Ask HN: An online 'doers' community for bootstrapping developers?
1. I'm a sole bootstrapping startup developer in Novosibirsk, Russia. (LiveReload app, if you heard of it.)
2. I want to virtually hang out with other folks busy building a product business on their own.
3. The goal would be to cross-boost motivation, share tiny successes, get feedback etc (NOT idle sharing of opinions), and generally to get more of a ‘team feeling’.
Anyone knows a place or interested in starting one?
UPDATE: I've created https://plus.google.com/events/c40a48hviivngqaj3r6a3k4jhug; please hop in if interested!
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @andreyvit details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
I really hope this could work.
However I have a growing suspicion that generally nobody really cares (not as much as you do, anyway) about you and your stuff, unless perhaps you have great writing skills and are willing to pre-chew your random learnings into lessons that might interest and apply to the reader too (patio11) or make it engaging in other ways (notch).
This is just the lonely path we chose as solo founders. Really true interest in the raw daily challenges of your project can only be had if those people are working on it and have a stake in it.
I know that there is(or was) a place like you described for book authors on Google hangout. They would just meet in a room and not really have a conversation but only be present. The goal was to get a motivational boost by seeing other people working and doing the stuff you should be doing too, which in that case would be writing. I imagine it could work for some people. So I say try to find something on Google hangout. And when you have found something tell me about it :)
I was looking for just that a few weeks ago. I joined nReduce in the hopes that it would be like that, but it's much less personal. I was thinking that joiners would split up in groups of around 10 companies and help each other out, and become intimately familiar with each other's progress and achievements.
I'd be very interested in starting something like this, if you like. We only need 8 other people, it shouldn't be that hard.
Hi Andrey, nice question. I'd honestly go for an IRC channel, i'm not really sure if anything like this exists, freenode should help in this direction. Anyway, i just added you on google+. I've spent over a year in Russia so far (NSK, Tomsk and Magadan) and i loved it :) And i'm also a startup guy. We can definetely get in touch. PS: I knew LiveReload and loved it!
Andrey,
I'm in the same boat - I'm trying to work on a startup but I need advice and motivation from peers who I can talk to in an environment which isn't impersonal.
I have to agree that an IRC channel would be awesome (#startups simply doesn't work for me).
I've jumped into the "Solo Startup Doers" event you created.
P.S. I do know of your app.