Why do entrepreneurs NOT use ready-made forum softwares like this to start startups? Clever use of general tools like this (maybe not specifically Flarum) can help them launch communities or marketplaces in less than a day. Is it as optimal as a in-house built forum? No. Should they be saving time on reinventing the undifferentiated code part so that they can test the core business concept and build out their differentiated networks of users? Yes.
- you're competing with hobbyists that have the same look & feel
- hobbyists are online when the community is (mostly outside of 9-5)
- members of the community demand custom functionality specific to their interest.
Also:
- building communities is very hard
- they're not easy to monetise
I've built two successful communities in related niches and I'm pretty sure that succeeded because I was young and early. It's not easy to replicate now.
Most, let's call it, web software is a handrolled system with its own framework, design patterns, etc. Flarum is a great example of web software that rolled it's own, WordPress is another far more popular piece of software that does it's own thing.
The point being, that unless you're already familiar in the "system language" of the software you want to hack upon, or unless the software is very light on abstraction, it's gonna be pretty inconvenient to MVP on top of it.
I've tried in the past to take that approach with few small projects and gave up pretty quickly. In my view it's the same as getting onboarded on a new project - it's slow. The only difference is that with OSS software you might have a bit more documentation available
