Last week we went live with a ‘public launch’. As many forum admins may be aware, we had a private period before this where we were keeping quiet to the ’silicon valley’ circle what we were building out. Our private period drew potential forum admins to our service via google ads. This plan worked very well for us, because it allowed us to closely work with an active and engaged community before publicly launching. Their feedback directly contributed to the product you see today, and the feedback we’re receiving today is contributing to the product you’ll see tomorrow.

Our official public launch on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 drew a lot of attention from blogs and a few news outlets, such as the San Francisco Chronicle. Some of the larger blogs included TechCrunch and c|net’s Webware.

We had 500 forums created within just the first 24 hours of our launch. TechCrunch was a large slice of the pie driving traffic to our site, with almost 24% of referrals coming from TechCrunch. Another, slightly smaller, slice of that pie came from various RSS readers (17% Google Reader, 3% netvibes, and 2% Bloglines – pretty easy to see who’s dominating the online feedreader market.)

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Celebrations?

As with any good news, we take that as a time to celebrate and enjoy life. By Wednesday night, we were all starving, so only one cuisine could feed 7 hungry men, Churrascaria (aka Brazilian Barbecue).

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Earlier this week, we spent time reviewing our past progress and how we want to keep moving forums forward. We figured the best place to get our product ideas flowing, would be where one of San Francisco’s best beers gets their product flowing – The Anchor Steam Brewery.

For more photos, check out some of these linked below:

• Team photo one & two.
• Moustaches for all.
• Anchor Steam closeup.

We believe that forums are essential to online communities. lefora was started to bring forums up to speed with the latest ’social’ and ‘technological’ trends seen across many of the ‘web2.0′ sites that have popped up over the past few years (has it really been that long?)

The existing forum market is huge, however the options that exists for everyday people are pretty slim. You pretty much have phpBB and derivatives, vBulletin, InvisionPowerBoards, or something tacked onto a larger service (like facebook’s groups). We want to change all that with an offering that is simple to use, fun to use, and makes life easy for admins and moderators. And that’s why we created lefora forums.

This blog will try to focus on a few things:

• Where are forums headed?
• What makes for a successful forum?
• How do forums enable “community”?

We’ll talk about our own vision, but we’ll also bring in forum admins from across the web to get their take as well.

Remember, forums pre-date the web, but they don’t have to feel that way.