🤔 What are you building your community for?
☝️Curious what product/service are people building their communities for? Is it a product, a newsletter, are you doing paid courses or something completely different?
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☝️Curious what product/service are people building their communities for? Is it a product, a newsletter, are you doing paid courses or something completely different?
I built https://midnight.pub for people to have a place to talk and feel listened to. To engage with others a little like you could in a bar. It's a little place of quiet. :)
This is such a good idea! I love the aesthetic of it as well. Well done!
What did you use to build it? Assuming this is something completely custom? Feels super snappy and simple.
I appreciate that! Thanks :) I've built everything from scratch with React, NextJS, FaunaDB and Algolia. It took a few month, but worked on it as a hobby.
building mailing list hackers – a chat community – because i've realized over the past year and a half that i love writing newsletters and building my list, and i want to learn from other people about how to grow my own list. i also have a ton of experience at this point doing automations and fairly technical stuff inside of convertkit (email list provider) and i wanted to be able to share that info back with people.
btw everyone else is plugging here so i will say that our registrations are currently open - we'll move to a yearly membership fee sometime next month but we're building a group of core people and organizing early virtual meetups, so it's a great time to join if you build newsletters (or want to)!
Sounds ace! How come you've decided to opt for a chat community as opposed to a more forum-like platform?
I'm building a community to help creators to earn a sustainable income from their content. https://www.joinsiva.com/
Is this something along the lines of Patreon? If so, why would one use you and not them?
Not really, This is how creators can earn money from Siva:
I'm currently building http://indiestack.co/ a private community for digital makers, bootstrappers, and indie founders. I created this community since many of the free communities are filled with people trying to provide value then sell their service. I wanted to create a community not rooted in members trying to "build an audience".
The second reason is I've been in the indie maker space for 8 months now and before this community, I didn't have real friends, only people who I followed. I wanted to create real meaningful relationships online.
The last reason is that it's simply impossible to break into the inner circles of @mijustin and @robwalling and the other successful indie makers without already being highly successful at being an indie maker. I decided that I'll make my own inner circle with amazing founders where we can all grow together while building long-lasting friendships.
If you're interested in joining, registration is still open. Our community will have a maximum of 250 members. This will keep it small enough where everyone can really get to know everyone else.
Hi @yaroslawbagriy. 👋 I don't think @robwalling and I are that difficult to connect with. 😉
I do remember being in awe of Rob when I first got started (in 2008). Sitting in my car, listening to Startups for the Rest of Us I never thought in my wildest dreams that I'd be sitting with Rob, in Barcelona, having dinner in 2015.
I think the bootstrapping community is pretty accessible. Folks like Rob have been good at giving a "hand-up" to folks and sharing their platform.
I do think there's such thing as a "cohort" though. A group of people start around the same time and start to gain steam around the same time. And that group can be hard to "break into" (in the sense that I have some friends in my cohort that I DM with all the time).
In that sense, I think new entrepreneurs should be looking around, and trying to connect with "the next wave" of indie makers. 👍 (Who's in your cohort?)
If you connect with the right people now, those people will grow and flourish and will become invaluable in the future. Having a strong network really helps when comes to launching, getting advice, solving problems, and hearing about opportunities.
Thanks for the reply @mijustin I agree and I’m in the same position as you were in 2008. But now I’m listening to Startups For The Rest of Us and Build Your SaaS 😉
Agreed and that’s why I created https://indiestack.co/ to bring that cohort together. It is hard finding your people online especially when there are hundreds-of-thousands indie makers online. Who’ll be around in 5 years from now?
Agreed many of the bootstrapper community is accessible for a few questions her and there. But the successful ones have their circles filled. New bootstrappers need to find their own inner circles. I’m trying to build that for the community that’s looking for it.
good pitch. i'm intrigued :) meaningul relationships in a world soaked with marketing are hard to build. then again, if i need to pay for it...
Nevertheless it's an good idea worth exploring! :)
DM me on Twitter we could work something out 😊
Come join us 😊 give the community a one year try and see how you like it. It’d be only like $3/month!
That actually resonates a lot with myself.
One of my biggest pet peeves with IndieHackers is that everyone is trying to sell you something. Just feels like a big pyramid scheme most of the time, where instead of making an actual connection, you're just being sold to.
I do also think that most people here are to "make it" and the people who have "made it" don't really hang out here that much as, like you've said, they have their own inner circles they interact with.
I see you're using Discourse for your community. Any particular reason why you've decided to go for that? Is there anything that it doesn't do that you wish it did?
Yeah and now that I read it again, even my post just simply sounds like I'm selling haha.
I decided to go with that since I can self-host for $10/month. It's a piece of software that's been around for a very long time with a huge supporting community around it. There are enough plugins to get me what I need.
I'm not sure I'd trust some of the smaller and newer community software. What if a bug happens? What if their servers go down? Too much out of my hands. We use Discord, Discourse, Memberful, and Zoom, and DigitalOcean for the teach stack. Everything works well with each other too.
One minor thing I'd like is a way to join our virtual meetings right from Discourse. Which you can if you have a higher tier of Zoom. Also to automatically cross-post a reminder to Discord. We already do cross-posting between Discourse and Discord to get more of a connection between the two platforms.
I'd consider other community platforms if they were open-sourced. But right now it does 95% of what I want it to do.
I've sent you a DM on Twitter. Hope you don't mind 😄
experimenting with paid communities for bootstrappers at xoxo.vc
I love that you used Notion for your website. Very clever!
What do you use for communication between members of your Mastermind groups?
Slack right now.
Slack rocks for just "chatting" but really gets screwed up when people need feedback or something. You have to be diligent about starting a thread otherwise one person's question can consume the whole channel for everyone.
https://circle.so/ looks promising. I signed up for their beta.
Facebook groups also might work but I just hate facebook.
Honestly, might build something custom if circle.so doesn't do what I need and xoxo hits critical mass.
Would you be open to having a conversation about what it is that you're looking for in a community solution? I've followed you on Twitter, if you'd be up for conversing over DMs there, or if you're more comfortable, my email is available on my profile.
sure, I dmed you on twitter
I made Followchain to help others grow their Instagram audience :)
Looks cool!
Yes, it's follow for follow. It kinda works like the "Hacking x" threads on here, but for Instagram.
It's built entirely with WordPress plugins.
Oh wow. I would not have guessed WordPress. Very well done! 👏
I believe that development is more than following trends: it's building good foundations to learn easily whatever built on top.
I'm building my "community" for... helping.
As a developer myself, I definitely agree with this mindset. A good foundation and ability to embrace change ensures you're resilient and can evolve easily with the industry.
What are you using to build your community?
My blog, and soon my book. I'm thinking about a good old forum too, phpBB style.
What's making you opt for a more traditional, phpBB style forum, as opposed to something like Discourse or Circle?
I'm building a community for student-athletes, amateur athletes, and students and also fellow countrymen as most of them do not think of doing a side hustle. I just want to show how valuable it is to be a building block for the future. I want to make a product, newsletter and a cheap paid course.
Sounds interesting! What would the product be?
Gamezzz
To drive development. mental health solutions are often "evidence-based" but there needs to be more community input. After all, those are the people we're building it for. https://myladder.health/
With offdesign, I'm making a list of free and premium resources for remote makers and indie hackers to quickly start their side projects.
Where does the community aspect come into play?
The list is almost made by Indie Hackers that create something, I mean those that I found here and I think It's a good start to connect with each other.
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Great idea! Looks rough around the edges still, but I like the direction this is going.
I'm assuming all this is custom dev work?
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