A community of makers shipping together
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Marc Köhlbrugge

Work in Progress - A community of makers shipping together 🚧

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Vision Directory
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Work in Progress is a community of makers. We help each other stay accountable and focussed on building, shipping, and growing our products.

We publicly share our todos, celebrate our successes, discuss our failures, track our goals, and provide each other with actionable feedback.

Don't ship by yourself, ship together!

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Marc Köhlbrugge
Vision Directory
Maker
👋 Hi PH! I'm so excited to finally share WIP with all of you! A few months ago I started a simple Telegram group for a couple of makers to share what they were working on and keep each other accountable to ship daily. Today this group has grown into a vibrant community of makers working in public, sharing their progress, and motivating each other to keep shipping. Here's how WIP works: 💬 Group chat Most of WIP happens in our Telegram group chat. Here's where we discuss what we're working on, ask for help, and share the occasional meme. We have a chatbot that lets you track your todos, and when you've completed them. This way everybody gets to see what the rest is working on which is very inspiring. 🤖 Chat bot We have a bot called @wipbot that lets you easily perform tasks in the chat. For example you can type "/done launched on Product Hunt" to create a completed todo, or "/ask What are best practices to launch on Product Hunt?" to post a question to the group. 🔥 Shipping Streaks If you complete at least one todo each day you will earn a streak. Kinda like how you can earn a streak on Product Hunt for upvoting, but with WIP it's all about shipping your own products. There's a public leaderboard of who has been shipping the most consistently. Currently dominated by Product Hunt Maker of The Year @levelsio with 162 consecutive shipping days. (This guy ships!) 👩‍💻 Maker Profiles Each maker has their own maker profile. It shows the world which todos you recently completed and which are still pending. It also shows your shipping stats so you can get a better sense of when you are most productive. Here's mine: https://wip.chat/@marckohlbrugge 🤔 Q&A Got a question for other makers? Looking for feedback? You can ask in the chat, but it might disappear after a while. That's why we've got slash commands like /ask that cross-post your question to the group. Recent questions: https://wip.chat/questions 💰 Paid membership WIP is a bootstrapped product so to support further development all memberships are paid. This also makes sure the community doesn't grow too big too fast. There are monthly and yearly subscriptions available. ---- For more info see https://wip.chat/about and https://wip.chat/open for all our public numbers. I'd be happy to answer any questions!
Marc Köhlbrugge
Vision Directory
Maker
Major shout out to all WIP members for helping build the platform. Without you and your feedback WIP would just be me talking to myself. I can't possibly @mention everyone here (well actually I could with a simple database query, but I don't think PH will appreciate me @mentioning dozens of people), but you know who you are. Thank you so much for your support!
hunterhart
@marckohlbrugge just added!
Emily Hodgins
Product Hunt
@marckohlbrugge hi Marc, looks like a great community. Congrats on the launch and for building a place like this for Makers! 💯 Quick observation from your homepage. I see 40+ guys (+1 cat & 1 dog). I don't see any women. This may sound small but it makes the community seem much less welcoming (to me personally). If you have women in your community, be great to highlight on your homepage to feel more inclusive. If you don't, do you have plans do diversify your community?
Mo
There
@marckohlbrugge @ems_hodge That actually seems like a really good point in my opinion as well, I don't think there are more than a dozen women in WIP, @marckohlbrugge maybe you can share some stats?
Jonathan
Crypto Coins
@marckohlbrugge @ems_hodge Hi Emily, there're definitely women on WIP. What you see on the homepage sidebar is a leaderboard of the individuals with the longest streaks. In the middle is a stream of the most recent ships by the members of the group. Anyone can get on the homepage based on their level of engagement with the community.
Ryan Hoover
Product Hunt
Great work, @marckohlbrugge. I love how you "MVP'd" WIP as a Telegram group. 👏🏼 Most people wouldn't charge from day 1, but in doing so (I think) you create accountability among participants. Will you offer a free membership to WIP someday?
Marc Köhlbrugge
Vision Directory
Maker
@rrhoover Thanks Ryan! Membership was actually free of charge for the first few members as there wasn't much to charge for yet. It later became paid (for new members) to slow down growth. Too many new people coming in would disrupt the community we built. Right now there are no plans for a free tier. I'd rather focus all my efforts on making WIP the best platform it can be for makers that commit to WIP by paying the membership fee. I do realise there are makers around the world that truly cannot afford it. I'd like to find a way to help them at some point too, but I don't think a free-for-all membership would be the answer.
Ryan Hoover
Product Hunt
@marckohlbrugge that's one way to curb user growth! At Product Hunt, we had a similar challenge in the early days. We didn't have the systems or internal support to manage a large community in the beginning so we introduced an invite system to slowly expand the community.
Benjamin Libor
@marckohlbrugge The Dutch Connection (You & Pieter) definitely aims for the Guinness World Record of "most websites built in a lifetime". The anti-thesis for everybody who believes you should focus on one thing rather than many. The idea of WIP is great! Sometimes I just rest and think: It's crazy to see what impact PH had on a whole community. But isn't the cool part about the 'maker community' that people support each other for free. Free tools to build stuff, free advice from highly skilled experts, reach via popularity/votes instead of marketing spends. Not sure if a paywall supports this ideology. Imagine submitting to PH would have a price, what would the community be like today? Not saying you don't deserve rewards for your hard work, just that a paywall is a very conservative way of receiving those. There's so many more options. Introducing a paywall to slow down user growth!? You're a real boss 😂
Marc Köhlbrugge
Vision Directory
Maker
@bnjmnlbr While I wholeheartedly agree with the concept of paying it forward, I don't believe that means every maker-oriented product or service should be free of charge. It might be okay for a one-off tool, but for anything more serious it's not sustainable. Every day new maker tools come and go. The ones that stay tend to be the ones that figured out a revenue model. Now there are different ways to raise the required capital to build a platform like WIP, but I personally believe simply charging customers is the model where everyone's incentives are best aligned. It has been working really well so far. We might open up some parts in the future of course, but I don't want to run before I can walk. One step at a time :)
Antonio Viggiano
The idea seems nice, but I find the pricing quite expensive. It seems that the whole idea could be replaced by a slack channel with some integrations and everyone would save $20/month. I get it that you are really paying to be a part of the community, not for the chat product itself, but anyway...
Marc Köhlbrugge
Vision Directory
Maker
@aviggiano Hi Antônio. I get where you're coming from, but the pricing is based on value rather than costs. If you join WIP you'll notice that the most successful makers price their products this way. It leads to a sustainable business and ultimately happy customers. Have a look through some of the customer reviews above and you'll see what I mean.
Antonio Viggiano
@marckohlbrugge No doubt, I've seen other makers' reviews before this PH promotion, and indeed everyone seems pretty happy with the product. Nevertheless, I am generally reluctant to buy a product without trying it first, even after reading tons of reviews. That's why I was surprised to see a popup asking for my credit card when I tried to create an account, without any kind of free trial access whatsoever. Anyway, maybe I am missing the point and this is how the WIP community build things, but I am just giving my feedback as a potential client, not as a fellow maker.
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen
Write Invisible
@aviggiano - The price is expensive. But, is it worth it? I was trying WIP, and the price seemed expensive. But something happened when I posted a very draft concept - In half an hour I got advice on CSS changes, someone picked up a typo, my copy was improved, and I got some SEO advice. So after that, I just paid, because the value was just immense.
Antonio Viggiano
@ebrahimkhalil Well I should perhaps rewrite my comment, since I mixed two subjects in a single post. My issue with the pricing is ONE that I find it expensive (although I never tried it, so I can't really say if it's worth paying) and TWO that I cannot try it without paying $20. The first issue is totally questionable, I agree with you, and it seems that 100% of the users would say that it's worth paying. The second issue is what I find the most weird and non-standard, the fact that this product does not let me try it before I buy it. Everything on the internet will let you try at least something for free (5 articles per month on newspapers, limited storage on file storage services, not real-time data on analytics websites, you name it), but not WIP. Anyway it's just my opinion, and I am well aware that everyone else here does not agree with it.
Ebrahim-Khalil Hassen
Write Invisible
@aviggiano - you entitled to your opinion and I respect it. I however think offering a free tier is great for bigger companies, but not a good strategy for Indie Makers.
levelsio
eu/acc: European Accelerationism
WIP has kept me accountable for the last 150+ days: https://wip.chat/@levelsio I've shipped more than ever: 773 tasks in 162 days. WIP's chat on Telegram has been very solid to get quick feedback on new ideas I have, and help newbie and advanced shippers with issues they have, that we might have had in the past. Think "which payment processor to use" to "should I use Discourse for forum software or build my own?". I'm a solo maker, and at times that can also be lonely and being in a chat with ~1,000 people chatting about shipping and making friends has helped me a lot there. I know @producthunt is building something similar, and for good reason. Mixing community + accountability is a great idea and I think WIP validates it. I wonder what more products we'll see pop up. There's now so many indie makers, and WIP shows you can make products that help them ship.
Marc Köhlbrugge
Vision Directory
Maker
Looks like there are a few other WIP members on the Product Hunt frontpage today. Make sure to check them out as well to get a better idea of what type of products our community is building. https://www.producthunt.com/post... https://www.producthunt.com/post... https://www.producthunt.com/post... https://www.producthunt.com/post...
Jonathan
Crypto Coins

The first thing on my mind when I wake up is what I'm going to ship today. I've gotten some big rocks done tasks that ordinarily would've taken me a month or 2-3 weeks to do I've gotten done in a day because I'm held accountable.

Pros:

I've gotten more done in the last 9 days than I have in the last 2 months.

Cons:

None.

Angie
Femwyse
I am learning how to code so this community would be a great way to ship my first app :)
Swizec
Hide Imgur
WIP is the best. I am in a couple masterminds and this group beats them all hands down. The amount of knowledge, ideas, and inspiration shared every day is amazing. 👌 Seeing everyone ship has made me want to build more products. 7/7 would WIP again.
Stephen Johnson
Day 1 WIP member checking in! So awesome to have a community of motivated helpful and all around awesome people to learn from and ship with! Let me know if I can answer any questions 👋 https://wip.chat/@stephenfjohnson
Marc-Antoine
Awesome community and tool, i've never been able to use todos, with WIP its now part of my daily habits. Really nice to share todos and task done with other WIP since it always triggers useful discussion and feedback. Also the corgi in the chat is the best <3
Marc-Antoine
omg i forgot, i wanted to write a comment mostly because i'm trying to keep a collection of all products launch by WIP Member here: https://www.producthunt.com/@mar...
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