How would you grow a list that doesn't grow rapidly?🙄
We all know the trend of the .*list.com websites (Excuse my regex 🤭).
nomadlist
betalist
visalist
...
You guessed it. I have another list idea.
It's a micro list though, of only 30-40 items and its growing super slow.
It solves the problem that it's hard to find the list items individually.
I imagine it would be possible to plug some promotions in between the items and make (pocket) money.
There is obviously competition but this kind of list is a side thing for them and pretty much incomplete although overall not bad. It's either a good or a bad sign..
My biggest concern is that my list would have low traffic and low retention since its just a nice source of information, and is mainly static in the sense that it doesn't grow rapidly.
Does it sound like this could work?
I might build it anyway to get some experience as an indie hacker 😋
Very hard to tell because I don't' see many contexts in your description, but I believed you're building something that solves problem @nscode
My advice is: never to early to reveal and gain feedback. There's no unique idea, we need to admit it. What separate idea is how you execute and your team.
All the best!
@felix12777
openstartuplist.com
I just deployed it, so let me know what you think about it.
You speak in such general manner that it's hard to say really anything.
I will just say that I am building a list for a very specific niche.
It has some similarities - items appear rarely (although in my case there is much more of them).
Maybe that's an actual opportunity? If there is not many of the items, you could maybe go really in-depth about each single one?
What attracts me to nomadlist for example is not the number of places they list - in fact it's too much to even visit them all in the lifetime. But every place has TOOOOOONS of info about it.
Or maybe after you attract traffic in your niche you can start slowly adding additional content they will care about?
See how nomadlist is now much more than just a list of places. You also have job offers, you have travel insurance itp.
@mpodlasin
openstartuplist.com
I just deployed it, so let me know what you think about it.
Dude, I love this idea!
So my first impression are exactly what I said:
right now you have only links to websites of those companies. It's good start but it would be amazing to be able to have this data directly on your website. Since there is not so many of those companies maybe it would be doable to start scraping (in an ethical way) this data?
It almost asks for some content marketing. How about interviews with founders of those companies, asking them about motivations for that style of company? You could also write posts yourself about history of open startups, who started it etc. It's a topic you could write endless articles on.
I think you could monetize it with simple job board with offers to work in those companies. Once you start getting some traffic, I would ask them if they were interested with posting some offers on your website. You can start by posting them for free or for cheaper price, depending on how much traffic you will get.
Right now you have just collections of links. This is nice, but you will need to put much more effort to grow this, especially since - as you said - this is just handful of companies.
Dude, write in depth analysis how coronavirus affected open startups.
You will get massive traffic.
Thanks for the feedback @mpodlasin
I was tinkering with the idea of scraping, but in some pages I checked I couldn't find an easy way to have one script that rules them all.
Doing it manually is out of the question (Inspect nomadlist and ghost, some data like MRR is only visible through the graphs. Naming conventions for the ids are not helpful for a scraper either).
I definitly thought about interviewing these founders on the aspects of having an open startup. It's on the list :)
Content marketing is on the way as I already have gained new subscribers (just from yesterday). So I will definitly go that path as well.
I think it's a too small of a niche for a job board. The trend still needs to grow, but yea I will keep that in mind!
Thanks again, really appreciate it!
I will talk more about this when I build the MVP.
I think there might be an opportunity here. The trend I'm onto is at it's diapers stage and possibly grow faster at some point.
Take note of these,
@levelsio also started a small list, got confirmation of people interest and even plugged a promotion and made $ when it all started. He grew it by adding features like a slack channel and others.
Even @csallen started IH as a list (of interviews) and grew from there to build a community around it.
I think the most important take away from this, is that if you successfully confirmed the interest of your list (as did both Courtland and Pieter), you can continue to grow it and add to it.
Start small so you can do it better.
Tiny products FTW :)