Story Time
Anthony built a virtual community called Indie Worldwide that now has over 2,000 indie founder members. Between a premium membership club and sponsorships, the community rakes in several thousand dollars a month. Not too shabby!
Background
It all started when Anthony got fired from his first job at a startup after just 6 months. He was thrilled though because now he could work for himself. He hustled and landed some sweet freelance web dev gigs, even hiring a couple friends to help out. For a while they were making good money, but then things went south when Anthony screwed up a big project. Oops! But he took his lumps and moved on – traveling the world a bit and learning Spanish before getting back into entrepreneurship.
Anthony decided to take some time off after that failed project to regroup and recharge. He spent several months traveling through Southeast Asia and Europe, immersing himself in new cultures and perspectives. During his adventures, Anthony also took the opportunity to brush up on his language skills, becoming fluent in Spanish. This international experience expanded his worldview and nurtured his entrepreneurial spirit.
The Idea
Anthony knew he wanted to build his own products but needed an idea first. What he did have was skills organizing events from his college hackathon days. Anthony thought back to those experiences running large hackathon events with thousands of participants during his university days. He realized that he had a knack for bringing people together and fostering engaging communities around shared interests and skills development.
Additionally, Anthony had been involved with local entrepreneur and indie hacker meetup groups in various cities as he moved around while traveling. But he noticed that those local communities would fall apart when he left the area. This gave him an idea – what if he could create a virtual community that tied together indie founders across geographies? An "Indie Hackers Without Borders" of sorts.
So drawing from these past experiences, Anthony conceived of creating a virtual community platform specifically focused on serving indie hackers, makers, and founders. It would help them connect, collaborate, learn from each other, and support one another's entrepreneurial journeys regardless of physical location. He aptly named this vision "Indie Worldwide" – A globally accessible tribe for the indie business crowd.
Execution
Anthony started small by organizing a simple monthly video chat for Indie Worldwide. He promoted it organically through relevant existing online communities and word of mouth. Slowly but surely, over many months, Anthony built up a small but dedicated member base through consistently turning up to host engaging events geared to indie interests.
His masterstroke was focusing relentlessly on facilitating real-world gatherings and meetups alongside the virtual events. This helped members forge genuine bonds and friendships, creating a solid cultural foundation. Regular in-person opportunities prevented the community from ever feeling vague, distant, or impersonal despite its international digital nature.
Over 2 years, Anthony organically grew Indie Worldwide to 2,000 members through this hybrid online/offline event-based approach combined with word-of-mouth community momentum. He resisted any advertising or partnership plays to stay scrappy and retain full control, vision, and agility.
While not monetized at the outset, a few years in Anthony decided to test adding a premium membership tier called Founders Club to generate some revenue. Here for a subscription fee, members get additional perks like exclusive founder introductions. He also started securing sponsorships related to the audience. These two streams now pull in several thousand dollars a month combined.
While revenue is great, Anthony maintains community experience is still the top priority. He focuses on fostering friendships, collaborative learning, and member empowerment. After all, the quality engaged membership itself is Indie Worldwide's core value proposition.
Explosive Growth
In 2021, after years of slow and steady diligent community-building, Anthony decided to try actively expanding the member base more rapidly. He executed a targeted launch campaign to publicize Indie Worldwide to aligned external audiences across platforms like Product Hunt, Hacker News and Twitter.
The initiative was a huge success - allowing Anthony to double total membership twice in quick succession within just months! First to 4,000 then 8,000 members. This influx infusion of new members forced some rapid community architecture restructuring to maintain culture and experience integrity as audiences scaled 10X.
Today
Now comfortably profitable, Indie Worldwide generates enough revenue to fully support Anthony’s minimalist digital nomad lifestyle. With over 400 highly engaged core members and 100 average event attendees, community strength remains robust.
On the money side, growing sponsorship deals now pull in several thousand dollars per month. Founders Club premium memberships add several thousand more in recurring subscription revenue.
Having succeeded in creating a thriving globally connected community for indie hackers in just a few short years, Anthony feels proud but knows this is only the beginning...
The Future Vision
Anthony's future vision is to evolve Indie Worldwide into a full-fledged online academy, education hub and business accelerator for indie hackers. Sort of an indie-focused parallel to the Y-Combinator/Techstars ecosystem.
The core community he has built provides an amazing launch pad to expand into dedicated programming, courses, mentorship, founder grants, deal flow opportunities and more. The sky's the limit!
Indie Worldwide over time can become THE destination for ambitious indie entrepreneurs across all business verticals to connect, learn, share and access resources to rapidly build, launch and scale their companies.
That’s the next level Anthony is aiming to take it to by combining his veteran community-building skills with the distribution powers of his now sizeable audience.
Key Takeaways
So in summary, some of the key lessons from Anthony's Indie Worldwide journey so far:
- Leverage existing expertise - Anthony tapped into his event planning skills to bring people together. Figure out what you already do well.
- Start small then grow slow - Monthly video chats to a tiny group slowly cultivated into a 2k+ person community. Have patience in your platform's infancy.
- Hybrid is powerful - Blending real-world local events with the virtual global community provided connectivity on multiple dimensions. Omnichannel strategies engage members more holistically.
- Revenue allows reinvestment - Once profitable from memberships and sponsors, Anthony could double down on resources and time invested. Money funds growth.
- Audience as moat and asset - The engaged community itself became the core value proposition. Social capital and relationships drive defensibility.
- Vision attracts opportunity - Ambitious future plans turn existing communities into launch pads for new initiatives. Dreams pull in resources.
So in closing, that's the tale of how Anthony tapped the power of community to incrementally build an impressive global tribe and business. By focusing on serving member needs, he organically grew Indie Worldwide from a passion project into a thriving commercial venture. And saved some epic entrepreneurial war stories along the way!
