Hey everyone, we've also written a blog post telling the backstory of this community that @jon started 9 years ago.
The Secret Community of 20 Kids That Spawned 5 YC Founders, A Theil Fellow, & Dozens of Startups: http://needwant.com/p/secret-com...
@marshal I signed up for the mailing list and now will *never have to make my bed again* - fyi: it takes you back to the SmartBedding site as that's probably the default for that MailChimp account.
I've been part of #Launch for the past few months (my face even made the site!), and it's a great community. I definitely recommend applying.
The quality of the original #Launch group is insane. I've met a good number of them, and it's like a mini startup mafia. (Here's a list: http://cl.ly/image/3F3j3k0b0C0r)
Hi guys (loved the little blog post).
Question: How do you know that the level of "value" from this particular community will remain high? Isn't opening up the community for others to join going to weaken this community?
Interested in your perspective :) - big fan of community driven projects.
@bentossell I feel the same way. I was going to apply to join but at the end of the day, although I'm a Rails developer with over 10 years experience in web development, I don't see why #Launch would want someone like me.
@bentossell while the community is being opened up, we won't be opening the floodgates (which I feel addresses your major concern).
Until recently we were only about 20 people, but in the last month (since we moved from IRC to Slack) we've grown that to approximately 90 and it has been better than ever.
@bentossell@jeffandersen@marshal I've thrown my name down - I've found the MakerHunt community to be an excellent resource of amazing people, and am quite interested to see how #Launch plays out.
The one thing I'm curious about - you guys seem to be really pushing the re-launch (ProductHunt, Reddit, blog, etc.), but then are restricting access to maintain quality. This seems a little bit incongruent to me.
What sort of application/acceptance rate are you currently seeing on the site? Given you aren't capturing a lot of information during the application process, what level of scrutiny are you applying to applicants?
I 100% think that some level of scrutiny is important to prevent the creation of a wantrapreneur community - I'm just curious as to how you guys are filtering.
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