OTB Chess

This update pretty straight forward. After running the OTB Chess community for a few months we finally reached 60 users.

Right now, OTB Chess helped people in Los Angeles, Newark, New York and Amman, Jordan meet and play Chess in real life.

As you can see the growth is not staggering, but, as they say, the slow and steady wins the race. Only in this case, there is nothing to win, just grow, slowly.

I have setup a F5Bot account to track mentions of chess related keywords (e.g. OTB Chess, over the board chess, etc.). This helps me find people, threads, subreddits where people are looking to play chess in real life (so, my kind of people).

When I get a notification, I would go to the relevant subreddit and leave a comment saying that they can use our community. Well, today was a little different.

When I went to the reddit post of a person asking where to play OTB Chess in Hong Kong, one of the comments was suggesting out community 😍😍😍

I think this is the first time someone but me mentioned this product. Huge milestone I'd say.

First vanity metric milestone 😃

Yesterday, our small (for now) community reached 50 users. It took 80 days to reach that milestone. The first month there were crickets only, as I've been very passive about growing this community.

About a month ago I started tracking keywords across the web, responding with my community seconds after I see it. I started reaching out to different communities, subreddits and influencers.

I mostly hear rejections, but it is fine in the beginning of the journey. The important thing is that users are coming, they are finding other people to play with and that's what matters. I hope this trend will continue improving.

For anyone following the story of OTB Chess, you would know that the point of this community is to find a person to play chess with in real life.

Well, I have fantastic news, this goal actually became true. This weekend to players played a real game of chess in Los Angeles.

I hope as time goes by, more and more players join this community to find someone to play chess with.

Right after launching the community and setting up all the relevant threads, decided to mention the community on Reddit. I made a small post on the r/chess subreddit. This subreddit is quite large, with around 368k users.

I did not expect much, since people like other type of content, but to my surprise the post received a few upvotes (48), which lead to around 2500 page visits and 15 registered users (0.6% conversion, not the best result).

This is a first post of mine that lead to a good reception from the reddit community, so I'm happy about that. Furthermore, the new users, seem to be active and posting in their relevant threads. The group is very diverse. There is couple that are inviting people to play in Maui, Hawaii. Another person is calling people in Sydney, Australia. And the closest person to me is inviting people to play in Baltimore.

I have high hope for this community. I think there is currently a problem in the world of Over-The-Board Chess, and I believe this community is a good solution to that problem. Will see.

The next step would be a HackerNews post, for the next wave of traffic. I am certainly expecting much smaller, response as the public is much less chess oriented than in the r/chess subreddit. I have already made a post, you can support it if you want. I would really appreciate it.

Will report results tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.

Yesterday I spent some time configuring the DNS and IP setting for the domain I just purchased (https://otbchess.com). This always takes some time. But once I was done, it was time for some fun.

I setup up a server for a Discourse forum, using the DigitalOcean Marketplace. The setup was suuuuper simple.

Long story short, after all configuration I launched the community last night. Posted about this project on the Chess subreddit, and am now waiting for the first day results.

🤞