner that didn't eventually become a cesspool of discontentment. Maybe there are some but I'm unaware of them.