Case Study: Cofounder Dating for Indie Hackers

Nate Ritter collected 100+ emails in 1 weekend and grew top of the funnel for his masterminds program without a massive audience. Simply by creating a Curated Connections program.

Meet, Nate Ritter

Nate writes the Founder Labs newsletter for early staged, bootstrapped solopreneurs and founders. His goal with the newsletter is to deliver massive value for free, build an email list of his ICP and funnel the right people to his paid mastermind program.

The Idea

YCombinator has a cofounder matching platform that helps aspiring founders meet cofounders to start a business with. But it's only for founders that are trying to raise VC money - not bootstrappers.

What if we built a micro tool for this? It'll deliver massive value to the indie hacker / bootstrappers community, while giving Nate an organic way to grow his reach. Curated Connections has drastically reduced the cost and effort required to set up all kinds of matching programs.

The Result

We worked with Nate to create Cofounder Dating for Indie Hackers. 100+ people signed up over the weekend when Nate announced it on his Twitter/X account (Nate had ~4k followers on Twitter/X at the time of posting).

Convertkit dashboard showing email signups
Twitter post about Cofounder Dating for Indie Hackers Twitter post showing responses to Cofounder Dating for Indie Hackers

How it worked:

  1. Created a single page website for the program using Carrd (using this $9 template).
  2. Created a Convertkit account to collect emails and send automations. (Convertkit's Creator plan gives you 10k subscribers.)
    3. Cofounder Dating for Indie Hackers website
  3. Triggered an automated sequence after signup sending them the link to the application form. The email focused on the exclusivity of the program and deterred spammers from filling the application.
    4. Cofounder Dating for Indie Hackers website
  4. The application form itself was created on Curated Connections. It asks them about their expertise and their needs, along with other basic info like whether they have an idea already, openness to raising VC money etc. The program is set up so that it matches people with complementary strengths.
    5. Cofounder Dating for Indie Hackers website
  5. After people have signed up, Nate will be able to see all the applications from his dashboard. It'll also give him the option to remove any member who may not be the right fit.

Finally, he just picked a date and started matching.

Key takeaways?
  1. In a world where everyone and their mom is starting a newsletter to grow an email list, you need to do something different to stand out.
  2. There are more creative ways to deliver massive value. One of them is to give people access to a private community.
  3. You don't need a fancy community platform to create a communal experience. Your followers want crave connections. Give them what they want with Curated Connections.