So today again, I wanna share Day 4 of building Crowdwide.
For anyone who doesn't know what I'm building:
Crowdwide is an open-source social/community platform where users can create communities, post articles, polls, discussions, follow people, discover communities and basically build their own little corners instead of everything being controlled by already-big accounts.
You can check it out here:
Crowdwide: https://www.crowdwide.run.place/
Source code: https://github.com/DeveloperPuneet/Crowdwide
I've also got a Build in Public community on Crowdwide:
https://www.crowdwide.run.place/communities/build-in-public
It's an open community, so anyone can post there.
Right now though...
I'm basically the only one posting there. 😭
So yeah, I'm using my own empty community to post my own building updates until someone else decides to show up. 😂
I also posted some of my better articles there in the general/open Crowdwide feed.
While working on it, I improved some of the UI and made the newsletter feature more interesting.
Now it can understand your interests and show you more relevant articles, posts and communities.
And then I started thinking...
What if a new user comes to Crowdwide and doesn't even know what kind of stuff people post there?
How are they supposed to understand what the platform is capable of?
So I made another endpoint just for that:
https://www.crowdwide.run.place/posts
Anyone can visit it and see what people are posting on Crowdwide.
You can read everything, but you can't comment, like or share unless you're actually using the platform.
Basically...
"Here, have a taste before you join." 😂
I'm also still working on finding a partner-style monetization setup for Crowdwide.
No replies yet.
I mailed 5 companies and explored some more, but something funny happened while doing that.
Some websites had email addresses that looked completely dead or like dummy emails.
I was honestly shocked.
Like... bro, you're an actual website 😭
Maybe they're outdated, maybe they're abandoned, maybe I'm just unlucky.
If anyone knows why companies sometimes leave dead/dummy contact emails on their websites, tell me in the comments.
Current Crowdwide progress
6 members
20 posts
3 communities
And if you still don't know what Crowdwide is, basically I'm trying to build a social platform where users and communities can actually grow instead of everything being dominated by whoever was already big.
But honestly, this article isn't really about Crowdwide or the numbers.
It's more about the experience of building it.
Before Crowdwide, I tried building another project called Rizzzler.
And I noticed the same thing again:
Building a feature isn't always the difficult part.
Getting users to understand that feature and actually use it?
That's the difficult part.
I've built a bunch of features in Crowdwide, but then I look at the usage and...
Nobody is using them. 😭
Nobody is even touching hashtags.
And that makes me wonder:
Why would someone actually use my platform?
Is it because they want to discover something?
Is it because they want to build a community?
Is it because they want to share their work?
Is it just to waste time?
But then again...
people literally switch platforms just to waste time. 😂
So what actually makes someone say:
"Yeah, I'll use THIS one."
And I think this might be one of the biggest FAAAAAAH moments for indie devs.
You can build 50 features.
You can make the UI clean.
You can add search, hashtags, communities, newsletters, recommendations, whatever...
And the user can still look at it and go:
"Cool."
...and never come back. 😭
That's the part I'm struggling with now.
And then there's another thing I've started thinking about.
Creators need a reason to keep creating.
At least that's what my experience so far is making me think.
If someone is regularly spending time writing posts, making videos, building communities or creating content for a platform, eventually they need something back from it.
Maybe it's money.
Maybe it's recognition.
Maybe it's growth.
Maybe it's an audience.
Maybe it's all of them.
I don't know if this is universally true.
I'm still learning.
But I know one thing:
It seems to work.
That's why I started looking into monetization for Crowdwide.
Not because I want to turn Crowdwide into some giant ad machine.
I want to experiment with a system where the platform can grow and creators/community owners have a reason to keep putting effort into it.
So I contacted 5 companies about possible partner-style monetization.
And...
still nothing.
No replies yet. 😭
Maybe they'll reply tomorrow.
Maybe next week.
Maybe never.
Who knows.
But I'm trying it because I want to test whether this idea actually works instead of just thinking about it.
And that makes me wonder about another thing.
Is Crowdwide going to become another project sitting inside my GitHub account with a nice README and a few screenshots?
Because on the first day I had around 4 users.
Second day, 6 users.
And then...
it basically stayed there.
Posts keep increasing, but the user count isn't really moving.
I think this is probably a very common nightmare for solo developers and indie hackers.
You spend weeks or months building something.
You finally launch it.
And then...
silence.
And most indie developers aren't sitting on huge budgets either. A lot of them are building on free tiers, cheap servers, whatever they can afford.
But the amount of work behind those projects is still real.
And lol, sometimes I open an app store and see people downloading some random crop-photo/click-photo app while hundreds of underrated solo-dev projects are sitting there with almost no users. 😂
I don't even know if this article will get engagement.
Maybe it'll flop.
Maybe 3 people will read it.
Maybe nobody will care.
But I'm still writing it because this is part of learning and building something.
One thing I'm slowly realizing is that a new user needs a kick to get started.
Not a physical kick. 😭
A mental one.
If someone joins a completely new platform, they don't automatically know:
- what to post
- who to follow
- what communities to join
- why they should stay
- what they can actually get from the platform
That's a problem I'm still trying to solve.
Even some of my projects connected to Google Search Console haven't gotten Core Web Vitals data yet because there isn't enough real-user data over the last 90 days.
And that itself is kind of funny.
You need users to get data.
You need data to improve things.
But you need the thing to already be useful enough for users to come in. 😂
Then I started thinking about platforms like Blogger, YouTube, Instagram, etc.
They give users a reason to keep creating.
More views → more motivation.
More users → more content.
More content → more users.
And eventually the platform and the creator both have something to gain.
That's something I want to experiment with in Crowdwide too.
Not just:
"Come here and post."
But:
"Come here, build something, grow it, and maybe get something back from it."
And honestly, Crowdwide itself isn't based on one single idea.
I've taken inspiration from a lot of places.
Obsidian.
DEV Community.
Spotify.
Twitter/X.
Instagram.
Newsletter platforms.
Even things like Google's security emails and 2FA flows.
I don't think you always need to invent every single thing from zero.
Sometimes you see something that works somewhere else and think:
"What if I rearrange this and build it differently?"
That's basically how a lot of my ideas happen.
One weird analogy I keep thinking about is an owner with 100 horses.
The owner makes money because the horses are working.
But if the owner keeps taking everything and never feeds the horses, eventually the horses stop being useful.
So if you want the horses to keep working...
you have to feed the horses.
That's kind of how I see platforms and users.
If users create the content, bring the activity, build communities and keep the platform alive, the platform should also give something back.
Still figuring out how exactly to do that.
Still building.
Still experimenting.
Still probably making mistakes. 😂
But yeah...
Day 4.
How are your projects going?
Have you ever built something that worked perfectly but then got almost no users?
And more importantly...
Have you figured out what makes a user actually stay?
Would love to hear from other solo/indie developers.
Top comments (0)