BeerChief has only been up and running 2 days, but myself and Adam are already in the process of a major revamp.
There are plenty of things we know we can improve… layout, use of AJAX, comments section, lack of ‘groups’ section, lack of profile customization for members, better organization on the admin side of things…
BeerChief ‘v2′ will iron out all of these problems and really begin to put the ‘world class’ feel in BeerChief. We’re never going to happy – i think that’s obvious… but if we can match the big guns and keep it as simple as possible that’ll be good enough.
I haven’t spoken yet about ads yet on BeerChief… it’s too early and we’ll only be adding ads to the site when we’re completely cash strapped. For now and in to the near future, BeerChief will be ad free as we try to build up membership, content and make the site bug free.
If we keep growing though, inevitably we’ll have to put ads on the site simply to pay for the server/s and upkeep. We’ve invested $10k+ so far, expect that to rise to about $12k when v2 is launched. I’ll quite happily live on the breadline for BeerChief…
Early signs suggest it will be worth my while… at it’s current rate of growth we’re looking at 600 members per month. So by Christmas (~6 months time), we should have 4k members based on our stats so far. We are of course still in private mode and haven’t promoted the site so realistically, i’d be expecting 5-10 times that figure…. 20-40 thousand members and if we get to that stage we’re in business.
Easier said than done though…let’s drag up this post at Christmas time and i’ll see how much i got right 
