WeekendHacker

@hello_world How'd this get started? What did you do to grow the early community?

@dshan I started this in 2011 as a simple email list. I posted it on HackerNews. I did it because I had a lot of small projects and always looking for people and always had people asking me for help with a little bit of design here and there. I could do design and so I thought why not connect people helping each other out. People signed up and started sending me projects via mail. The first 100 projects and first 10 or so newsletters was me receiving projects via mail then selecting the ones that would go into the newsletter. People then sent mails for the specific project and I connected them. As a result 0% spam. Today the system is a little bit more automated but it's still 100% hand curated when it comes to selecting which projects get to be up there and first time helpers are approved to so there is no spam happening. It's been a little bit on the backbone as I have been busy with Square but I am actually working on doing a weekendhacker publishing which will sell tutorials for small projects that can be build in a weekend and a co-study feature that allow people to find someone to study the same subject with and have a mentor to help them. But i love WH and the people on here. Got a lot of offers to turn it into a business but I would rather keep the basics free. Also it's quite interesting how many things you can do with email. It's still the best tool for a MVP in many cases if you ask me :) I am going to write a post about it one day at http://www.000fff.org (also when I have some more time :)

@hello_world Man, lots of stuff I identify with there, superb answer. I love email and almost all my side projects start (and stay) there. Obvs as someone who spends 70% of my weekends working on little side projects, often to learn something or test some idea/itch or get familiar with some marketing/user acquisition channel, WeekendHackers really resonates. All the luck in the world as it moves forward!

@hello_world Given that Product Hunt itself started as a mailing list, I'm wondering if you have any designs on letting a community of folks submit, rate and collabo on hacks? Could be a great way to offload the work of publishing the newsletter while also growing the community?

@tarikh @miguel0020 (the amazing developer I am working with) and me build our own little system. Stack: PHP, Postmark, Mailchimp. Flow: Project gets submitted into a list from where I approve the ones that are WH material. After that they are routed into a que with a newsletter number attached. When we want to create a newsletter we basically just put a button, add the freeform text we want to. The projects, links etc are all autogenerated and autoformatted. Then all I have to do is go to mailchimp and push send. I can't tell you how much time this saved me and it could easily be a collaborative process. Now that I think of it it might be it's own little collaborative publishing engine we have created here hmmm...

@DavidSpinks In need of community building. Would love to chat if you are available.

@shapob Sure, david at cmxhub.com. Drop me a note.

@DavidSpinks see it does work with community building too :)

@hello_world haha if that's not proof of concept I don't know what is ^_^

@arieljalali I have actually been in talk with several larger companies who wanted me to facilitate online hackathons. So yeah :)

@jessiewould yeah it really is for exchanging design and development. I have been thinking about adding other verticals but then it would probably have to be with different terms. It's not that you can't pay someone it's just that the community don't want too many of those types of projects in there. If you are looking for finding someone to hire shoot me a mail and I will add it to the newsletter in a separate section.