[Repost] EP18: From 0 to 50k Members Real Quick with the Founder of IndieHackers

IndieHackers is a community that helps developers by sharing the strategies and even revenue numbers behind successful software projects. Courtland Allens is the founder of IndieHackers and joins us on today’s episode on how he built a community with tens of thousands of people from scratch. To start Courtland got inspiration looking through the popular site Hacker News, a site run by startup incubator Y Combinator. He found a community called Nomad List that served as an inspiration, instead of showing you where to live Courtland’s community showed you how to build successful software projects. Courtland built the site himself, he knew that having a unique site and a great user experience would stand out. Even before he finished building everything he had brilliant ways of testing what features people would want. For example, before he built a forum he put a tab that said “forum” and then had an email subscribe option to join the forum when it was live. That got enough traction for him to prioritize him building it out. There were lots of things that didn’t scale but helped, when he was interviewing people for his blog he would send hundreds of cold emails every week to try get people to share how they built their business, with revenue numbers! For people that are just starting their community, he shared that the work might seem daunting at first but once you get in and actually begin it’s not as hard as you think. Also, while it might seem like a lot of manual work that could be automated or outsourced the depth of understanding you will gain from being so in the weeds of the community, at least at the beginning, will help you, in the long run, know how to build and care for your community.

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