@Gunwitch asked me about this. I will just say... lol @ the scuttlebutt re: Roosh. How do these things get started?
Besides the fact that Roosh is now a born-again anti-PUA Christian, he is also now working construction jobs to get by, last I saw.
I don't mean to knock the guy; I had a cordial relationship with him when he was in the space; he's now following the path he needs to follow. But unless he plans to pay for an acquisition by offering me
indulgences, I don't see how (or why) he'd pull that off.
As for this forum, just to clarify my personal stance:
- I run it because I genuinely care about the community and am grateful to it, and I believe a healthy forum offers certain 'intangible goods' to the space as a whole and the company managing the forum additionally. Every important writer we've had for GC has come from forums (including me), some from forums I've run (such as Hector)... many of our products and almost all the coaching we do is the result of guys working for GC who've come from forums. If a forum didn't exist to source good talent from, we'd probably be stuck trying to turn creative writers into seduction experts, like a lot of companies do, and failing miserably... or more likely GC would be a one-man operation with a hard ceiling on how big it could get
- The forum itself is not a (direct) moneymaker by any stretch of the imagination. I haven't even gotten the ads up on here (we used to have ads on the old GC Boards pre-merger... I think they kicked in a little revenue here and there... keep meaning to get some up on here but keep not getting to it). Even if we did have ads it likely would not contribute very much
- I would be very surprised if a forum of no more than 70 or 80 active users, with no more than 500 visits per day, would fetch enough of a price from anyone to be worth selling... at least to me personally (I'm not ridiculously wealthy, but at this point I'm not hard-up for cash either)
- Also, as I said to Gun... my stance on the Boards here is that they are something separate from GC proper. Selling GC is one possible future for the company (I have several), but re: Skilled Seducer, if there ever is a GC sale (and, just btw -- I have had repeated M&A firms reaching out to us about acquiring, which I have just been ignoring, because I don't think we're ready for that yet -- either in terms of the valuation I think we could get or having all the systems in place to hand it off and know it'd still be run well for at least a decade or so), my intention is to spin SS off to the community. I'm not totally sure how I'd structure that, and we'd probably want to do a brainstorm with the top guys here to figure out how that should go. But I'm not including this place in a sale. Which, btw, is pretty typical in acquisitions... I don't know how many folks know this, but when Gambler sold PUA Training he did NOT sell his YouTube channel... he ended up looking to sell that off separately (not sure if he ever did). He also did not sell his games or the rights to make more, so far as I am aware. What gets included vs. what doesn't are typically parts of the discussion... if ever I decide I do want to sell GC, I will almost certainly spin the forum off FIRST so it is not even a part of that discussion (and I might do something devious like sign a contract between GC and the guys I spin it off to that specifies GC has to include a link in XYZ whatever place to the forum for the next N years, that way whoever acquires GC can't just go in and take that link off... lol)
It's possible I could go 'totally evil mustache-twirling greedy capitalist' and decide at the last moment, "No way, the forum gets sold too! I want the tiddlywinks we'll get for it!" Or I could, like, get addicted to gambling (quote from
The Mummy: "I only gamble with my life, never my money"), burn all my savings, and suddenly not be able to make money any other way than an asset sale for some reason, then in desperation decide to sell the forum... hypothetically.
I don't think either of those is remotely likely, but we're all human and humans are fallible and change.
So, I don't have any issues with guys doing contingency planning or wanting to set up backups or anything else like that.
Just wanted to share my stance on things, because I
know it's a community guys have invested a lot of personal energy into, and I have a responsibility here to not just be shooting from the hip treating it like a piece of merchandise or some thing I can do with as I please. I also was around (though less active then) for the whole Gambler debacle with mASF and I still think that's a tragedy. Obviously you guys who were on nextASF have been through that twice now... once with Formhandle selling to Gambler and that all going to hell, then once again with Blackdragon pulling the plug on th eforum, then letting it go to hell too.
(also, I am not sure how these forums get corrupted? I have been running one forum or the other for over a decade now and have never had a forum database get 'corrupted'. It is a mystery to me how both Gambler and Blackdragon managed to have their forums go completely offline, with corrupted DBs, within a year of shutting down. At least from my experience, it seems like in theory you should be able to quit maintaining a forum and have it still run fine for years and years)
One other note... one concern I heard from Gun was about the forum disappearing from the GC navigation bar after the update. I think this was one of the other things that stirred up the scuttlebutt.
I am sorry about that, and it is the last link I wanted to take off there, but we rolled out the mega menu with all the categories and subcategories (which I personally spent months categorizing... it was awful) and there was literally no room for anything else.
We took off the link to the how to/start here page, took off the link to One Date, and took off the forum link too.
The forum is still linked in the footer, and in the new theme (which is not live yet... and seriously, egregiously overdue) we have a "latest posts on the forum" block on all the category pages. If it seems like we're getting less new blood, I'll look at where else we can add a forum link (such as on the article sidebar).
Anyway!
If we are getting acquired, nobody's told me about it yet.
Which would be surprising, seeing as I control all the shares and am the sole signing authority for the business
Just waiting for that email from Roosh offering me forgiveness for my sins if I hand over the forum...
Chase
