Today we're talking to Courtland Allen, the founder of Indie Hackers, a primarily online community for independent entrepreneurs. By “independent” I mean these are people who are building businesses that make their money from customers. (They're not backed by investors.)

We sat down to talk to Courtland about getting his community off the ground, why they are open and explicit about revenue numbers with one another, and how he’s approached building a business with Indie Hackers.

Almost five years ago, Carly Ayres started a community in Slack called "100s Under 100," a play on the Forbes "30 Under 30" list and other similar awards. The group brings together a vetted collection of designers, everyone from senior creative leads at big companies like Dropbox to high school students looking for feedback on their college applications.

We get questions about community "watering holes" all the time. People want to know what platform they should use to bring their people together, or what they can do to actually make a digital space engaging. Carly has figured all of this out and more.

In this episode, we'll speak to Lola Omolola about FIN, the private Facebook group she started for Nigerian women. Today, FIN has 1.8 million members and gets hundreds of post applications every day. The Facebook group is managed by 10 volunteer moderators.

But how did Lola get the first conversations started? How did the first members find out about FIN? We called her in Chicago to learn more.