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Jeff Atwood on growing Discourse
- klinskyc 9y agoDoesn't raising seed-funding stop you from being an "Indie Hacker"?
- fpgaminer 9y agoI would tend to agree, especially if it's something from the get-go. If I had to defend it, though, I'd say that _every_ indie startup has seed money. Most of the time, it's from the founder, who commits their own time and money to the project. In this case, they got others to commit their money. But it's definitely a blurring of the line between indie startups and rocket ship startups.
- soneca 9y agoSelf-funded seed money is pretty much what defines as "independent". I see a very clear line here, no blur at all.
- fpgaminer 9y agoThe blur I see is that one could argue the defining feature of indie startups is not that they're "independent" but that they're a reaction against rocket ship startups (startups in the sense that most VCs in Silicon Valley define it). If that's the defining feature of an indie startup, that it's counter to a regular startup, then being self-funded is only one of many ways that indie startups can differentiate themselves. All that said, I think the information from the interview itself _is_ valuable. As long as Indie Hackers doesn't become flooded with non-indie startup stories, and as long as the readership is aware that the lessons Jeff Atwood learns may not be applicable to them (which is true of any story on Indie Hackers, really), then it's okay.
- soneca 9y agoYes. The interview might have value in itself, but it is odd placed at indie hackers. The reality of a big shot in SV raising venture capital money is a lot different of mine, a struggling "indie hacker".
- ramses0 9y agoBut they use Stripe! /s
- hkmurakami 9y agoDepends on who it's from imo.
- xiaoma 9y agoThey've also featured Nathan Barry, who is neither indie nor a hacker. He's a popular blogger/author who used his considerable profits from that career to hire a team to build ConvertKit for him. I'm not actually sure what Indie Hacker's idea of an idie hacker is.
- bdavisx 9y agoMeh, if their advice is useful to an 'indie hacker', then why not have it?
- xiaoma 9y agoBecause it dilutes the focus of the site! There are all kinds of people who give "useful advice" that could, in theory, help an indie hacker, but are actually aimed at a general audience. In the extreme case, consider diet and beauty tips, relationship advice or stock investing strategies. Yes, those things are useful to many if not most indie hackers but they're also easily found on more general sites and can easily crowd out more focused content.
- csallen 9y agoI agree with your general point, but both Jeff Atwood and Nathan Barry are far from crossing any reasonably-drawn line.
- xiaoma 9y agoJust my own personal feedback here: I've really enjoyed the site, but the Nathan Barry interview decreased my interest in the site a bit. It's because, for me personally, the thing that makes IH special is the stories of people who didn't have degrees from elite schools, family wealth or VC funding and still successfully built something sufficient to cover their living expenses or even start hiring employees. Stories about people who do a lot with a little are a blueprint that can be applied by people of just about any background. Stories of parlaying medium-sized fortunes into large ones are most useful to people who already have medium-sized fortunes. To be clear, I don't dislike interviews with founders of large companies. I sometimes watch them on youtube and have read books about many of the largest tech companies. It's just more useful for me to learn about how people went from 0 to 60 rather than from 60 to 200. IH is still my favorite place on the internet for that, which is why I care about how well it serves that role. You'd have to dilute it quite a bit before it fell behind the next best alternative, though.
- csallen 9y agoIt doesn't. I know it's broad, but my definition[0] of an "indie hacker" is anyone who's making money from customers rather than an employer. I've never discriminated based on funding, which is why I've had the "bootstrapped vs raised money" filter[1] on the homepage from the beginning. Personally, I'm partial to early-stage tech bootstrappers, which is one reason why I've interviewed so many people from that niche. It's just a lot more near and dear to my heart, and those are the people who tend to struggle to get coverage elsewhere. But it's worth branching out, because other entrepreneurs have valuable experiences to share, too. And to the extent that we can get even well-funded companies to share their revenue numbers and behind-the-scenes strategies, that's a good thing for all of us imo. [0] https://www.indiehackers.com/about https://www.indiehackers.com/about [1] https://media.giphy.com/media/l4FGycUhVUpsBuoqQ/source.mp4 https://media.giphy.com/media/l4FGycUhVUpsBuoqQ/source.mp4
- jrochkind1 9y ago> It doesn't. I know it's broad, but my definition[0] of an "indie hacker" is anyone who's making money from customers rather than an employer. So... once you hire your first employee and the staff is no longer exclusively founders/owners... the founders/bosses are still 'indie hackers', but the employee is not? Or none of them are anymore, you can only be an 'indie hacker' if the entire staff is founder/owners with no employees? When only bosses can be 'indie', hmm. I guess that is a pretty good synecdoche of a certain kind of bay area techno-capitalist-hipsterist ideology.
- csallen 9y agoThere are many more blurry lines than that. For example, is a contractor an indie hacker? Technically they get paid by clients, not employers. But they're also directly trading hours for dollars, and rarely make for good interviewees. Etc. At the end of the day, we can spend a lot of time bike shedding about semantics and the name "Indie Hackers," but what's more important is the overall purpose behind the site — a place for entrepreneurs to learn from each other and share their experiences transparently. Sometimes those entrepreneurs will be the Jeff Atwoods and Bezoses of the world, and that's just fine.
- deleted 9y ago
- webninja 9y agoEnjoyable article. If you liked this article, then you might also like some of Jeff's other articles like this one about Why Do Computers Suck at Math: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-do-computers-suck-at-math/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-do-computers-suck-at-math/
- fiatjaf 9y agoDiscourse is so heavy and error-prone for the simple task it executes that I imagine anyone wanting to run it reliably must hire the Discourse team for a ton of money. So probably what this article is saying is that the key to make money is to build yourself a name, then use it to sell crappy software and sell the support.
- frik 9y agoIt's probably part of the choosen language and framework, and certainly helps sales that it's not so easy to get it running. It's certainly not as simple to get started as with Nodejs npm or LAMP stack. But there are already easy to install discourse forum clones that use Node.js or PHP as backend language (use Google to find them). Edit: two of several clones that run on Node or LAMP stack (I am not related to any of them) Nodejs: https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB PHP: https://github.com/flarum/core https://github.com/flarum/core
- cwyers 9y agoYeah, I know the web hosting landscape has changed since WordPress took off, but if the goal of Discourse was to be the WordPress of forums, using Ruby and Postgres instead of PHP/MySQL seems like a big misstep.
- penpapersw 9y agoWell also, they seem to have a weird idea of what "modernizing" a web app means. While it's true that traditional web forums have plenty of usability issues, I don't really think Discourse actually solves them. It just hides them with fancier ones IMO.
- CM30 9y agoAs was having the system not well suited to running on shared hosting accounts. That's because (for good or bad) the vast majority of websites are hosted on fairly cheap shared hosting accounts on large webhosts, where access to the server is heavily restricted and language choices are often limited to PHP/MySQL. WordPress (and most traditional forum scripts like phpBB) work fine in these situations. Just upload a few files, set up a database and run the installer to get the thing working. Discourse doesn't. It also generally isn't integrated into one click install software like Softaculous or Fantastico. This means that the audience using a typical shared host like Hostgator and clicking a button in their CPanel to set up their site can't easily use Discourse like they could WordPress. So yeah, that's an issue here too. Discourse just requires too much control over your server for most shared hosting accounts and can't easily be integrated into one click install setups/setup by merely uploading a bunch of files. So the mass market won't ever touch it.
- xenihn 9y agoI really dislike using Discourse for some reason. The concept seems really good, but using it just makes me unhappy. I just don't find it to be a good user experience.
- Kenji 9y agoThere is no reason why such a simple interface cannot be native. The fact that you drag along the entire browser engine with HTML and CSS just boggles my mind. If a message cannot be sent because of minor latency problems, the discord client acts up as if a solar storm destroyed much of today's electronics. EDIT: Oh, how awkward. Yes, I was thinking of Discord.
- karussell 9y agoWhy & what exactly?
- joshmanders 9y ago> Don't target the low end market if you can avoid it. Disagree with this statement. There is money to be made in the low end market, and it's not as bad as you expect it to be.
- accountyaccount 9y agoIt's easier to start high-end and open up the low-end than it is to start at the low-end. There's a clearer method of prioritization (working on features for paying customers first) and you can spend more time making high paying customers happy rather than trying to retain hundreds.
- joshmanders 9y agoDepends on what you're doing. For example my business is built on catering to the lower end of a service who can't justify the high end prices.
- accountyaccount 9y agoRight, that's totally reasonable — but it's harder because you by default have to attain and retain more customers.
- SwellJoe 9y agoIt's a pretty rough life for a small company to target the low-end. There's money there, but the low-end market also demands more time, if you aren't extremely careful about how you implement your sales/support process. Some products just aren't an upmarket product...mobile apps, for example. But, if there's a way to target your product to people who have a budget, you're going to have a much nicer time scaling up...you'll have money to hire people (and to a lesser degree, other resources that cost money) to do so. It takes a lot of $5/month sales to pay for one employee. But, $200/month sales add up really fast.
- zeta0134 9y agoI don't disagree with the statement in its intended context. He's speaking to startups here, who don't have an established product yet, and don't know if their product even reliably solves a business need. In that context, this is excellent advice. Once the product is built and already making you money, then you can easily pivot and see if there's any profitability in marketing the now-sustainable product to the lower end segments. But don't start there unless you really know what you're doing, because the low margins in that market amplify your risks.
- gsylvie 9y agoThe developer community area of Atlassian switched to Discourse recently. I really like it! https://community.developer.atlassian.com/ https://community.developer.atlassian.com/ I didn't really quite grasp the full picture of what was going on before. Seemed to be a mix of google groups and confluence. This is much better. Also interesting to see Atlassian walking away from their dog food in this case.
- thereau 9y agoI think they use Discourse too, just look at the html.
- CM30 9y agoA cynic will say that if Atlassian walking away from their 'dog food' made their online community easier to use, maybe they should also take a few lessons for the likes of JIRA as well. Because as someone who's used the latter... well, they seem pretty bad at making their software easy to understand or use.
- gue5t 9y agoFor anyone who has to deal with the pain of reading Discourse message threads, you can append ?_escaped_fragment_ to the URI to get a JS-free page that loads completely immediately and doesn't unload when you scroll. I have no idea why this user-hostile functionality is present by default. It breaks ctrl+F, ctrl+S, the scrollbar, and loads of other browser functionality.
- Macha 9y agoYeah. It's weird given he got it so right at SE and SO was just totally better than Yahoo Answers and Experts Exchange, but as a user, I hate discourse boards and would much rather good old 00s vBulletin or phpBB
- frik 9y agovBulletin 3 was the gold standard and phpBB the second best. StackOverflow has such a nice UI and UX. The UI is nice in Discourse too, but its UX needs more work. Bigger forums are hard to follow, infinite scroll comes with its own problems. The themes waste too much screen space.
- sbierwagen 9y agoRecently I've spent a certain amount of time on forums trying to troubleshoot a problem on an older car, and I'm having trouble agreeing with the statement that vBulletin was any kind of gold standard. There's just so much... junk. Huge post signatures, user badges, post counts, other post metadata... It's remarkably hard to skim a thread for relevant information.
- richardwhiuk 9y agoAll of that stuff (post counts / signatures / badges) was part of trying to encourage it to be a community.
- ahartman00 9y ago
- shubhamjain 9y agoI have been following Jeff's blog since a little after I started programming. I have seen his articles—especially those having strong opinions—criticised vehemently. Jeff even wrote post about people who email him how they hate his blog. But, I find it delightfully amazing that he stuck to his programming roots and found two successful ventures nonetheless. I think he's a great example of power of doing things. He didn't start a blog with any objective other than just to write. And he wrote prolifically. If you follow his blog posts, you'll realise that he's rarely more than a person who loves computers. But, because he did things without dissuasion, he kept improving, until the success started building on his efforts.
- Clanan 9y agoThere's a great early SO podcast with Jeff A. and Joel Spolsky (Fogcreek) where they argue about whether developers should know C and/or C++. Joel is rigidly in favor of it, whereas Jeff thinks it's pointless. It's a great back-and-forth, hearing these two successful guys scratching their heads at each other's comments and stubbornness.
- kamikaz1k 9y agoIs this the one you were referring to? https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W87857 https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W87857
- philliphaydon 9y agoI'm one of those people who don't like his blog, I've never emailed him tho. It's just personal preference to not like his style of writing and random bolding / underlining everywhere where he doesn't need to. But no one should ever like they can't achieve anything just because a bunch of people don't like them or say mean things. Just continue to do what you enjoy and ignore those who don't care for your passion.
- YCode 9y agoDefinitely an example of perspiration over innovation. So many devs and "idea guys" dismiss flawed ideas and wait around for that one great idea that will launch their career, not realizing most popular libraries/sites/etc. started as a pretty basic and flawed concept that was iterated into a work of art. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amelius 9y ago> "Sell to people who have money!" As opposed to optimizing your product so that poor people can enjoy it too.
- accountyaccount 9y ago>And of course we have the open source version for people with low or no budget, and our free GitHub program for popular open source communities. It's free software.
- YCode 9y agoYou say that, but many devs do precisely what you're talking about. They compete with existing frameworks to solve problems starving devs are having instead of looking around for the problems that small to medium-sized businesses are struggling with and getting little to no help with.
- blinkingled 9y agoHas he complained about Android JavaScript performance yet?! :)
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago> Don't target the low end market if you can avoid it. But make sure you never mention it explicitly or else millions of angry users from a country will give a 1-star rating to a totally different app that happens to sound a bit like yours.
- the_common_man 9y agoDiscourse is really a pain to self-host :/ I hate the whole Dockerized install thing. Why not just provide simple instructions on how to deploy and we can use Docker if we want to? Don't get me wrong, I like Docker but the way discourse does it is totally over-engineered.
- trustfundbaby 9y agoThat's just one way to run it. I actually run it on heroku without docker with no problems at all ... had to make a few edits here and there, but once I got it up I haven't had to touch it and its been humming along just fine for months now.
- fiatjaf 9y ago"Sell to people who have money!" is the sole recommendation from these bootstrapper-idols in the startup community, like Patrick McKenzie and related. Still, if you want peace of mind, try selling to people who don't have money, but who will also not require you to give them support night and day, to write complex contracts and have a lawyer, to have a dedicated helpdesk and to write custom code for. If you want money, money and money, ok, this is probably fine advice, but not all people want that. Many people, I believe, want to write software they enjoy.
- sytelus 9y agoTLDR; I'm interested in how to grow community. They started with press release, got 3 customers by offering them everything free + full "white glove" support, court more paying customers, scale infrastructure.
- jarjoura 9y agoI think anyone paying attention knows the world went from lots of phpBB community websites straight over to Reddit. Reddit is hideous, but man, it's easy to use, and accessible. I don't think I ever saw a successful community run on top of discourse.
- Macha 9y agoFunnily enough, the phpBB (old, static, boring but predictable) vs Discourse (new, fancy, JS-laden) debate is literally going on on Reddit right now as they told the mods they're going to take away custom subreddit CSS for the new design since it's a fundamental rewrite (and replace it with theming tools which they have denied are going to be as limited as colour pickers, but we'll see), which judging by the mobile site will be a card-based, infinite scrolling, React app.
- CM30 9y agoI've never seen a successful community run on top of Discourse either. However, that's because: 1. The people who like internet forums and more traditional communities don't seem to like it very much, and prefer sites using traditional scripts like phpBB or vBulletin or XenForo. 2. Those who find forums outdated find Discourse as or even more confusing than traditional forum scripts and don't really see the point in it. So the succesful forums opening at the moment pick something else, because that's what their userbase wants. The ones trying to use Discourse for something new struggle because the software is offputting for their members and doesn't attract the new audience Jeff Atwood thinks it will. And the sites that switch to Discourse usually realise only too late that A: their forum problems are often down to their management and the state of society rather than the software and B: that their regulars detest the new design. Discourse just doesn't seem to appeal to pretty much anyone.
- karussell 9y agoI'm not sure about all the negative comments. I have the exact opposite experience. I really like discourse. We run it now since two years with exactly one issue when I did an update, but that was more or less my fault being not on 'stable' but on 'beta'. Self-hosting is not complex although I wouldn't want to do this without the docker they offer. What I like about discourse * discuss in real time (!) * if you prefer email then you can get it, ask questions via email or get answers there if you are not online * mute specific topics or subscribe only to a few categories * you can like answers without having to say '+1' * simple to self-host IMO * open source * our community likes it too ('it is simple to use and does what it should') * the inbuild search is good There are parts that work better than with Github: * The email response is bundled over 10 minutes before sending, reducing emails a lot and allows for fast edits! * you see in your notification where you get likes (you don't get emails because of this of course) What I don't like: * performance feels not that great for longer threads (similar problem on github IMO)