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Show HN: Founder Chats – Connecting Hacker News Founder Community

37 points by yurylifshits ↗ HN
Hi HN community!

A huge number of startup founders are reading Hacker News, but it's still very hard to make new personal connections here and help each other with product building, growth, or fundraising.

As an experiment to make HN founder community more connected, I've created a system of chat groups, organized by location, industry sector, and priority tasks.

We were testing it out for the last couple of weeks, starting with 200+ YCombinator alum companies. Now already have 1000+ startups there, and 80+ venture investors have joined to connect with founders early. Many pitch practices scheduled, intros made, spontaneous meetups planned, and even a few seed rounds have been raised using chat intros there.

Check it out: https://openland.com/invite/OIaK6GJ

13 comments

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mindcrime
I feel like this is about the 347th time some variation of this has been attempted. None of them have "stuck" yet AFAIK. But what the hey, I'm game to give it a shot.
yurylifshits
Thanks for giving it a shot. For YC-backed companies, there's an internal network called "Bookface". It's very helpful and been active for years. See this tweetstorm for details: https://twitter.com/sama/status/631874706543480832

Unfortunately, up to this moment, startups outside of YC alums, didn't have anything of comparable quality. Trying to fix that!

MishievR
I'm using it for two weeks now, and it seems like they got it right. Great people inside with a willingness to connect plus the thoughtfully built product is the only two things that really lead to success.
filipt
Great job with Openland! I love the ability to chat with a group of people that are going through the same problems as us with the startup <3
captainbeardo
The web and iOS app are both really buttery. Hat's off to your product team I'm sure they will continue to produce quality. Seems the make or break it here will be the community and the sticky-ness.

What is your strategy to onboard and retain a community that will be comparable to YC's Bookface? (assuming that's the goal)

yurylifshits
The long-term goal is to have high-quality professional communities for every vertical, including engineers, product managers, designers, growth marketers, and more.

For onboarding, we have welcome messages, group navigation, making lost of direct intros at the start. In the long run, we will be needing a group of moderators, hosting regular expert AMA sessions, and building comment-only advice groups (aka channels) with high-quality content.

minor_fb
hah, i'm already there, looks useful
Cherepukhin
Great new community! Yury does a great job connecting founders and helping them to solve all sorts of business matters.
Fulger
One of the best direct outreach chat app out there. Fast, reliable, great network.
bhnatkovskyy
Great community there. Used it in YC preparation.
borisandcrispin
I've been using Openland for some weeks and I'm impressed! The product is great and you clearly notice that they are improving every day.

The quality of the community is another plus. The possibility to connect, learn and collaborate with founders from other companies is a huge thing.

chrisked
Well done. Hope to skip the waitlist soon :)