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Just hit 120 members (4k MRR) for my founder community!
by
Maddie Wang
Founders Cafe
Co-work with Founders from Stanford, YC, and more
founderscafe.io
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I started bootstrapping this community in June! Ended up moving to Palo Alto, and lived in a storage closet at Stanford for awhile.
Met so many awesome founders https://members.founderscafe.io
Just finished co-working with 3 fulltime founders https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-golub-3ba850128/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/arundhati-sampath-2a0113/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/selena-secor-12228a32/
Let me know if you'd like an invite. Most of our community are bootstrapped founders who worked in industry (Google/Citadel;etc) for a few years then left to work on their startup!
Wow, would love to see more about the storage closet where you lived! :)
ARE YOU USERNAME LADIESMAN217?!
No. I'm a ladies woman
I love that your username is simply the word "gay". Very blunt way to describe yourself, I audibly laugh whenever I see it.
BTW Congrats on the success with your community, keep it up!
Storage closet: https://i.imgur.com/8fWurUW.png
This is awesome. Did you stay there through the night and no one noticed anything? You've got great spirit to stay positive through all this. Well done, you are now at 4K MRR!
Congratulations, That does your startup does? And that tip can you give to other. Thanks
Yes!!! Tips: Find paying customers before building anything
I'd like an invite: [email protected]
I built a competitor - growthclub.online . We decided to shut it down because I couldn't make it work, but Maddie has achieved unbelievable retention!
Aw thanks Max!!! For anyone curious, we plotted the retention curve for weekly cohorts in August
https://imgur.com/a/MOFlTrN
Hey neat community! Let me know if you'd like to list it on the Hive Index to reach some more members.
YAY THAT WOULD BE AWESOME @thefedoration
Great :) Founders cafe is up! Let me know if you'd ever like to make any updates to the listing.
Hey @gay ! Nice seeing you here
Hey Khalid!! Btw hows it going with https://searchegg.io :) :D :D
Congrats!
Congratulations. Big milestone! Curious to your answers on the questions below.
Done! What other questions do you have? :D
Nice! So you guys work together via a Zoom call - Do I understand the idea correctly? :)
Is there a non-realtime community as well attached to it, like a forum for example?
We're co-working now virtually too rn! https://i.imgur.com/mN5tQkt.png
Two of the members in the current call have had exits
Yes there is!! Discord -- we have an AMA with Jay ($1.3M ARR bootstrapped, blkbox.ai) right now and a really active/supportive co-working chat + help chat
Congrats on building such a useful community. What brought you to start this community? Who were your first users?
Robert was my first customer in June https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-nowell/
We were coworking everyday on a video call, shooting the shit, unblocking each other. Working on seperate startups as well
One day I interviewed him. Turned out he was using ($400/mo) WeWork AND Ondeck ($3000/yr) yet still co-worked with me everyday because he wanted the daily support/connection/friendship.
The next week, I interviewed 40 founders and got 40 customers in 1-2 months. Founder loneliness is pretty real and people need likeminded (and high quality)
founder family to bounce ideas off of each other
That's pretty amazing & inspiring. A reminder of the strong power of genuine human connection. Thanks
Great job, will mention this in my newsletter today (19k subs).
Curious: what has worked well for attracting new members to the community?
Hey a little off topic but i just started a newsletter myself (offside.bar) would love to your thoughts on how to get newsletter subscribers and also can you send a link to your landing page trying to learn on conversion :)
Thanks
Nice, congrats on launching!
I haven't found any great hack for getting subscribers. My main source is search engine traffic to my website, so SEO is my big thing, but it took a long time for that to get rolling.
Beyond that I just try to consistently put out an interesting edition of the newsletter each week.
My landing page: https://ebizfacts.com/subscribe/
thanks for the reply
Also any luck with any of the newsletter discovery platforms out there?
We haven't done anything with those yet but will likely submit to them in Q1 of 2022. The newsletter isn't my main business, so I don't push hard to grow it.
oooh also last question, do you do any monetization?
Affiliate stuff when it makes sense, but monetization isn't a priority for the newsletter. I'm in it mainly to build an audience and facilitate my own learning.
Also interacting with founders on IndieHackers, Discord, Slack, etc!
Word of mouth mainly! For example one of my members posted this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/qbazku/the_loneliness_of_the_entrepreneurial_mindset/hhaq7nz/?context=3
Hey Niall. What is your newsletter about? Share it here. Would be happy to read.
Thanks for asking. It's about different ways to make money online. Not as shady as it sounds, I swear!
You can check out past editions here: https://ebizfacts.com/blog/ebiz-weekly/
Great. Thank you!
Looks great to me. Good luck.
AWWWWW!!!