A year ago i completed my first sideproject, a digital course on how to "cold email a chief information security officer". I thought and think its a great course, but of course I fell into all the traps (didnt verify a need, i thought id make it and everyone would buy automatically), i tested google ads but hated nerding on that, so i decided to find a marketing person to partner up with! But i knew no one! That got me thinking how many people with relevant knowledge that isnt connected to others who need it, so i started gathering these people in an excel doc with what they know and then we created a slack channel for this etc! (fenomener.framer.website). Suddenly now we are 400 people sharing about our projects and collaborating! But if there is one thing ive been missing its "profile pages", that doesnt work well in slack. Id love to see an awesome project but then lurk a bit on who this person is before engaging in anything. so thats when we made the common decision of: what the heck, lets just build the thing we want.
So I partnered up with a fullstack (from the community!!!!!) and built relentlessly.no. we have like 50 users now and 17 projects and just finished our Minimum Lovable Product. Its not good enough yet and we are working on adding notifications and at least optimizing for first the product leader flow, then the builder flow. (we often get product leaders with a demo joining that are HUNGRY for devs, or we get builders hungry for anyone with an idea! its a god damn marketplace maybe!)
I actually think this might become 1000x more important than YC, because its place and time independant, and no one or no org has taken a place in the important space of sideprojects, where actually "everything begins". SIdeprojects sound so naive and not important, but after nerding on this a year i kinda see them as the most powerful thing we have. And this feels exactly as counter intuitive as a great idea should feel. So if we can let relentlessly resourceful people around the globe bump into each other, then the next gen of startups will be born here. Thats freaking meaningful stuff. And the hidden gem in all of this is something that didnt strike me before i had been working on it for a year: The point isnt to find someone to collab on your current sideproject. The whole value is the relationships that get formed. Because now after a year in this space then sideprojects have come and gone, but i have like 8 new "cofounder ready" relationships formed, where i actually trust them and "know" them and can build in the future with them. So i guess we are sortof solving "cofounder matching" without the akward "cofounder meetup night", or the slow "you HAVE to go to school with them for four years.
business wise this is my passion project for life I feel, and the ethical founder friendly direction im pursuing is just adding this on the site: "if you met your cofounder here, like the product and youre raising money with another confirmed investor: please invite me to your round <3"
I dont have money but maybe that will sort itself out, so this just makes me the worlds poorest investor with the most original investment product ever :D
Edit: I do agree with others though that we should be able to see projects/profiles before registering.
I am genuinely glad that you’re so pumped for it, and wish you the best of luck.
But I have to agree with the other comments, its current state absolutely killed it for me. There’s no useful information on the page and I’m not going to register just to check what little there is. Ordinarily I’d just have closed the website and never returned, though in this case I may check again in the future.
I've been an indie founder since 2018, and I'm interested in better communities to connect with other founders.
You're saying that there are no projects like this because there are actually a lot of projects like this. The problem I see with them is that the communities that are beginner-friendly tend to attract the most desperate and clueless founders, so it ends up being a community where people don't want to help each other so much as just get one more backlink and have a few more people look at their website.
The communities I've seen that are successful are highly curated and small.
What does this site do to encourage people to contribute rather than to just leech from the community?
Just from browsing the site a bit, I couldn't figure out how it works. If I click a project, it leads me to an empty profile saying "I just want to lurk." I had to click a few profiles before realizing that was my profile auto-generated. Also, saying "I just want to lurk" implies that I can lurk, when it seems like I'm actually not allowed to lurk and have to sign up for an account to see anything.
So, I think I'm the target market for this product, but the blocker for me is that I don't see how it would provide value for me. It would be nice to connect with other founders who are similar to me, but I'm not that interersted in connecting with a bunch of people who have no idea what they're doing and just want attention on their own projects. Nothing in the pre-sign up pages convinces me that there would be value for me.
good question around contributing vs leeching, im not really sure yet. we are working on functionality now so that product leaders joining can tag their project with "need builders" and builders can sub to new projects needing builders, with hopes of creating new connections in a small way, that can grow into more
leeching right now is hard, if you just hang around and comment not valuable stuff, youre just ignored i guess. If u give value in comments and have thought through projects, then that will surface. thats my hope and vision though. Im also thinking gold rings around "verified relentlessly resourceful" people... like i know who in my community has actually shipped stuff, is ethical, is kind, and not just a "talker" or someone who wants to get rich fast without caring about solving something. so thats an interesting thought im pursuing. and also maybe silver rings on people that "might be RR", if youre recommended by a gold RR its pretty liekly you are an RR.
Stuff like that. Its still early days though, this is just almost an MVP, so we are optimising the flow for product leaders now (cause thats my pain, that i know very well), then we will look at optimizing for builders. In our slack where we started we have 220 members ish, this site is an evolvement from our slack (fenomener.framer.website)
Yeah i see its not intuitive that clicking a project shows your "not created profile page", ive noted that and we will do something with that <3. and yeah youre right, the site today doesnt really allow lurking, since u only see titles and oneliners of projects
anyways, really useful feedback! its so valuable with a glimspe into the first impression of a person like you, one that we 100% hope to capture in the future <3
ive met six pepole in here the last year, some never on a call or physically, that i now feel i "know" and can trust. thats pretty special <3