Weekend Club

Some news: Weekend Club is dead. We're now https://ramenclub.so.

The community, content & tools supporting founders to ramen profitable, and beyond.

Since we ran Saturday IRL co-working sessions for founders back in 2019, our community has evolved considerably.

Many of our early members (many of who I met through local Indie Hackers meetups) have gone on to build successful internet businesses, like VEED, Tiiny Host, Data Fetcher, Indie Bites and many more. 🔥

And like our members, our service evolved too. From just IRL weekend co-working, we added masterminds, founder AMAs, remote co-working (weekdays & weekends), $50k worth of discounts, an active Slack, the list goes on.

It became clear we'd outgrown the 'Weekend Club' name.

Now, great communities have a coherent purpose - which ties into their brand & visual identity.

From conversations with people in and outside the community - it was clear that many people joined for a core reason... support on their journey to become "ramen profitable, and beyond." ✨ http://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html

As a founder, It's a worthy goal for you starting out. It provides the freedom to be less reliant on a job, savings, family or outside investments.

It's not the end destination, but a critical milestone in achieving freedom and control over your schedule. And it's been very well received by our members, the #RamenGang so far!

So how will we fulfil the vision? Well...

1/ Community 🫂

✅ Active Slack of 90+ founders at different stages
✅ Masterminds with 2-3 others for accountability and deeper bonds
✅ Wednesday/Saturday remote co-working
✅ IRL Saturday co-working at https://thehalley.co.uk in London (Lisbon soon!)

2/ Content 📖

✅ Regular deep-dive posts on topics like ramen profitability, market validation, growth tactics and much more.
✅ Live bi-weekly AMAs with experienced founders like Rosie Sherry, Arvid Kahl & Amar Ghose.
✅ In-house mentorship with our experienced financial, marketing and validation advisors

3/ Tools 🛠️

✅ Community-first product studio (Studio Ramen) building tools for and with our members (with paid gigs). First drop a free 'ramen profitable calculator'.
✅ Daily shipping streaks in Slack via our in-house tool 'PowerUp' to gamify communities.
✅ Much more to come!

Not to mention $50k worth of discounts, and our awesome in-house virtual assistant
Lydia Melvin 🔥

I'm particularly excited about Studio Ramen's potential. https://github.com/studioramen. Many communities have discussed making their own product studio, but few have done so yet.

We're looking to create a best practice template for how to operate these - and have some wild ideas on governance structures and how to best incentivise/involve the community. Stay tuned for more here.

Needless to say, but the roadmap's looking spicy 🥵

A special thanks to all my fellow Ramens aka #RamenGang: our amazing community members and hosts. You know who you all are. Ramen Club is nothing without you all 🍜🍜🍜

This is the most rewarding journey I've been on already, but it still only feels like day 1. I couldn't be more excited for what the next year (or 10) will bring.

If you like what we're doing, here are 3x quick ways you can support us today:

• show us some love on Product Hunt today https://producthunt.com/posts/ramen-club-2
• check our slick new website out https://ramenclub.so (maybe even sign-up? idk 🤪)
• and RT our Twitter thread! https://twitter.com/charlierward/status/1521399183684427777?s=20&t=QYfH_PpwcQ8WXcjQx_ukvA

Big love to the whole Indie Hackers community, Courtland/Channing et al - it's changed the direction of mine and many others lives, long may it continue!

With peace, love & MRR,

Charlie

Delighted to announce the new and improved Weekend Club. Show us some love on Product Hunt today!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/weekend-club-2-0

After interviewing a dozen of our members, we've made a tonne of improvements since our last launch:

• in-house marketing, finance and user research advisors
• masterminds: get matched with 2 other founders at a similar stage
• weekday co-working & co-learning events
• shorter, more focused weekend co-working events
• the return of IRL events (London only - for now)
• many more discounts, such as partnerships with MentorCruise, Work Club & Embarque

If you're an Indie Hacker aiming to supercharge your shipping, use code INDIEHACKERS21 at checkout for 50% off your first month: ramenclub.so 🤝

In March 2020, our Weekend Club community pivoted from IRL to remote as the world was shaken by a global pandemic.

This Saturday 13th November, we're delighted to bring back in-person weekend founder co-working events at thehalley.co.uk, a beautiful space in Haggerston, London.

You can book your ticket here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/weekendclub/599518

Or subscribe here: weekendclub.co

Feedback from our recent test session:

"Got lots done. Super friendly vibe. Good tunes."

"Great conversations with people who are deep on niche topics"

"Good vibes. Cliche but the community is comprised of awesome people"

And 81% of the attendees had a 'great' experience, according to our survey!

"What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years." - Chris Dixon (a16z)

Millions of amazing creators build in solitude every weekend.

We're going to bring them together and make building side projects 10x more fun and productive.

Let's do this!

weekendclub.co is the weekend co-working club for bootstrappers.

Until recently, we ran weekly, Saturday co-working sessions 10am-5pm on GMT (UK time) only, meaning only people in Europe and Africa would generally join (although we did have members in the USA and Australia too!).

Since 9th January, we've also been running sessions 10am-5pm US Central time, which has opened us up to a bunch of awesome new members. People had been pestering me to do this for a while, so I'm glad it's finally up and running.

I feel strongly that building things on weekends (especially important for people who still have day jobs) should be less lonely, and more fun and accountable. That's why someday I want Weekend Club to be available to every time zone on the planet. So whether you're in India, Vietnam or Australia, there will be a session at a convenient local time, every Saturday.

When we started out in London co-working spaces back in October 2019, I never envisioned we'd be welcoming new Weekenders from places as far away as Brisbane, Santa Barbara and Connecticut. It's been a privilege to build and be a part of this community every day, and I can't wait to launch the next time zone session, and the one after that.

Any questions, just let me know in the comments :)

Just over 1 year since we launched, weekendclub.co has now broken $1,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue. $1,104 to be precise!

Weekend Club is the weekend co-working community for bootstrappers.

It’s been quite a journey, starting as a twice monthly meet-up at a co-working space in east London. A lot of things have changed in the community since:

• We pivoted remote (using Slack and Zoom)
• 50 members strong from around the world, (USA, UK, Malta, Greece, Australia and beyond).
• Added 100+ software deals (e.g. Stripe, Airtable, Bubble)
• We saw a bunch of great new businesses and products launch (Remake, Talk To Stefan, ContentUK, Mugshot Bot, Catchup, Embarque, WhatFeatures, Tiiny Host, Indie Bites pod, Woolfie, Timo, Data Fetcher, VEED API, Simple Decisions to name a few)

Thanks to all our amazing members old and new. The community is literally nothing without you, and I couldn't be more happy to be on this journey together. We're just at the beginning 🙏

If you fancy checking us out, just visit weekendclub.co :)

11 months in, Weekend Club (weekendclub.co) is now on $777 MRR. We're a bootstrapper support network and accountability community built around remote, Saturday co-working sessions.

I'm delighted at how this community is maturing. It started out from friends I made running the IndieBeers meetups in London. People started asking me for a weekend co-working club with other bootstrappers, which we did in physical spaces. Then after COVID hit, we went remote. And here we are!

The main channels for growth were:

• building a newsletter/Twitter audience first through IndieBeers (which was later merged with indieldn.com)
• members inviting their friends
• the Indie Hackers site itself of course

That was enough to get to this stage, but for continued growth I'll need new channels. Now that churn has been at 0% for over 3 months, I'm ready to make this my next big project.

I'll share my learnings as I go.

Oh yeah, and if you want a limited, free 30 day trial, you can sign-up on weekendclub.co :)

I'm in a generous mood, so added a tonne of discounts to the Weekend Club membership.

We teamed up with joinsecret.com to provide a bunch of special offers, all within the same subscription.

Members now get:

$5,000 credit on AWS
$2,000 credit on Airtable
$4,000 credit on Freshworks
$500 credit on Bubble
12 months free on Sendgrid
6 months free on Typeform
...And much more 😃

If you too enjoy important and free stuff, plus an awesome Indie Hackers community to build your business with, start a free trial at weekendclub.co 🔥

Weekend Club (weekendclub.co) was an IRL Saturday meetup for Indie Hackers to work on their projects together, and things were going great. Then COVID-19 hit.

I had two options. Roll over and die, or figure things out. As you've probably guessed, I chose the latter.

Here's what I've done so far:

📉 Lowered prices for existing members.
🧠 Changed our positioning ('Work IRL with other Indie Hackers' ->>> 'The #1 accountability community for Indie Hackers & solo entrepreneurs.'
🔥 Went from every 2 weeks to weekly sessions (if we go back to IRL, this might return to every 2 weeks).
☁️ Revised the format to be fully focused on Zoom and Slack (runs 10am-6pm BST on Saturdays).
🤼 Added 'productivity buddies' - each member is randomly matched with another member for a 1:1 video call to hold each other accountable.
🖋 Revised the landing page with testimonials, new headlines and social proof (showing some of our member projects) - thanks for the help Olly (from RoastMyLandingPage.com).
🤯 Added deals. You can now get 50% off VanillaSocial.co and striqopodcast.com/launch

The results so far:

📈 Net increase of 7 subscribers (44% increase, from 16-23).
📉 Slight decrease in MRR from $500 -> $488 due to lowering prices. However if some free trials convert, it should be just under $600.
❓ Landing page conversion rate seems higher, but too early to tell. I'll update you :D

Overall, I'm happy with the progress, but much more to do.

The next steps are to optimise the landing page better for mobile, improve our onboarding process, and adapt the customer experience so people feel even more accountability.

Want to sign-up? Go here 👉 weekendclub.co 👈

Any questions? Let me know in the comments 👇