I was almost kicked out of a community slack for getting feedback 🙈
by Pratik SThe excitement of launching something is a massive adrenaline rush. I had such a rush and I reached out to members of a slack group called AI exchange. I got a strike for this outreach, as I messaged 5/6 members requesting if its ok for me to share my product for feedback. I was mindful to not spam directly with link but a few I did do it as I thought I had provided value to them in the past. 🤦🏽♂️
I got the dreaded message from the moderator/community manager asking me to refrain from doing so. He asked me to share it in the dedicated channel named "promote-your-work". I had posted my update there but I think promote has a negative connotation to it. Users do not interact with the channel with that name at all. We are at a stage where we just want feedback so we can grow and improve. Getting the feedback has been hard especially for developers like us who are not really good at self promotion or marketing. I apologised to the community manager and I even reached out individually to the 5/6 members and apologised to them for the outreach. Three strikes and I would be ostracised from the community 😢 This was strike one.
In the same community, there are a lot of consultants who seem to have cracked the code at meeting the guidelines and still be able to promote their work indirectly. They run regular jam session to share their knowledge about consulting pricing, negotiations and create value in the community, thus promoting their own work as consultants. I think the key thing to learn from this incident is "creating value". The consultants create value and it explains the big bucks they demand as daily rates 💰. Seeing them in action in the slack community was a massive learning curve for a first time indie hacker like me.
I am now trying to be a better community member and trying to create value by sharing my learnings from the experience as I am doing here
Please do share if you faced similar issues when you got too excited like me and started reaching out to peers and got blocked. Any pointers will help us avoid making the same mistakes ⛔️ 🙏🏽
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This was a very wholesome update - I was not expecting it. I came here expecting that mixture of pluck with selfishness (usually caused by the pride in their work, not egotism) so common on Indiehackers and I found anything but
Your post was thoughtful, it did was it preaching about (shared learnings / distributed value) and refreshingly honest. It made my day a little bit better.
