NotebookForums.com - A Brief History
Where it all began…
Notebook Forums was actually a side project for PC Torque that we started in mid to late 2002. We got so many questions about our Sager laptops because people weren’t yet comfortable with the brand name, so we thought we could address many of them right there.
My husband, Adam, went crazy snapping up forum URLs with laptop manufacturers in them. Today, it makes total sense - he always has good judgement like that. The first iteration of the site was pretty basic - and actually, it those days, it was called SagerForums.com (November 2002). Hey, everybody starts somewhere!
By the following April, we had built out our sections quite a bit more, and we were almost ready for our first name change. By July, we were making the switch from a Sager forum to a laptop forum. It was a totally natural progression from only Sager topics in a few forums, to more and more general topics.
By November 2003, the transition was complete - SagerForums was now TalkNotebooks. But by July of 2004, we would be changing names again to NotebookForums.
I don’t envy anyone starting a forum today. I think we were fortunate back then in that we didn’t have nearly the competition there is now. There we no fancy contests or paid posters - it was just us trying to get our laptop company going while we also helped customers get the answers they were looking for. Before too long, the forum had a mind of it’s own and people started getting their through search engines and they wanted to talk about Dells and Alienwares… it was surreal how it happened.
On April 21, 2006 - over 3 years after it’s creation, NBF hosted it’s first ads. It has been my job since then to monetize the forums into a business. It hasn’t always been easy, but learning has been a blast. I hope to share a lot about this process here. We are really just at the start of big things for the site, and I can’t wait for what’s to come.
(If you are curious about the history of NBF from the members’ perspective, our [awesome] member Duke has kept a running thread marking important dates in its history. It’s amazing and I am so thankful to Duke for keeping it up all this time!)
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