Cool project!
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.
thanks!! i havent seen any sideproject communities with the focus of creating relationships between the "makers" so that new startups happen, but maybe there are some?
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
Yeah, I had the same problem: I can't view any projects without signing up. And I'm not going to sign up without being able to see if there's anything worth signing up for.
Yeah good point. No point of us hiding the goods. We will look into that!