Welcome to another issue of our newsletter, and hopefully this time, a lot more of you are actually reading it.

We spent some time making sure our shit wasn’t just ending up in spam. Our biggest challenge right now? Conversion. People know us, they like us, they get value from what we’re building... but getting them to subscribe is proving to be surprisingly hard. So we’re thinking about new ways to add real value.

On the bright side, Product Hunt has been poppin’. Two of our recent posts did really well:

• How do you think social media is going to evolve?

• Idea TBD: Building a newsletter in public - here’s what we’ve learned

Shoutout to Product Hunt for being one of the most genuine communities out there. People actually give a shit. They take the time to read your stuff, encourage you, and share what they know.

And based on that convo, this week’s idea is live - it’s a kanban-style social platform for builders. It’s definitely not gonna be the next Instagram, but it taps into the direction a lot of people think social media should be headed.

From the community, we’re also featuring Webrating, a super handy tool that helps you find and rate the best web resources. Wildly cool to get to feature stuff like this from our own readers.

If you want to showcase your product, share a raw idea, or just post something fun - don’t hesitate to fill out the Feature Your Product form on the IdeaTBD website. We’d love to include you in a future issue.

✨This week’s template✨ 


👉️ How to mine gold from Amazon reviews, Reddit rants, and app store meltdowns and turn them into features users actually want. 👈️ 

Steal This Idea: Community Kanban Board

Tasks. Progress. Community. All out in the open

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❗ Problem

Building in public is broken. We’re posting updates into the void, with no structure, no shared momentum, and no real collaboration. Twitter/X is for shouting, Reddit is chaotic, Discord is buried in threads - none offer a true action layer for building together.
Even in communities, it still feels like we’re building solo.

 ✅ Solution

A public Notion meets Reddit meets Trello: a kanban-style social network where builders post tasks and collaborate in public. Communities and individuals share their roadmaps, move tasks forward together, and support each other in real-time.
Build in public → with your people → for actual progress.

⚙️ How It Works

• Posts = Tasks on a Shared Kanban
  Live in public boards (e.g. “AI Tools Weekend Sprint” or “Launch Day Tasks”)
  Tasks move from TO-DO → DOING → DONE
  Anyone can comment, contribute, or cheer it on

• Threaded collaboration on each task
  Advice, encouragement, code snippets, designs, feedback, gifs

• Boards can be personal or community-wide
  You can track your own progress or join themed boards (e.g., “Newsletter Growth”)

• Community work sessions
  Boards can coordinate group working sprints, live ideation calls, or async collabs

• Creator monetization baked in
  Builders can create boards where tasks come with rewards e.g., complete a task, get access to a tool, get paid, or get promoted
  Think plug-and-play creator economies around real collaboration

• Profiles = your public Notion
  Showcase what you’re building, what you’ve shipped, and what you need help with
  

🎯 Target Users

• Indie hackers, startup founders, builders in public

• Creator collectives & builder communities

• Startup accelerators & online cohorts

• Friends who want accountability and progress tracking

• Anyone tired of scrolling and ready to ship with others

💰 Monetization

• Creator task economies
  → Tasks that pay. “Help me finish this page and I’ll plug your service to 10k subs”

• Pro features
  → Private boards, integrations (GitHub, Notion, Zapier), insights

• Paid communities
  → Communities pay to host exclusive sprints, collabs, or live work sessions

• Board boosts & discovery
  → Promote boards, feature top collaborators, sponsor community events

• Affiliate layers / collab rewards
  → Tasks can have affiliate links, cash bounties, or tool discounts

It can also evolve into a shared space for friend groups and families living apart to stay connected, like a collaborative journal with fun photos, updates, and tasks, making it easy to see what everyone’s up to and join in on plans or projects together.

From the Community

In this section, we feature entrepreneurs building cool products. We share what they’re working on, get feedback from you - the community - and eventually, as the newsletter grows, help them find early users, collaborators, or even investors. We meant it when we said we’re here to promote real collaboration

 Webrating - Discover the best websites - powered by the community

🛠 What it does:
Webrating helps you discover the best web resources across the internet - sorted by category and recommended by real people. It’s like a community-curated directory where anyone can submit, rate, and review websites to help others find hidden gems online.

👀 Who it’s for:
Web nerds, info junkies, curious minds, and anyone tired of SEO junk and AI sludge. Whether you’re looking for tools, blogs, learning resources, or niche corners of the internet - Webrating helps surface the good stuff.

As founder Afşın puts it:

💬 Show some love:

What we’ve done so far

In this section, we share newsletter metrics, strategies we’re testing, and the tools/platforms we’ve discovered while building this newsletter and community from scratch

• Follow-up emails: We added an automation that welcomes new folks to the community and gently asks them to move us out of spam. Hopefully this improves our newsletter open rate.

• Website revamp: We gave the site a mini glow-up. Still a work in progress, but we’re adding a section with all the templates we’ve shared so far, because this stuff should be easy to find. Knowledge shouldn’t be gatekept, right?

• Paid growth (finally): We started paying to acquire users. Beehiiv’s Boosts feature is honestly the best user acquisition tool I’ve seen. You tell them how much you're willing to pay per subscriber (we said $1.50), and they send that offer to a marketplace of newsletters. If someone from the right niche and country signs up, you pay that amount - and it goes to the newsletter that referred them.
  It’s a two-sided marketplace where you pay only for legit, verified leads. No bots. It takes a couple of weeks for new users to get added to your list while Beehiiv verifies them, which is kind of amazing. Only downside: it’s slow. Because newsletter conversions are slow in general.
  

Money spent : $92

• $11 from the domain purchase

• $7 for the X premium subscription

• $49 for an upgraded beehiv subscription, definitely worth it

• $15 for acquiring 10 users on beehiv

• Spent $10 on a X post promotion campaign

Our not-so-secret strategy list

1. Money can be spent, in the right places
   Obviously, we want to keep this as lean as possible and that’s still the plan. The experiments we want to run to show you and ourselves is how we can grow in the cheapest way possible, while also making sure there’s room to run experiments. We recognized that Beehiv is excellent, and the Boosts feature is great. We had to try it out and we’d honestly recommend it to anyone growing their newsletter (Tyler, CEO of Beehiv, we’re giving you shoutouts, mind giving us some free Beehiv goodies? 🙏)
   

2. Free, Free, Free
   Plain and simple, we want to keep stuff free. We’re not saints, we’d like to have a piece of the pie too, but we recognize that the mission in growing our community is to give, and we’re completely okay with that. So please enjoy the fruits of our labor for free, our wonderful, wonderful people.
   

3. Brand Identity
   You probably noticed we didn’t post for a week. Don’t get mad, please 🙏. We were doing some background work, doing an audit and asking ourselves what our identity and mission is, how we want to represent ourselves, and again asking deeper questions that we sometimes forget to address when we’re building at the rapid pace we usually do.

   This is our new mission statement. What it means is that you won’t need another community because we’ll make sure we weather any storm, whether it’s AI or robots that steal jobs. We’ve got ideas for you, strategies you can copy-paste, and a community that’s always by your side.

   The last battle-tested builder community you’ll ever need.
   Steal Our Ideas. Grow Your Products. Free Forever.
   

4. E-books
   We’ve consistently seen creators offer books and PDFs. Based on our current experience, we’re ready to start offering value adds that are seriously helpful. We want to use this strategy to drive conversion, while making sure that this isn’t a marketing gimmick. We’re ready to get back to the drawing board and actually produce insights that could be of tremendous help. Does that sound useful? Or can you think of something better? Mind dropping it in the feedback form below?
   

5. Referral Rewards:
   We’re testing a referral feature too. Share the newsletter with 5 people and you get... something. What should that something be? Please don’t ask for our cat or the cake we baked last week (it was bad). Give us ideas, we want to make it worth it. Let us know in the feedback form below.

Want to be featured here?
Whether you’re looking for feedback, a collaborator, or just want to show what you’re building, reply to this email or fill the form below and tell us what you’re up to.

Feel free to drop:

• Any startup ideas you’ve had

• Stuff you’re building and want feedback on (we’ll feature it in the newsletter)

• Questions you want the community to weigh in on

• Or just general thoughts on the newsletter and how we can make it better

Fin.