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Comment by newman8r | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on a network of small communities and I'd tend to agree that these are the path forward. Even so, all 3 points you make are valid. I have no idea how I'd ever monetize the thing, and the only way I've been able to find interesting people is via direct recruiting (on average, the organic users have less to say).

I've been trying to open the network up to the public more, but I'm starting to realize that making the communities more insular and invite-only had been more successful - but that's very hard to scale.

The site is https://podaero.com - always appreciate new users.

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I run a community Discord of about 80 people currently. I personally would pay something like $100-200/year for a nice network for these people as the administrator. If the network grew more, I might be willing to pay more. Discoverability is a thing though. This community is deliberately private but is discoverable from two other social networks, and centered around a business which ultimately makes money from the community.

In other words, the meetup model might work for these kinds of communities.

Why is a modern forum (like Discourse on your own domain) not an option?

I've been doing the same thing but around live TV. The goal is each show is its own community that essentially forms and disperses as the shows are live and then end.

https://couchmate.com

that's a pretty cool idea. I've been looking for something like that with a crowdsourced playlist with live chat, and just to watch youtube videos. I think there used to be something like that but I can't remember it.

What are you doing to market your project, and have you had an easy time getting users?

Ha, so I'm an engineer by trade so I've been focusing on stabilizing the platform and adding table stakes features but I've tried to start reaching out to existing communities around different TV genres, mainly reality TV.

As you can imagine, it's hard to crack the chicken/egg social platform problem, so user acquisition is slow going and I'm completely bootstrapped. I'm in it for the long haul though (it's been over 8 years now in the making).

If you haven't already, you might want to start looking at those 'live threads' for popular tv shows on reddit, and try to message those users to try your app.

Kind of a tangential thought - it would be kind of cool to have crowdsourced 'prediction markets' for the tv shows - i.e. people guess what's going to happen in an episode or season.

This is what you are looking for: https://campfire.gg/

yeah that's pretty close, although it doesn't seem to have the amount of activity I'm looking for. It would be nice to have a few hundred people from HN in a room over there - I'm always trying to get youtube recommendations from people I meet here.

FortNine is an excellent channel.

Aside from that my motto has been that if you say something that doesn’t exist should exist, it’s now on you to make it happen or to find and fund someone who will. Organize an event using this service or another, advertise it to a few friends, make sure everyone has a fun time, they’ll spread the word for the next event for you.

agreed. might have to make a weekend project of it one of these days.

Nit on the homepage: TV's -> TVs

Ah, thanks!

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