As a founder, it can be difficult, lonely and mentally taxing to build a business from the ground up. COVID-19 has reinforced this idea even further as we adopted an isolated, remote-work culture.
While we’re not able to attend conferences in person and network with others, COVID has provided a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs and founders alike to communicate and connect with one another through online communities and events from around the world.
If you’re a SaaS founder looking for new perspectives, resources and answers to questions you and your organization are facing, check out some of the following communities.
4 Online Communities for SaaS Founders
1.Indie Hackers:
If you like Reddit, you’ll love Indie Hackers. They have a podcast and interview series where entrepreneurs and developers share their experiences of growing their business and the many challenges they face.
The topics range from “How I Launched and Grew My Startup by 500% During the COVID Crisis,” to “How I Went From near-Bankruptcy to Running an 88K MRR Business.”
As with other online communities, you’re able to give and receive feedback in community forum threads and ask the more pressing questions, such as “Launched our landing page. Could you give some feedback?”
2.SaaS Alliance:
This is an invite-only Slack group in which you need to apply to, but has over 1,000 SaaS founders.
Unlike most online communities that tend to have a low amount of activity, SaaS Alliance’s community connects you with active founders who have started companies like Close.io and LiveChat.
Created in 2015, SaaS Alliance has established a community of exchanging ideas, knowledge and best practices.
3.SaaS Founders Club:
Like SaaS Alliance, this is an invite-only Slack group in which you need to apply to as well, but prides itself on being a global real-time community for founders to share their passion and knowledge.
The application itself is only eight questions, so it doesn’t hurt to apply!
4.SaaStr:
This seems like an obvious one, but they have a lot of great resources such as podcasts and newsletters where you can stay up to date on some of the latest and greatest SaaS companies.
You might have heard about them because of their annual in-person conference with prominent speakers from Fortune 500 companies, but they also have podcasts and Q&As for SaaS companies at all sizes. A good episode to listen to is Karen Page’s lessons from The Secrets to Bootstrapping to $5M ARR in Less than a Year with Martha Bitar, CEO at Flodesk.
Check out their upcoming virtual event SaaStr Enterprise (it’s free!), where CEOs and CXOs from Qualtrics, ServiceNow, Hubspot and more discuss the latest trends and topics driving innovation in Enterprise and Cloud.
Some Additional Resources For You
If you have questions, are looking for other resources about growing your business, selling your company or want to see other founder stories (such as Jeff Schwerdt’s journey from being an F-16 pilot to entrepreneur), feel free to take a look at some helpful content we have on our ASG blog.
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