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Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

I've been waiting for a solution like this specifically for digital nomads. (It's also on my own to-build list so I might punch it out one of these days.)

My unsolicited advice: Market it to digital nomads exclusively.

I get that it's open sourced, but I don't like that and don't think it makes sense for the nature of the project... I'd prefer someone treating it like a startup and maintaining the product, making a nicer design, growing it, etc.

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I might go so far as making the platform invitation only. I think doing so would provide two benefits. First, it would allow you to generally restrict the userbase to the type of person for whom it's intended. Second, it provides a sort of crowdsourced verification that I think would help people feel like they're part of a trustworthy community.

This is perhaps comparable to private torrent trackers that are invitation only. Though in this case, there wouldn't be a strong incentive to abuse that system. Another example is the invitation-only system with which the OnePlus One launched (and still uses to a degree). The One started off as a "flagship killer" geared toward tech-savvy people, specifically the kind of people who would not buy an iPhone. Like with many "exclusive" products, people became interested. The simple fact that you could have offices at large tech companies with mailing lists with the sole purpose of distributing free invitations is not only excellent advertisement, but it demonstrates how making a product/platform/service exclusive can have substantial benefits when geared toward the right group of people.

The barrier to entry is already high for many people. Filing a PR is sufficiently easy, but you also need a GitHub account for the same.

I launched HackerCouch at hackbeach this year, and the first few people on there are friends who I know personally, so it was kinda invite-only to start with. But I don't want HC to become the one-stop couchsurfing website for everyone. I want it to be a cool way to find like-minded people where you are travelling.

I would be down for this. I live in Siem Reap, Cambodia and have a pretty nice house. The hacker culture is virtually non-existent though. Would love to host some hackers once in a while to exchange ideas and do some back to back coding.

I love Siem Reap. I spent a few weeks there in 2012 at the very beginning of my entrepreneurial journey which is now 3 years and 2 travel apps later.

One of the main reasons behind the death of Couchsurfing was that they pivoted to a company and became a startup[0]. I, on the other hand, don't want to make money on this.

There is also the issue of privacy. Would you be fine giving your travel information to a central third-party? I would like to keep HC to a minimum listing site and let people take conversations to a side-channel instead.

[0]: http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-...

It's mostly a problem that resolves itself. The digital nomad community is on average made up of professionals who are savvy and financially OK, who are all pretty similar and generally on the same page about things. It doesn't have all the variables of couch surfing, so I don't think you can meaningfully compare the two platforms.

If someone manages to find the site, they're probably there for the right reasons. It might be as little as getting it sidebar'd on r/digitalnomad to get the right crowd on it.

100% agree with having conversations off the platform, I don't think it needs to be dramatically different than what you have now.

The big issue was they essentially changed from non profit to for profit 5+ years into the community. It would have been completely different scenario if the whole community was built with the understanding that there was a commercial aspect to it.

That's basically what we're doing with Horizonapp.co. There is a Global Nomads group on Horizon, accessible with the following group unlock code: gn2015#insiders

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