Show HN: Guilded – build and organize online gaming teams

This looks really cool! This is not super related to your business, but do you have any recommendations for how to get started with frontend dev as a beginner? I usually do backend/infra stuff, and the frontend world is overwhelming - particularly CSS.

Do you have any tips on the best way to learn CSS? And do you think using React + MobX allows faster dev compared to vanilla javascript?

I just want to say that I've always thought you had/have the most beautiful site. One of the boys from your batch at Sixty introduced me to Guilded ~6 months ago and I've been smitten since.

Yes! This launch was focused on the foundational team tools, but making it easier for players to find teams is already in the works. I think we can have an experience where all the teams you see are active high-quality teams, are tailored to you, and the process is more automated and less manual. This is something that no gaming product has gotten right yet, in my opinion.

A lot of clans will use sites like this for recruiting but only their recruiting officer will sign up so that might explain why you'd only see 1 member.

Definitely - our first version had a lot of white, and also a lot of feedback asking us to make it not-white.

This post is especially awesome to me because Guilded was launched on reddit, and a majority of our continued feedback comes either directly from reddit or from users that found us initially through reddit.

The most fun thing about this project so far has been how all the things I spent tons of time on just for fun (reddit, gaming) ended up showing their worth later, like the superhero movies where the useless power ends up being useful in a really contrived way at the end.

Thanks for the feedback. We're still exploring all of these thoughts as we iterate and learn, so I don't have absolute answers here. Some thoughts, though:

> Yet another gaming community; it's very interesting how these continue to crop up but never end up sticking around.

We'll continue to see a lot of them crop up and die. I think we'll also see a lot of them crop up and succeed. Gaming is too big now for that not to be the case. The fundamental belief that drives this is that gaming teams will continue to be core to online gaming well into the future, and the question of if there will be a ubiquitous platform for their identity and team organization is more of a "when" than an "if" question, for me. Someone will crack that eventually, even if it's not us.

> You probably won't tell me, but how did you get funding?

Happy to share, there wasn't really any magic to it. We just explained the vision I described above and worked really hard to make something that a lot of people loved, and had some data to show that. I think a lot of investors know esports are big now, will be even bigger in the future, and they see the gap that we're trying to fill.

You forgot xfire! The people who brought us Steam Overlay

Thank you! Our users (and our team, for that matter) love Discord as well.

About the bot DMing, that could explain some of the errors we've been seeing - thanks for the tip. Taking a look now.

This kind of positive attitude on social media is probably a very cost-effective form of PR (That doesn't make it a bad thing, just an observation)

Thank you! That's great to hear :)

Oops, that was a last-minute change that didn't work out right - fixing that right now, thanks.

Edit: should be fixed now

Looks like it redirects you to /v2/ which in turn redirects you back so you have to click back twice really fast :(

Jacked my back button as well..

Working on fixing this now, thank you.

Interesting, I haven't looked into iRacing yet. I'll definitely check this out, thank you for the suggestion.

Official game communities are an interesting category that we haven't explored or reached out to much yet. That's a great idea though, and I think it makes a lot of sense to think about doing that more.

Our bot is in ~26k servers right now, and the vast majority are mid-sized teams, in the 6-250 person range. I think our tools would be great for larger communities, and I think the needs would be pretty similar - but we haven't explored that too much yet.

Yeah, we manually choose games to support right now. It was a goal from the beginning to make it feel like you're immersed into your game's environment as soon as you create a team, which requires us to have metadata and assets for the given games. We do get feedback from users requesting games, and we have analytics on what people type into the game suggestions box, so we tend to pick up games that we're missing pretty quickly. I can see adding "custom" games in the future (similar to how Twitch eventually opened up to IRL-style streams), but probably not soon.

It's a bit of a tradeoff: like you mentioned, this does cause some users to leave when they see that their game isn't available. On the other hand, it does allow us to focus on building a really good experience for the games we support.

Grrrr, I've had 1-2 other people mention this so far, but we can't seem to repro it. Mind posting or emailing me (in profile) the device/browser you're on or anything else that might help us track it down? That'd be really helpful. Thank you :)

We've been getting quite a few requests for board game groups lately. I hadn't considered that initially, but I think that's a pretty natural extension that I could see us adding soon. Thanks :)

I appreciate it, thank you :)

I've played on a MtG team before, good times. It's only for video games now, but I think Magic is something we can/should definitely add.

Thank you! AoE was my first online game ever, and still my favorite RTS of all time (sorry Starcraft, I love you too), so it was especially fun to add that one.