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What's going on with Indie Hackers? (February 18th, 2019)

A few people have had the bright idea of there being a #meta hashtag where we can discuss the state of the community and the website itself. I figure #meta will be a great place for me to keep you all updated as well, so here's a list of a few things I'm focusing on for the website right now:

  • Performance. The site is too slow and has been for a while. Lots of fixes in the pipeline.
  • UX issues, especially around creating and reading posts. Among many other things, I'll be looking into bringing titles back, but in an optional way. I'm also bringing back the ability to report spam posts.
  • Office hours. My vision here is to regularly bring in successful founders and topical experts who you can sign up for a Zoom call with and get some personal feedback. We'll livestream the calls to our YouTube channel and save the recordings as well. We did a test run with Vincent Woo of Coderpad ($4M ARR) the week before last and it went great.

More broadly, I'd like the community to be stickier. That doesn't mean bombarding you with notifications. Rather, it means building things that are genuinely useful, so you come back on a regular basis. The constraint is that these things will generally involve connecting founders with founders, because that's what IH is for. Ideas welcome!

(Note: There is a long list of other things we're working on at the moment around IH meetups, articles, our Twitter account, the newsletter, hiring, IH swag, etc. This post is just a snapshot of my personal short-term to-do list for the website.)

  1. 7

    I already asked for this a few days ago but it went almost unnoticed. Can we get RSS support for interviews/articles/posts please?

    1. 2

      Yes, hopefully soon ;-)

  2. 5

    Upvotes history.

    It would be useful to see my personal upvotes in my profile. That would be a good bookmark in case I recall something useful I read on IH and want to look into it again. Currently the Recent History section contains Articles, Comments, Posts, Discussions, but not upvotes.

    1. 2

      THIS.

      Can't emphasize enough how useful this (or a bookmark feature) would be. This would also substantially contribute to making IH 'stickier' (not only increased engagement but also 'closing the loop' and becoming the one-stop source)

  3. 1

    There should be a way to report SPAM. Just saw a strange spam post in IH, went to the person's profile and there was no way to report as spammer.

  4. 1

    Hey Courtland, the topic of online communities (and their evolution) has always been interesting to me, so I wanted to chime in here for what it’s worth. I don’t have the answers, but I do have some thoughts. As I started writing this it turned into a giant text bomb, so I’ll just start posting to #meta

    I’ve gotten a ton of value from IH, specifically from you. The first hand experiences you’ve shared from your own path has personally helped me. Your experiences of burnout, getting into time traps, and then moving forward with constraints around your idea validation resonated deeply. Thank you for sharing your journey.

  5. 1

    That was fast. Great!

  6. 1

    Yes! All the work you're doing on IH is only getting more impressive as there are more and more of us with ideas and suggestions.

    #meta #products
    What do you think about the idea of allowing products to have both verified and unverified revenue? My site's subscriptions are through Stripe, but just last week a prospective customer in Mexico told me he'd tried multiple credit cards and they had all been rejected so he needed to use Paypal. I've also got affiliate revenue coming in from Gumroad, Amazon, etc.

    I was thinking rather than keep revenue completely unverified, or verifying an inaccurate claim, it would be nice to have a third path—verify what can be but still report the total, including what can't.

  7. 1

    Hey, @csallen, what is the best way to report some UX issues? For example, creating a product page today, I had a problem uploading the logo, with no feedback on what format and size it should be. I eventually figured it out, but it definitely takes more time than it should! Thank you again!

    1. 3

      I usualy sending an email and he is fixing things in no time :)

  8. 1

    I love the idea of office hours. Sign me up!

  9. 1

    Awesome, thanks for the update Courtland!

    There are one or two things I'd love to see IH do to provide additional value to users. Will try to come back later and elaborate.

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