How I got into the global #startup community
What we experienced and how you can join us
We have been supporting founders and startups since 2012. First on a local level, by organizing startup events for our city of Rotterdam (the Netherlands) and eventually we got to cross borders. Somehow we skipped the national level, the Netherlands isn’t that big, and we didn’t like the competitive vibe it had at the time. Since 2013 we have been flying across Europe to do our workshops and events, and we noticed that we were privileged. We had the opportunity to see what was happening in the #startup scene, but most founders we met had no clue.
Somewhere in the past year it hit me. The one thing we can help founders with, that is more scalable than the workshops and events we did, was connecting them. Connecting them and guiding them into coaching each other.
Me and Bob started to do Customer Development on the founders in our network and extended network, the incubators and accelerators. We found out that there is a genuine issue with keeping track of a startup’s progress. But that a social network for founders wouldn’t work as founders have more important things to spend their time on. There wasn’t a direct ROI on time spent on another social channel.
At the same time, we experimented with a method to keep our organisation in touch with each other. Since I am the chairman and the only person full time working on our efforts, we have a lot of volunteers from across the Netherlands and some from abroad. Slack became the tool to keep in touch, and we quickly added people who where building the startup community abroad. Even though those people weren’t a part of our team, we loved the fact that it would allow us to stay in touch in a non-obtrusive way. We had a Facebook group before, but we noticed a lot less activity there. After some research we soon realized that people see Facebook as a distraction to their work and therefore attempt to steer clear, whereas teams were already working on Slack.
One day at the Rotterdam Startup Port (our small incubator/co-working space) we had a talk about how we were using Slack, and that a lot of communities use it, even though it is created for companies. I remember telling the rest I was very impressed with the way Pieter Levels created Nomad List (through collaborations with his target audience and an excel sheet) and his #nomads, a community on Slack for nomads. Ten minutes later, Raymond Hannes send me the URL of Slack Chats. I posted our group there, stating that if anyone was interested, they could email me.
I shouldn’t have.
You see, what Raymond didn’t tell me was that Slack Chats was #1 on Product hunt, and it would remain there the entire day.
I received close to three hundred emails in the following days requesting access. After dozens of replies, I started to sent people an application form made with Typeform, to collect motivations. I even experimented with the Stripe integration and charged applicants a fee. And they paid. Then I made the fee optional, and some still paid. So founders actually do want to be connected to other founders. Maybe they don’t need another social network, but if you offer a community on a tool they already use, they are interested.
We decided to curate who got access very early on, and eventually invited about 200 of the 300 emails we got that week. Around 150 founders actually joined #startup.
Of all those new community members, a couple DM’ed me saying we should definitely post #startup to PH. I wasn’t so sure, but the idea struck a cord and I talked to some other founders about it. ‘If you have a decent landing page’, they said. So I made one, and got a domain: http://hashtagstartup.co. After two days of playing with the design, I submitted it to Betalist and thought that would be a great test before we would put it on PH.
I shared the URL with some more peers in a DM on #startup, one of them was Bram Kanstein, an avid Product Hunt’er. He loved it and posted it the following morning. But when I woke up, we were not only #1 on Product Hunt, but also on Hacker News. Later that day, we were present on Reddit and Betalist. Did I arrange this like a mastermind plotting a strategy towards world domination? Nope, I wish I had, I would have been prepared. At least half of all of this came straight from the community.
It felt good. Not because of PH, HN or Reddit and Betalist. But because we had found something, together with the community, that resonates with other founders. Because the community put in effort, made smart decisions, all without management. The community actually creates itself as it grows by the day and more amazing founders join. I’m just the monkey doing a dance and sending out invites.
One hard lesson learned
I didn’t expect us to reach #1 on Hacker News. But when we did we hoped to stay there for when the US would finally wake up, we didn’t. The worst part? We learned that if there are more comments on a post than there are up-votes, you lose that precious position. What was I doing? Replying to every single question that arose, naturally. Again, I didn’t even expect us to be there, but it sure hit me like a hammer when someone told me I was solely responsible when we ended up on page six.
However, since this all started out as some experiment, an MVP if you will, we still had a blast. So how about those stats?
In short we hit 11,012 uniques on that Typeform to date. From which we received 1,467 applications and a total of €1510,- (at 10,- each this boils down to roughly 10% of all applications choosing to contribute for an expedited review of their application). Also notice that almost everyone is on a PC or laptop, personally I resent some of the websites being re-made for tablets. I don’t see the majority of people do online banking or ordering groceries from their iPad. Have a look at Albert Heijn to see the horror I’m talking about.
The spike on Stripe’s dashboard is so big you can’t even see the payments made before the madness started.
Between 10am and 12pm (GMT +1, NL) we were on the #1 postion on HN. This made the ‘America wakes up’ spike you usually directly see unnoticeable.
But when we select all sessions from the states, you can definitely see its impact. For reference, when our time was 12pm, we just had the HN spike and it was 6am in NYC, and still 3am in the valley. From that point on however the traffic grew to almost the HN spike until 12am our time.
And that is because most of the traffic came from the states.
A specific state to be exact.
So where are you now?
We feel we validated the need, and that founders will pay for this service, and now, they will have to. We’re shutting down the option to provide a motivation and we will continue to research how we can best support founders in building more successful startups.
While we appreciate the fact that so many applied and wrote often great motivations, most of the motivations were too generic. There are still too many left to screen. So no more. You either donate the small contribution, or get someone on the inside to vouch for you if you don’t have a credit card or can’t afford the contribution.
Our time isn’t best filled with screening applicants, it is best filled with finding new opportunities to support founders, and executing on them.
If you’re wondering if I’m going on a nice vacation soon or buying a new laptop, I say both! But not from the donations we have received. The funds will go to the Startup Foundation, and will be used to generate value for the #startup community. No more motivations, we’ve got work to do.
Update: We are still getting around 20 applications per day. Curious to see where this is going, but in the meantime, we will be inviting new members around the clock.
