
Show HN: Founder Chats – Connecting Hacker News Founder Community - yurylifshits
Hi HN community!<p>A huge number of startup founders are reading Hacker News, but it&#x27;s still very hard to make new personal connections here and help each other with product building, growth, or fundraising.<p>As an experiment to make HN founder community more connected, I&#x27;ve created a system of chat groups, organized by location, industry sector, and priority tasks.<p>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.<p>Check it out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openland.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;OIaK6GJ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openland.com&#x2F;invite&#x2F;OIaK6GJ</a>
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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Cherepukhin
Great new community! Yury does a great job connecting founders and helping
them to solve all sorts of business matters.

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Fulger
One of the best direct outreach chat app out there. Fast, reliable, great
network.

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

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bhnatkovskyy
Great community there. Used it in YC preparation.

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minor_fb
hah, i'm already there, looks useful

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emuravjev
Nice!

