Launch HN: Openland (YC W18) – Community platform with automation
We believe that in the next five years there will be a massive shift from audiences (top-down content broadcasting) to communities (two-way communication between organizers and members and among members). For members, communities fulfill fundamental social needs: new friendships, safe space for self-expression, learning from peers. For organizers, communities help collect leads, sell, drive customer success, or earn direct revenue from members.
Today, building a great community is super hard. Getting people in one place, explaining and enforcing the rules, collecting member info, and interacting in a scalable personalized way takes a huge amount of time.
That's why we've built Openland. At its center, there's a new fully-functional messenger, comparable to FB Messenger or WhatsApp. On top of that, we added tools for onboarding, automated messaging, integrations (CRMs, etc.), analytics, and paid memberships. Community automation is what sets Openland apart from other messengers and community platforms.
Openland has actually started as a marketplace for urban land. While working on its messaging module, we realized that professional messaging in general is much underdeveloped and our talents are better suited for building a horizontal messenger than a vertical marketplace. We made a pivot shortly after YC graduation and spent the next two years quietly building a new messenger for communities.
Since our soft-launch this Summer, 250+ communities launched on Openland around educational programs, professional services, tech products, content creators, and nonprofits. There are also standalone communities built from scratch. The largest community has 14k+ members who've already sent 500k+ messages. Openland is free to use. Today, we take a small revenue cut from member-supported communities and will add premium plans for business-led communities later in the future.
If you want to start a community for your customers, students, fans, or followers, we'd be delighted to help. To coordinate, ping Yury at https://openland.com/yury or email at yury@openland.com.
Openland is built on FoundationDB, Node.js, and React Native. For anyone interested in messaging tech, we share our engineering lessons at https://openland.com/tech.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and questions. Do you run a community? Thinking about starting one? What tools have you tried so far? What worked and what didn't?
40 comments
[ 1.1 ms ] story [ 86.3 ms ] threadYour "member guide" (https://www.notion.so/Openland-Member-Guide-a249051153614aef...) only contains bullet points and your "why another social network" (https://www.notion.so/Why-The-World-Needs-a-New-Social-Netwo...) is extremely vague.
- Member onboarding
- Integrations (CRMs, Zoom, etc.)
- Automated messaging
- Hashtags for messages and profiles
- Threaded comments (Discord don't have them)
- Community analytics
- Paid communities (one-time, subscription, donations)
- More to come. We work directly with community organizers on new functionality they need the most.
We'll be expanding our articles and guides soon. The community building playbook is the one I recommend to read now https://www.notion.so/openland/Openland-s-Playbook-for-Commu...
Openland vs Slack
Openland vs Discord
Openland vs Facebook Groups
etc.
The classic of course is hubspot -> https://www.hubspot.com/products/sales/salesforce-vs-hubspot
Also, without any explicit monetization alternative other than advertising displayed, there's really no guarantee that this won't just devolve into the same thing as Twitter and Facebook.
EDIT: Also, upon looking at the other people who commented on this, other than myself and one other person everyone has fewer than 10 comments total.
Today, our biggest and most distinct advantages are on the organizer side. Automation and integrations are key for larger organizations and individual leaders to launch and operate their communities. With Openland there will be more communities in the world.
Things that I hate about Discord are that it forces me to have just one global account name across all servers, and one icon. Sure, once I join a server, I can change my nickname there, but I still can’t change my icon. But names (and nicknames) aren’t globally appropriate or useful. Nor are icons.
But at least Discord servers have public forums, some of which might be announce-only, others might be discussion oriented, and then there might be private forums that are only available to certain people with a particular tag. It doesn’t sound like your service is going to have any of this.
I have a small observation which I can't explain it in a clear way (pardon my poor English). There are some designs that look desirable to work with. Things feel just right. I am not a designer, but I can feel it.
But something is wrong with openland design. The column in the middle is too wide. The font doesn't attract me to read it, it is like it is designed to look good, not for reading.
If this doesn't make sense to you, just dismiss it.
On column width, I am curious, what device and browser size have you used? Many of our users use the desktop version and resize it to the proportions they like.
Slack feels too structured if I just want to have some casual conversations with people with mutual interest. Telegram is a general chat app and it’s too light.
Openland fits in-between and I think that’s what most people need when it comes to starting / participating in communities.
We guarantee easy export for all organizers. If something goes wrong or you simply want to move elsewhere, we will not keep you locked in.
English speakers aren't going to stick around, it's a horrible experience.
The most useful communities on Openland are single language and well-moderated.
My question is why would anyone pay for a community which they could get for free elsewhere?
1. Community is free for members, organizers pay Openland for premium features. This is useful for businesses who use communities for volunteer management, lead generation, product sales, support, and referral programs.
2. Members pay organizers, Openland takes the cut. This is useful for various "knowledge products": premium content, consulting, coaching, courses, mastermind groups, and networking clubs.
— Most users use their real name
— Focus on direct and group chats, not posts
— Ability to save people in contacts, profile hashtags to find interesting people
— More professional-grade tools for organizers: automaton, integrations, analytics, payments, etc.
For anyone that's interested, I created a "Programming Career Advice" group: https://openland.com/invite/sX8kTKR
In other words, why should we believe Openland is simply not the next Facebook, etc?
That said I think the product looks cool and the ideal - as it is expressed - is admirable.
But on a real-deal level unless you are a B-corp, nonprofit, or your financial incentives are aligned with what's best for the user (the way that Apple has a financial incentive to ensure user privacy, for example), inspiring words are merely ... words.
If I'm understanding correctly, do you mean you hope for your primary customer base to be community organizers and member-based communities?
— Mighty's main focus is on top-down content, not messaging with organizers and among members.
— Mighty's communities are all separate, with individual accounts and sometimes even separate mobile apps. On Openland people have just one account and inbox for all their communities. Much simpler than Mighty, Slack, or Discord.
Is the landing page aimed at the person setting up a "forum", or the average person looking for a community to join or both?
I am not seeing anything there that makes it stand out enough from the plethora of platforms.
You say above "Today, building a great community is super hard. Getting people in one place, explaining and enforcing the rules, collecting member info, and interacting in a scalable personalized way takes a huge amount of time."
If the landing page could make me feel that and show me how you solve those problems, and why discord or slack won't, I'd be more convinced.
Would be good to know who it's for. Do I get my existing community and move it over to you because I'm fed up of Slack. I come with a laundry list of pains. I have the people I just want to have an easier job moderating?
Or for a newbie to building a community that has no members yet who wants to find their audience. My problem is how to I get people to find me, what do I set up to make it entertaining and keep them coming back, etc.
The landing page is for community members. We'll add a separate landing page for organizers soon.
From the technical side I like that I can use `markdown` inside messages. Web version is also smooth and fast even on mobile Safari.
The platform reminds me of Reddit and will be great to get weekly or bi-weekly digests pointing out to interesting discussions in different groups. Also, Reddit has lot of NSFW groups and NSFW posts. I wonder if OpenLand can be used for NSFW content or NSFW groups?
As for the landing page. It uses spans with javascript for links instead of normal a, thus stopping people from opening link in new tab (I'm not even mentioning accessibility or using it without javascript).