Tech Startup Community

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Inspiration

It has been almost a year since I started the Tech Startup Community on Discord. Since then, it has grown to over 1500 members. The community recently reached the 1500 member milestone and I was wondering how awesome it would be to have a dedicated website for people to discuss ideas in a more organized and formal way than on Discord. As the community manager, a particular problem I faced was with managing all the conversations and ensuring people used the correct channels for certain things.

What it does

Simply put, it is a website to connect entrepreneurs around the world. It allows entrepreneurs to sign up, create their profile, ask questions, share advice, discuss issues they are facing and connect with others.

How I built it

I built it using Forem, a powerful open source project to make setting up a community website easier. I self-hosted it on GCP (using Google Compute), which makes it more straightforward.

Challenges I ran into

Finding simple documentation and guides on Forem was quite difficult. It is also surprisingly difficult to set up a Forem site and required a significant amount of setup. Particular problems included not being able to use Windows for setup (so had to use Linux laptop), DNS configuration, and GCP permissions.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Creating and launching a community website in just a weekend was quite a feat! I am proud that I finished all of it, despite there being times when I was really struggling and considering giving up.

What I learned

Persistence was the main thing I learned, at times struggling to remain committed, particularly when faced with error upon error. I took each one down one by one until there were no more! Additionally, throughout this build, I conducted a large amount of research on community management and learned about analytics, moderation, and other areas.

What's next for Tech Startup Community

The main thing in the future is to get people actually using the platform. I will be encouraging members of the Tech Startup Community Discord server to join the online platform and get involved with discussions. But all in all, I am super excited to see what happens and how many people will actually find it useful.

Built With

• forem
• gcp