Group chats are the new community.

Recently I was listening to an old podcast interview between famed real-estate investor Nick Huber and MyFirstMillion's Sam Parr. In this, the two mentioned how in their Twitter early-days, they had grouped up with some fellow 'reply guys' who would help them boost their profile visibility and grow, through a group chat.

Those 'reply guys' included Nick, Nikita Bier, Sam, Greg Isenberg, Shaan Puri, Austin Rief, Sahil Bloom. Names you likely know. A combined 3.3M followers between them today. Nick now attributes "96%" of his fund's capital raising to the audience he built there.

But the Group Chat network wasn't just important for building a twitter audience. It's the same fundamental principle in YC (https://blog.eladgil.com/p/yc-is-network-effect-business), government, investor circles, secretive invite-only influencer discords and more.

In the era of IndieHacking, Vibe Coding, small or single-person startups and creator economy, I think there's a need for something like YC, but for Indie Hackers and all about networking, not fund raising.

That's BIPCombinator.

BIPCombinator is launching today and I expect a slow start (my ProductHunt announcement was a full-on FLOP, for example). But it's Day 1. My aim is to get to the end of June with 20-30 initial applicants and form our first cohort, case-study it and grow. This is the founding cohort and I'll be a part of it.

Excited to see where this goes.