Slack Communities: Accelerate Your Growth
Advice on how to start and grow your own startup is ubiquitous nowadays. Everyday, my Facebook feed is populated with a myriad of articles on the topic. Not to mention the books, the blogs, and the courses. There has never been such a great time to bring your ideas to life and to the world.
But maybe you don’t want to take the plunge, and rather take “the fourth option”. Regardless of your choices, I recently found a better and more instant way to accelerate your startup’s and your own growth, get feedback, share synergies or even get hired.
Introducing: Slack Communities
After reading about how Slack could replace email at the workplace (and that’s just the beginning of what it can do), I started using it myself. Shortly after, I was hooked. I’m not going to try to sell you on the benefits of using Slack, so if you’re not using it yet, go ahead and give it a try.
Things start getting interesting when, not long after that, I heard stories about people using Slack outside of work, in an IRC-like way. Not having used IRC myself since 2005, this sounded exciting.
#nomads started it all, but served a very specific purpose — it’s a community for digital nomads. #techlondon’s community was the second one I found, but since I’m not based in London, I didn’t see the value of joining it (particularly because there’s a fee to join). After digging a little, I found Bootstrapped, Online Geniuses, and Amateurpreneur. Although free to join, these communities aren’t as active as I’d expected them to be.
And then came #startup, the largest community and the one with the best talent. The guys from InVisionApp, Elev.io, and StartupBus are among the admins, and that’s just the beginning of it. I was initally deterred by the fee you need to pay in order to join the community, but after getting great feedback from members from my other communities, I dropped the $25 and I don’t regret it at all.
The Startup Foundation, the group behind #startup, uses that signup fee as means to filter those who are willing to contribute to the community from those who’re not — and it shows.
Just a few hours after joining the community and introducing myself, I was getting a distribution deal for my startup — Barba Brada — and a consultancy gig with an early stage startup as a part of DISSONANT. That $25 investment was quickly returned.
Besides having separate channels for ideation, design, investment, or legal matters, it also has a talent channel, and jobs offers drop every day. #startup quickly became my go-to place for when I need quick feedback, ideas, or general support in those tough moments entrepreneurs know so well.
Is Slack quickly becoming the new age IRC? I believe it’s becoming much more than that, and I’m not the only one.
P.S.: If you’re Portuguese, join us on the #startup community at #portugal_!
