[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Openland (YC W18) - Community platform wi...
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Launch HN: Openland (YC W18) - Community platform with automation
Hi, it's Yury and Steve from Openland (https://openland.com). We
make it easy for any person or business to build a chat community.
We believe that in the next five years there will be a massive
shift from audiences (top-down content broadcasting) to communities
(two-way communication between organizers and members and among
members). For members, communities fulfill fundamental social
needs: new friendships, safe space for self-expression, learning
from peers. For organizers, communities help collect leads, sell,
drive customer success, or earn direct revenue from members.
Today, building a great community is super hard. Getting people in
one place, explaining and enforcing the rules, collecting member
info, and interacting in a scalable personalized way takes a huge
amount of time. That's why we've built Openland. At its center,
there's a new fully-functional messenger, comparable to FB
Messenger or WhatsApp. On top of that, we added tools for
onboarding, automated messaging, integrations (CRMs, etc.),
analytics, and paid memberships. Community automation is what sets
Openland apart from other messengers and community platforms.
Openland has actually started as a marketplace for urban land.
While working on its messaging module, we realized that
professional messaging in general is much underdeveloped and our
talents are better suited for building a horizontal messenger than
a vertical marketplace. We made a pivot shortly after YC graduation
and spent the next two years quietly building a new messenger for
communities. Since our soft-launch this Summer, 250+ communities
launched on Openland around educational programs, professional
services, tech products, content creators, and nonprofits. There
are also standalone communities built from scratch. The largest
community has 14k+ members who've already sent 500k+ messages.
Openland is free to use. Today, we take a small revenue cut from
member-supported communities and will add premium plans for
business-led communities later in the future. If you want to start
a community for your customers, students, fans, or followers, we'd
be delighted to help. To coordinate, ping Yury at
https://openland.com/yury or email at yury@openland.com. Openland
is built on FoundationDB, Node.js, and React Native. For anyone
interested in messaging tech, we share our engineering lessons at
https://openland.com/tech. We'd love to hear your thoughts and
questions. Do you run a community? Thinking about starting one?
What tools have you tried so far? What worked and what didn't?
Author : yurylifshits
Score : 60 points
Date : 2020-10-15 16:12 UTC (6 hours ago)
| PatrolX wrote:
| I'm English, and every group I joined was full of Russian
| language posts so I quit.
|
| English speakers aren't going to stick around, it's a horrible
| experience.
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Fair, there are groups in various languages on Openland and the
| group language isn't always obvious from the group name. We
| need to make our community recommendations more aligned with
| people's preferred languages.
|
| The most useful communities on Openland are single language and
| well-moderated.
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| Looks like a morph of reddit into something modern?
| yurylifshits wrote:
| I like this analogy! Key differences from Openland to Reddit
|
| -- Most users use their real name
|
| -- Focus on direct and group chats, not posts
|
| -- Ability to save people in contacts, profile hashtags to find
| interesting people
|
| -- More professional-grade tools for organizers: automaton,
| integrations, analytics, payments, etc.
| happysasha wrote:
| great alternative to the bloated mass-messengers!
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Thanks Sasha! The magic of new messengers and new communities
| is that early on, its always a special group of people. There
| is culture of trust and collaboration. Hopefully, we'll be able
| to keep this spirit as we grow.
| newfeatureok wrote:
| Literally everything on the home page is already possible with
| Facebook. Why use this?
|
| Also, without any explicit monetization alternative other than
| advertising displayed, there's really no guarantee that this
| won't just devolve into the same thing as Twitter and Facebook.
|
| EDIT: Also, upon looking at the other people who commented on
| this, other than myself and one other person everyone has fewer
| than 10 comments total.
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Thanks! Openland is almost intentionally very close to FB
| Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram in its user experience. We
| want to make it super familiar and easy to participate for
| everyday people who join for access to special communities and
| people we have on the platform.
|
| Today, our biggest and most distinct advantages are on the
| organizer side. Automation and integrations are key for larger
| organizations and individual leaders to launch and operate
| their communities. With Openland there will be more communities
| in the world.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| I was obsessed with social networks in my early career. Wanted to
| build a new one but felt it doesn't worth it.
|
| I have a small observation which I can't explain it in a clear
| way (pardon my poor English). There are some designs that look
| desirable to work with. Things feel just right. I am not a
| designer, but I can feel it.
|
| But something is wrong with openland design. The column in the
| middle is too wide. The font doesn't attract me to read it, it is
| like it is designed to look good, not for reading.
|
| If this doesn't make sense to you, just dismiss it.
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Very interesting! We actually use the system fonts. I.e.
| Openland is set in San Francisco on Mac/iOS, Roboto on Android,
| and Calibri on Windows. We do this to minimize distraction of
| an unusual font.
|
| On column width, I am curious, what device and browser size
| have you used? Many of our users use the desktop version and
| resize it to the proportions they like.
| mrwnmonm wrote:
| I am on Windows, a 14 Inch machine. And using the web
| version. It is not resizable.
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Readability is a big priority for us, we'll keep working to
| make it better across all devices. Yes, the web version is
| only resizable with the browser itself. For more control
| over the app dimensions, consider using Openland for
| Windows.
| freshbagels wrote:
| Hmm, I don't see it. It looks a little enterprise-y, but
| otherwise good IMO. What are some examples of peak social media
| design to you?
| sidcool wrote:
| Congratulations on launching.
|
| My question is why would anyone pay for a community which they
| could get for free elsewhere?
| yurylifshits wrote:
| There are two business models here:
|
| 1. Community is free for members, organizers pay Openland for
| premium features. This is useful for businesses who use
| communities for volunteer management, lead generation, product
| sales, support, and referral programs.
|
| 2. Members pay organizers, Openland takes the cut. This is
| useful for various "knowledge products": premium content,
| consulting, coaching, courses, mastermind groups, and
| networking clubs.
| michalbacia wrote:
| Mighty Networks https://www.mightynetworks.com/about started in
| 2017 as something similar to what you're describing. Now they've
| shifted to "powering brands and businesses that bring people
| together via online courses, paid memberships, events, content,
| and community-all under your brand, instantly available natively
| on every platform" Might be relevant for you
| maxan wrote:
| Congrats on the launch, Yury!
| adamsea wrote:
| If Openland is VC-funded, my first question is what is to stop
| Openland from eventually introducing ads, invasive practices
| regarding user data, etc, in order to maximize it's investor's
| return?
|
| In other words, why should we believe Openland is simply not the
| next Facebook, etc?
|
| That said I think the product looks cool and the ideal - as it is
| expressed - is admirable.
|
| But on a real-deal level unless you are a B-corp, nonprofit, or
| your financial incentives are aligned with what's best for the
| user (the way that Apple has a financial incentive to ensure user
| privacy, for example), inspiring words are merely ... words.
| yurylifshits wrote:
| We think that sustainable people-first social networking will
| follow from the new business models. Openland's bet is on SaaS
| model for community organizers + revenue cut from member-funded
| communities. This business model has better incentive alignment
| between Openland platform, members, and organizers.
| raziel2p wrote:
| A page comparing yourself to other similar apps (Slack, Discord)
| would be nice. The front page just gives me the impression that
| this is yet another fragmented chat app that people will be
| hesitant to download.
|
| Your "member guide" (https://www.notion.so/Openland-Member-
| Guide-a249051153614aef...) only contains bullet points and your
| "why another social network" (https://www.notion.so/Why-The-
| World-Needs-a-New-Social-Netwo...) is extremely vague.
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Openland advantages over Slack / Discord:
|
| - Member onboarding
|
| - Integrations (CRMs, Zoom, etc.)
|
| - Automated messaging
|
| - Hashtags for messages and profiles
|
| - Threaded comments (Discord don't have them)
|
| - Community analytics
|
| - Paid communities (one-time, subscription, donations)
|
| - More to come. We work directly with community organizers on
| new functionality they need the most.
|
| We'll be expanding our articles and guides soon. The community
| building playbook is the one I recommend to read now
| https://www.notion.so/openland/Openland-s-Playbook-for-Commu...
| danielheath wrote:
| Wait - are you claiming that integrations are an advantage
| Openland has over Slack? Care to elaborate on that?
| satorusasozaki wrote:
| I like that openland is more casual and easier to jump in and
| out. It would open up the opportunity for non-tech folks to have
| their own place online.
|
| Slack feels too structured if I just want to have some casual
| conversations with people with mutual interest. Telegram is a
| general chat app and it's too light.
|
| Openland fits in-between and I think that's what most people need
| when it comes to starting / participating in communities.
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Thanks! Indeed, we strive for simplicity. It's still too hard
| for people and organizations to start a chat group or multi-
| chat community. More to be done here with community templates,
| organizer resources, and organizer onboarding.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Hey! I'd love to pursue this for an energy efficiency community
| I'm apart of, but my chief concern is "What happens to my
| community if you close down"? With phpBB and self hosted
| solutions, you can run your forum in perpetuity on whatever you
| compute you want.
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Would love to talk more about your community. How can I reach
| you? I am at yury@openland.com
|
| We guarantee easy export for all organizers. If something goes
| wrong or you simply want to move elsewhere, we will not keep
| you locked in.
| dglass wrote:
| This is pretty cool and I like the UI. Congrats on the launch!
|
| For anyone that's interested, I created a "Programming Career
| Advice" group: https://openland.com/invite/sX8kTKR
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Dave, congrats for launching your own group on Openland so
| quickly. We'll help you find members among people who are
| already on Openland.
| hagibborim wrote:
| Will there be integrations with Patreon, Youtube, and SoundCloud
| oriented towards community building?
| yurylifshits wrote:
| Yes, this is high on our priority list. In general, we'd like
| to work with every business-in-a-box platform (Coursera for
| teachers, Shopify for sellers, Spotify for musicians, etc.) to
| help their creators run customer/follower/fan communities.
| [deleted]
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