This is my first site/product. What do you think?

Good site. It would be nice if it had search functionality by skill. As far as growth there’s several avenues:

1. Social media
2. Malaysian subreddits
3. Run targeted ads
4. Reach out to local businesses to see if they will promote your work in exchange for a mention on your website

First of all, congratulations on releasing the site. As a fellow Malaysian, will register shortly

To grow the site, maybe you would want to reach out to those that register and conduct interviews with them? What/how would the site serve them better.

As for traffic, I could not find much SEO on malaysianswhomake.com.
Adding a blog to the site would help rank for keywords you want to rank for.

I think it's great giving people exposure from a community!

First, don't knock reaching out individually, doing things that don't scale is a perfect way to find initial users.

Some random suggestions (I have the same problems you do growing websites, so these are only suggestions :)

• Make sure you've got their e-mails on a mailing list. (And make a good "See what Malaysians are up to weekly!" type mailing list signup)
• Ask them what they've been up to, are working on, etc. Try to get a good list of their blogs and twitter/etc profiles.
• Start collecting what they're posting about so you can highlight them on Twitter and/or your mailing list.
• Link to your twitter account.
• Start posting the highlights on twitter, with other cool stuff. Retweet their stuff as well. (Find a cheap/free app to make social media graphics that have a logo/brand, a profile pic, and a quote or some text to make the shares interesting).

Replace Twitter with your preferred social media.

Why? If I saw a site like that, I might think it's cool and browse for a second, but unless I have an immediate need, I'd probably forget it existed after closing the tab. Newsletter/social links remind people they can stay connected. And posting cool stuff on twitter is a great way to get a following there.

So you mentioned wanting them to connect. Reach out to the ones you have already (individually if necessary) and ask them: How could this benefit you? Maybe they just want to connect. Maybe they want exposure to Malaysian businesses that could use their help. Who knows! The more you talk to them, the more you try things, the more you'll learn what hidden value there is.

Oh yeah, talk to the people you were inspired by! Send them a DM and tell them what you're doing and ask how they grew!

I think you're on an excellent path. Keep focusing on providing value (esp by asking), and you'll have a great following if you add paid stuff to it later :)

The website looks great. Keep it up.

Hey Rachel, I work with Women Make, I don't know if you've heard about us. I think it'd be a good idea to talk with Marie, the founder, or other super users from her community to know how she built it. As mentioned in the comments, it depends if you want your site to be some kind of recruiting platform or if you want to build a supportive community (or both). If you want to have something around a community, you need to have a way for people to talk to each other. We use Telegram for Women Make. And whenever we have announcements that we want to get visibility for, it's going on Twitter. We use a ton of other platforms like Hacker News, PH, IndieMakers etc. but the core of the community is happening in the Telegram group.

Another thing I can suggest is to talk to Robin Noguier who built esperanto design. There might be something in there for you.

Hope that helps!

T.

Malaysian Indie Hacker here, well done! I love it. #majulahmalaysia

This looks great as an MVP @rachelhxw. Congratulations on everything so far. Growth marketing is a skill in itself. One thing I recently did was create a lead magnet that generated me over 120+ initial leads for my business. I created a course and gave it away to garner initial interest and generate leads. I am sure you have a wealth of knowledge that you could turn into a lead magnet and share across your social profiles and link it back to a landing page for sign up on your site. Keep up the great work!

I love the design! So clean, so scannable. The options @CarlysleMcNaught listed are good. Post to community boards where Malaysian makers hang out. Be proactive in some of those communities as well so you gain recognition. People will trust you more if they keep seeing you around.

Your site looks great, congratulations on a solid start.

If you want to grow the site as a recruiting tool, consider using LinkedIn to track Malaysian principals in US startups, and just introduce the site to them. They will remember it, and might use it because most expats always look for ways to connect back to their roots, give back but also take advantage of that extra ability to tap into a foreign talent pool.

Good luck!

There's tons of solid advice here on the growth side so I wanted to comment on the tech.

React + Google Sheets is a solid and versatile stack. It's what I'm using for Liist which lets people build the exact kind of site you've built.

If you want to chat tech, feel free to reach out. Great work!

Hi Rachel,

This is a good idea! It will likely just take work to build a critical mass.

Here are some ideas off the top of my head:

It might be good to have Behance and Dribble style portfolios on your own site, rather than having visitors click away. Could you make it easy for people to migrate their portforlios to your site?

Maybe have a newsletter where you regularly feature a Malaysian Maker/Creative with more info on how they got started and the work they do? It would be good to connect with your community and build an audience.

Although this is not the time, in-person events would be great to position yourself as the leader in KL. Think Creative Mornings in NYC. Can you do online events to bring people together with a monthly or weekly guest speaker?

People submit their profiles because they want recognition and more work opportunities. Give them more recognition and work opportunities and more people will register. The more you promote others, the more they will promote you.

It's a chicken and egg problem. You need to feed the chicken first. :-)
John

It's a brilliant start. The site looks really clean and pleasing. Firstly, do not feel bad or bogged down that you are getting organic sign ups or enquiries. It takes time, a good amount of time to grow a community and derive value out if it.

As mentioned also below by others, stick to defining the value of this initiative. You should start creating content around it and push it in twitter, LinkedIn for the demand and supply side to notice. Sometimes having an additional social media handle helps you build the traffic too like a FB group for that matter. There are many ways, tricks to experiment if you want to organically grow it in your demography of KL. I have been in KL for work purpose and I really liked the upcoming creators market. Never lose hope. Just keep doing. Enjoy the process and the challenges.

If you want to discuss more do connect at - ashimavtar@hotmail.com

Hi Rachel,
I'm usually not nice but since you asked I have to :P
The site is really elegant and inspiring.

reg the problems you listed:

• try to promote it on linkedin, I believe recruiters would love it
• cold outreach is not a problem, it's actually a great start. As I see you already have many talents on your site
• Growing is not easy, i'm not good at it either. But I think you need to tweak your model a bit. You have 2 "customers"

1. talent
2. recruiters
   You already giving value to both but you once a match is found you are out of the picture. I mean if found a talent through you website, probably the talent will never know that they got the connection from you unless they ask or the recruiter told them and at this point word of mouth would really help you grow if talents started telling others about your side and how it helped them. same for recruiters.

I don't know exactly how you can implement something like this but for example you can manage the messaging and notify the talent when a recruiter is interested just a anything to show them that "someone noticed you because you are on malaysianswhomake.com"

Opps, sorry for the long message, and best of luck

I like the clean design. All in all, I think local, targeted communities can work really well--especially as a launching pad for a lot of other ideas. One thing I'd consider making clearer, is the value that the Makers on your platform would get from the visibility.

It's not clear if this is just a networking site, or a freelancer lead generation site (like Upwork), and I think that is probably why it feels like a hard marketplace or community to grow quickly.

I'd maybe start by asking the people who have already signed up why they were willing to and what they hope to gain from being on the site. Starting there will help you to dial into the core value proposition that you can then start to find others like them.

All in all, I'd say keep at it--communities and marketplaces can take a long time to build a critical mass, but it doesn't mean they are bad ideas if they provide value to the people on them. And I think figuring out that value and communicating it on your site is the step you're on at the moment.

Good luck!