August highlights ✨
Launched on Product Hunt, finding a community of founders, doing customer research on Reddit, and building CalmCode
Hey folks,
It’s been a while. Writing these posts is challenging and time-consuming. But, like working out, I feel great after I get it done. I want to get back to writing more regularly (i.e. every 2 weeks). I just need to find a way to make it a bit easier and faster without sacrificing its therapeutic benefits. A more structured format may be helpful. I’ll figure that out and give it a try for the next one.
For this issue, let’s just catch up through bite-sized highlights ✨.
✨ Diverse.fyi launched on ProductHunt & LinkedIn
We did it! Thanks in large part to your upvotes, likes, and comments on ProductHunt and LinkedIn, diverse.fyi got a lot of eyes on it.
Key stats for August:
83 of visitors (12%) clicked through to a diverse community and 9 (1%) signed up to receive email notifications of new communities.
This was the first product I’d launched on PH, which is a great milestone to celebrate. Here’s to many more! 🥂
✨ Finding community
Being a founder can be isolating. Not a lot of friends or family may be able to relate to the day-to-day work. Being a solo, self-funded (or bootstrapped) founder is even more isolating. I'm so grateful to those of you who’ve read this newsletter, reply, and even make time to chat.
In the past month, I’ve made more of an effort to find and engage communities of founders. There are a lot of them online, but it’s also been fun meeting people in person again.
NYCFounder Rooftop Demo Nights
Meeting Twitter friends IRL
Dip.chat Telegram group
I love and miss working with good people, so this has been energizing!
✨ Customer research on Reddit
In August, I decided to focus 2 weeks on just talking to recruiters and hiring managers. I’ve done this before but, this time, I focused outside of my close network which represented only a handful of companies. I also wanted to ask better questions.
Ultimately, I ended up speaking with about 17 people over 10 days. My goal was 30 but that was appropriately ambitious.
One channel that proved effective for customer research was Reddit. It is a gold mine for user angst. Joining relevant, active communities and searching for “any recommendations” or “[name of current alternative product]” surfaced several public discussions of customers actively searching for solutions. Commenting on those discussions led to direct messages and deeper conversations.
If you’re interested in using Reddit for customer research, I’d recommend checking out GummySearch. It was incredibly helpful in using Reddit in this way.
✨ Building CalmCode
After two weeks of research, I decided that I want to focus on improving technical interviews. So, I’m building CalmCode.
The first demo went well :)
Thanks for reading y’all. Talk to ya in 2 weeks.