Outpost Community Demo

hey everyone, indie hacker here, just launched my first community 🚀

By yeetcode ·

Sup! I'm building a SaaS for freelancers to track their invoices. Just launched the community on Outpost yesterday to get a place for user feedback and support.

Honestly picked Outpost because:

  1. Free tier is generous enough for my 47 users lol
  2. The embed means I don't need another domain
  3. API means I can eventually auto-post release notes from my CI/CD

This is my first time running a community so any tips for getting early engagement would be sick. Right now it's just me talking to myself in there which is... a vibe but not the vibe I want.

4 replies

mayaonfire ·

Welcome! For early engagement, my go-to tricks:

  1. Seed it with questions — Post 5-10 questions your users have actually asked you via email/DMs. Answer them yourself. Now you have content.
  2. Email your users — "We launched a community" email with a direct link to a specific interesting topic, not just the homepage.
  3. Reply to everything — When someone posts, reply within hours. Speed of response sets the culture.

47 users is actually fine for starting. You don't need 1000 to have a good community. You need 5 who keep coming back.

Samira K. ·

That CI/CD → release notes idea is really good. I do this with mine — GitHub Actions triggers a webhook to Outpost's API that creates a new topic in the Announcements category with the changelog. Users get notified automatically.

yeetcode ·

Just REST API. It's literally one curl command in the action:

- name: Post changelog to community
  run: |
    curl -X POST \
      https://your-slug.outpost.ninja/api/community/your-slug/topics \
      -H "Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.OUTPOST_API_KEY }}" \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -d '{"title":"v${{ env.VERSION }} Release Notes","category_slug":"announcements","raw_content":"${{ env.CHANGELOG }}"}'

Dead simple. 💀

Samira K. ·

Just REST API. It's literally one curl command in the action:

- name: Post changelog
  run: |
    curl -X POST https://your-slug.outpost.ninja/api/community/your-slug/topics \
      -H "Authorization: Bearer $\{{ secrets.OUTPOST_API_KEY }}" \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -d '{"title":"v$\{{ env.VERSION }} Release Notes","category_slug":"announcements","raw_content":"$\{{ env.CHANGELOG }}"}'

Dead simple.