Coders hang out on Stack Overflow. Designers hang out on Forrst. The invite-only site for Web developers and designers just raised a $205,000 seed round from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Gary & AJ Vaynerchuk, Nate Westheimer, Sahil Lavingia, Adam Schwartz, and Jim Sokoloff.
Forrst is a forum for Web designers where they can share designs and code to get feedback from other designers, ask each other questions, or write posts about design topics. It also offers an About.me-like profile page for designers called Forrst.me, witha picture and links to that person’s Forrst posts, Twitter, GitHub, and Tumblr accounts. Here is founder Kyle Bragger’s Forrst.me page. About 10 percent of the Forrst.me accounts are premium accounts that cost $9/month.
Forrst has a small but intense following. It has 23,000 registered users and 11,500 on the waiting list. Bragger estimates that about 35 percent of its registered users actively create a substantial amount of content every month. Activity is doubling on a monthly basis. The site attracted 330,000 visitors last month, and 1.7 million pageviews. Bragger plans on speeding up the rate at which new members are approved, while still keeping the quality of the contributors high.
Forrst is based in Brooklyn, NY.