We're a group of makers shipping together. We help each other stay accountable and reach our goals.
Apply for access
Nik Spyratos
@nikspyratos
This is very insightful, thanks!
You mention reaching out directly into groups, creating communities, appearing in guest blogs and podcasts, and listing in directories - this is kind of what I've had in mind as the potential longer term alternative here. Being intentional and posting in ultra-relevant niche communities and making direct connections with others. I.e. going back to a personalised network/social graph to deliver value (and get customers!) instead of the interest graph that has been forced on us for engagement.
I liken it to focusing on being a medium fish in many small ponds, than trying to be a gigantic fish in an entire ocean. There's a lot more food that way!
That way, you can also focus on controlling the network more. Specifically with things like email lists instead of followers. Longer term when there's budget (for tech) or time to manage it, owning the tech of your community is also beneficial since no one can take it down (within legal bounds I mean) when you run your own forum and newsletter infrastructure.
You're welcome! I'm glad you asked the question. It's something that a lot of people have been wondering about (not just here, but elsewhere), and it helped me organize my thoughts around it to explain to others too.
Honestly, it's ALL about niche communities and personal connections. It's how I've been able to stay in the freelance game for 15 years -- from getting new clients, being referred, getting stage speaking opportunities, and other really cool things that wouldn't have been available otherwise. If you just provide a great brand + customer experience, people are really quick to rave about you (even if they aren't customers lol).
In a world where people are looking to automate everything, that personalized touch can be a strong differentiator.
(And I have stories where I've landed clients because of how far I take this, and I'm happy to share my "secrets.")
I agree with you about the socialgraph vs interestgraph approach. Interestgraph has its place, but it's not the BEST way to connect and grow. I've found exponential growth with the socialgraph model because you can leverage entire communities.
I 100% agree with owning your brand assets.
I tell all my strategy clients we're focusing on email marketing immediately, even if that's not why they came to me initially. It's just common sense. And there are so many affordable tools out there, so there's no excuse to NOT prioritize this.
Also, I've heard far too many people talk about how Facebook is removing their entire group -- and people are running their paid memberships on Facebook, which means...they just lost their own business because a bot took down their group. (Good luck earning that trust back.) That should terrify people. Even if it were a FREE group to use as a lead gen tool, that's a lot of work to just have it disappear. I don't trust anything that much lol.
(Plus with free tools like Mighty Networks, Discord, and even Slack, there's really no excuse to not have SOMETHING growing off social media. Is it harder and slower growth? Absolutely. People are attached to social media, but it's way more sustainable and protected. Hopefully the norm around off-social communities change.)
That'd be really cool to build a tech solution to support community growth for creators, though! I find Mighty Networks does such a phenomenal job at this already (and now that they're connected with Convert Kit, it's even better), but their Mighty Network "marketplace" isn't as great as it could be, so creating a hub to FIND all these great communities across the internet would be such a valuable tool.
(Also, I've been brainstorming micro-SaaS ideas and this is one of them! I just have zero tech abilities, so even "no code" is above my paygrade, so...potential collab is in the air haha.)
Ha, discovery is a side of communities I've explicitly avoided because it's such a hard problem. What I've been able to find is directory sites for communities that are often tied to a specific tech. E.g. Slofile for Slack groups, and another site I forget now for discovering Discord communities.
I wonder if this idea of doubling down on the personalised touch & network graph extends for discovery as well? In my mind that's the only real way to bypass it. Otherwise you become tied to the platforms. And just because Slack and Discord aren't Facebook, it doesn't mean one is much safer in the end in terms of control and not getting arbitrarily banned.
I run a tech meetup/community myself: PHP South Africa. I've had discussions with many other meetup hosts about Meetup.com being such a horrible platform, but they all give me the same answer in return: "yes it sucks, but it's where everyone is, so yeah I'll shell out the $120 a year just to post events."
If people do succeed without these discovery mechanisms and go purely off of the tactics we've discussed, that's also not necessarily a scalable/automatable approach, like you say. So building SaaS for that might be tricky. Perhaps there's tools/features that can be added to ease that work, at least?
Jason Leow's latest post seems to agree! Saw it on the WIP feed now.
It's not a bad option, sure, but you have to be explicit about it. Is it purely to get a bit of support for the content, or do you intend to use this as a revenue stream? In the former case you have to be clear that what they're doing is supporting you with no guarantee of any return. In the latter you're usually offering something exclusive in return for these Patrons.
What I've also seen done are "just support" Patreon tiers at something like $1 that gives no benefits, or alternatively also open a BuyMeACoffee/Ko-Fi/etc account alongside Patreon for one-off donations.
Thank you for your thoughts.
The type of community I'm building could include Youtube / Podcast and I think Patreon could tie everything together.
I wouldn't mind using Patreon as a way to provide commercial free content, previews and access to early features, voting on roadmap stuff.
I like how aharris00britney built the tiers. "Early Access + Voting" and
www.patreon.com/aharris00brit…
So you have a very good point... just make it very explicit what users are getting.
I'm with you on not being able to compartmentalise well.
Part of the human condition is always to be slightly dissatisfied with things, so that never truly goes away. Compromise is another word that often comes up here - you can almost never have everything going well at once; sometimes some life aspects just have to fall aside for a time.
True, even with indie hacking there are aspects I'm dissatisfied with (lack of social interaction during the day being a big one - attempting to fix that by moving to a digital nomad hub where I can surround myself with people building bootstrapped startups). There are always negatives with each decision, just trying to optimize for a better ratio of good stuff to negative stuff
Thanks for sharing! I'll have to look into the Happy film and that 12 things process.
It's a slower life, and maybe not going to make us mega rich, but that isn't the only desirable outcome in the end!
Thanks for sharing!
I guess that's part of my question overall - what's the line between delayed gratification and flat out living an unsatisfying life?
I think it'll be different for everyone, but it takes very deliberate introspection to find it.
Good question - inherently, delayed gratification implies some level of dissatisfaction while going through that process. I'm also bad at compartmentalizing things, so when my job wasn't ideal that led to other parts of my life not going so well. So, I always felt somewhat dissatisfied with my life when working in Corporate America. Not to the degree where I felt my entire life was shit (and I did like parts of my job), but that feeling was always there.
It was however a conscious decision to "embrace the suck" as they say in the military and remain at that job for a while and stack money so that I could lead a different life eventually.
I'm with you on not being able to compartmentalise well.
Part of the human condition is always to be slightly dissatisfied with things, so that never truly goes away. Compromise is another word that often comes up here - you can almost never have everything going well at once; sometimes some life aspects just have to fall aside for a time.
True, even with indie hacking there are aspects I'm dissatisfied with (lack of social interaction during the day being a big one - attempting to fix that by moving to a digital nomad hub where I can surround myself with people building bootstrapped startups). There are always negatives with each decision, just trying to optimize for a better ratio of good stuff to negative stuff
Markdown IMO is still the best for that - even Notion acknowledges that given its interface works very well with (and is partly based on) Markdown.
Obsidian also has plugins that are stored per-vault so you can enhance your setup with things like kanban boards, data tables/spreadsheets, etc.
Are you sharing docs externally? In other words, do you need the SSG at all?
For personal use local markdown files + preview is a much easier workflow. VS Code with the Markdown All In One extension is more than enough (if you don't already want to use Obsidian).
It's all private, but I have a mix of journals, project logs, work experience, random thoughts, etc. I like having an interface that lets me quickly review, filter, and collate
Markdown IMO is still the best for that - even Notion acknowledges that given its interface works very well with (and is partly based on) Markdown.
Obsidian also has plugins that are stored per-vault so you can enhance your setup with things like kanban boards, data tables/spreadsheets, etc.
I think lots of the competition are pretty good, I've tried Clickup and Coda. However it really boils down to what specialty features you need and if you need multiple users. For just yourself, I second Obsidian. Bonus is it has the Publish paid feature so you can publish notes on the internet, either publicly or lock the site with a password.
Ha, discovery is a side of communities I've explicitly avoided because it's such a hard problem. What I've been able to find is directory sites for communities that are often tied to a specific tech. E.g. Slofile for Slack groups, and another site I forget now for discovering Discord communities.
I wonder if this idea of doubling down on the personalised touch & network graph extends for discovery as well? In my mind that's the only real way to bypass it. Otherwise you become tied to the platforms. And just because Slack and Discord aren't Facebook, it doesn't mean one is much safer in the end in terms of control and not getting arbitrarily banned.
I run a tech meetup/community myself: PHP South Africa. I've had discussions with many other meetup hosts about Meetup.com being such a horrible platform, but they all give me the same answer in return: "yes it sucks, but it's where everyone is, so yeah I'll shell out the $120 a year just to post events."
If people do succeed without these discovery mechanisms and go purely off of the tactics we've discussed, that's also not necessarily a scalable/automatable approach, like you say. So building SaaS for that might be tricky. Perhaps there's tools/features that can be added to ease that work, at least?