Confidist

Getting users is difficult, unnatural, and often times the most important facet of our project. I'll gladly share my experience in getting to this point in the hopes of helping another indie hacker and I encourage others to leave comments with the same goal.

First, let me give a little context about Confidist so specific actions make more sense. This project started out as a peer-to-peer therapy application with a simple goal and proposition, "Listen and be heard". Everyday people would be able to volunteer to listen to others, and those going through a tough time that either couldn't afford a traditional therapist or would rather speak in a more casual setting could have someone to speak with. My secret sauce would be collecting and showing attributes users have in common to help humanize the mostly anonymous online interaction.

After about a month of building out the initial product and asking for feedback from friends, family, and colleagues I knew I had to find "real users".

The overwhelming majority of my users have come from 2 places. A small subreddit that is trying to facilitate the same interaction as my original concept, and the site alternativeto.net (https://alternativeto.net/software/confidist/). The rest have been from a hodgepodge of comments posted on other social media sites and direct interaction with people.

The small subreddit community (/r/kindvoice) has been by far the most valuable and fortunate collaboration. One that I would highly recommend other sites try and emulate when first starting out. After PMing moderators from many subreddits and exploring around my luck struck when I joined the Discord server of KindVoice and asked if I could speak with one of the admins.

As a side note, I find it extremely important to go about the appropriate channels and respect the rules of each community you approach. Spam might help you a little bit, but gaining the trust of a community will have a much larger impact if you succeed. Not only that, but it will keep the reputation of your project in tact.

To my elation, the administrator I spoke with was very open minded in collaborating. After another month or two of building features and tweaking the admin gave a green light for a launch event that he would personally promote within their community. We also have our application permanently highlighted within their subreddit sidebar and have built the majority of the application with their users in mind.

The second source of consistent new users was from alternativeto and ill let you know why this works for Confidist but maybe wouldn't work for you. This site is basically a large graph network of software that anyone can help build out. I could say that Confidist is an alternative to Indiehackers, but a user could flag that as incorrect. I was able to find about 50 other applications that relates to Confidist, either as a social communication platform, or more particularly for social benefit. This allows me to tap a relatively large audience of existing social app users in my case. And in a sense the site gives an illusion of social proof, without having much barrier to entry. This is a great choice if you are able to understand how to categorize your app and relate it to others. Likewise, list your application on as many aggregator sites as you can find. https://www.placestopostyourstartup.com/ is a great collection of them.

I hope you found this limited experience helpful. What do you recommend to others trying to find more external users?

Negative milestones are still important and lessons to share and learn from. This round I was rejected without an interview from YC W20 and when you receive this email you are not given a direct reason. I think this is entirely fair, realistic, and honest. In case anyone is interested they do point people to this resource: https://www.ycombinator.com/whynot/ to help reconcile our pesky problem-solving minds.

So what does this mean for Confidist and the thousands of other rejected companies who applied? Well, not much. I'll keep bootstrapping, iterating, and growing the best I can. I definitely don't regret applying as the application process really helps founders evaluate their progress in the eyes of potential investors and craft a more concise vision. I have to admit that creating a compelling 1-minute video about my project was much more difficult than expected.

A famous quote from President Woodrow Wilson sums up the nature of the problem nicely:

A member of the Cabinet congratulated Wilson on introducing the vogue of short speeches and asked him about the time it took him to prepare his speeches. He said:

“It depends. If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

So congratulations to everyone who was accepted for an interview, and good luck! Everyone else, well, give yourself the benefit of the doubt and keep on, keeping on.

https://www.confidist.com is a place for meaningful conversations on the web.