The Best Online Business & Entrepreneurship Communities to Learn From And Join

One of my biggest interests in life is around the topics of business, startups and entrepreneurship. But not just any kind of business!

Since I have a programming background, I’m pretty much only drawn towards online (internet-based) businesses. These are businesses that:

Are easily scalable and can be expanded globally. You only need a laptop and internet to run. Allow you to work from anywhere in the world. Meaning… completely location independent. Are fully flexible and let you work at whatever schedule you want. Have some degree of automation, passivity, or evergreen effect.

And one business type that fits this criteria really well is a software as a service (SaaS) business. I actually challenged myself to build a SaaS business within 1 year, and to document the whole process on YouTube.

In addition to SaaS, there are other business types that also fit this quite well such as e-commerce, online courses, content creation, authority sites, online consulting, content sites, etc…

Of course with some of those “businesses”, you need to combine it with affiliate marketing, consulting, or selling your own product/service, in order to see the business side of it.

However, I personally tend to lean more towards a SaaS type of business the most. It just resonates with me.

And it is quite hard to find really good communities that serve this kind of crowd well and also have a great leader behind them.

So I’ve decided to compile a worthy list of communities to follow, or maybe even join, and I plan on continually expanding this list. If you just want to get your feet wet into entrepreneurship, you could first try attending an event like Techstars Startup Weekend.

Anyways, here are the communities that have caught my eye and meet some of my above criteria!

The One Percent

This is an entrepreneur community over at Capitalism.com, which is run by Ryan Daniel Moran. He has a proven track record of past business successes and provides a lot of really great free content for entrepreneurs.

I first came across him several years ago on the topic of selling on Amazon and e-commerce. The 2 things that stuck out to me the most were that if you’re able to sell four products at $25 each per day, you have a million dollar business! The second one was that your big financial event happens when you sell such a business. Meaning that you could possibly get a 7 or 8 figure exit!

Over the years he has pivoted a bit and is focused more on helping entrepreneurs succeed with their business, regardless if it is product based or not. Of course a product based business is his bread and butter. He also likes talking about investing, which is an additional bonus that I really like about him and his content.

When I start gaining traction with either my David Nowak site, my Entrepreneurial Dreams YouTube channel, or my next SaaS venture… I will very strongly consider joining his paid community. I’ve followed him long enough to see just how valuable his advice is and the value he gives out in his content.

I would see it as an investment in myself and for my future well being.

Indie Hackers

While I personally haven’t been very involved with this community at all, it definitely resonates with me. The community at Indie Hackers tends to attract the crowd of people who want to bootstrap their own business.

This is precisely what I want to do myself!

However, since the Indie Hacker scene in Europe is not very popular (or at least in many non English speaking countries), it makes it difficult to be part of the offline meetup aspect of the community.

Whereas if you are over in North America, it is much easier since it is more popular and common.

I’ve come across quite a few Indie creators/hackers/founders online, and all of them have paid tribute back to this online community.

And one of my acquaintance friends is very much into the Indie Hacker community and he even recommended it to me quite a while ago. He told me that he has met a lot of really cool and interesting people from hosting Indie Hacker meetups in his city.

I’ve seen and heard enough good things that I’m comfortable enough to recommend it.

Though as I’m writing this, I’m wondering why I haven’t consumed more content from Indie Hackers myself? And why haven’t I made more of an effort to be part of their community?!?!

Actually… I’m going to go create an account over there right now.

Seems like I just successfully convinced myself to join!

PS — here is the proof

The (Millionaire) Fastlane Forums

If you have browsed my site at all, you may have come across my book list on my about David page, or read about How my Journey Towards Change all Started blog post and hopefully noticed that I recommended reading The Millionaire Fastlane book.

The Fastlane Forums is just a gathering of people who also want to live their lives in the fastlane (as described in the book), rather than in the slowlane or sidewalk. It’s a community of entrepreneurs that have come together from reading that book (or one of the author’s other books).

While I think a public forum is soooo 2003… and that there are much better community platforms out there to use, it seems to work.

It also gives him full control over the community, since he hosts it on his own website. And if you live by the whole C.E.N.T.S. thing, like he does, control is one of the commandments in that acronym.

There are a lot of inspirational posts and stories to read on the forums. You can find the good ones by searching for Notable, or Gold, threads and be sure to learn something useful, find motivation and/or inspiration.

It happens to be a good place to ask for help, feedback, or to get suggestions on your business, idea, or the problems that you are facing.

It is also a good place to chat and connect with other like-minded people who are interested in creating fastlane businesses.

Fastlane means businesses that you can acquire wealth quickly from. Where you are fully in control of what you earn and your earning potential is almost unlimited.

Many members are quick to help and some even use it as a platform to promote their own business services.

In addition, I even made a couple like-minded friends from here. We ended up forming a mastermind group on Discord to push each other and to this day remain active in it.

Other Communities to Consider

I thought I would also list some other communities that provide good value, or are ones to keep an eye on.

StartFromZero

StartFromZero isn’t really a community and hence why I decided to not include it in the previous list. It is run by a guy called Dane Maxwell and more of a promotional site for his book. However, there are a couple good pieces of content on this site. I’ve also learned a lot of good information from Dane himself, and from some other sites he is part of like The Foundation.

The Foundation is more inline with helping entrepreneurs start a SaaS business. But I decided to link to this site, since he is not actively part of The Foundation anymore.

This is more me saying that it is worth listening to Dane at times, as some of his content is quite good. However, it is scattered over numerous sites and I’m not sure if some really good content he had has been removed.

If you do visit his site, you may have noticed that he does have a paid community on there. But it is closing down this year in 2021, so that is usually not a good sign of a healthy community.

The last thing I want to mention is that he stretches the truth with some of his copy/marketing for his own personal benefits, so you have to do your due diligence before you blindly believe everything he writes.

In saying that, he does have some really good content out there when he isn’t trying to sell you anything.

Location Indie

This is one that ticks a lot of boxes, especially in terms of starting location independent online businesses, and has been around for quite some time.

It seems to be a smaller, tight-knit community that helps educate people on how to start a business and then helps them build one.

Of the few pieces of content that I’ve consumed from them, they clearly seem to be doing something right. However, I’m not sure what it is like inside of their community.

Though, at one point I was considering joining. But it wasn’t the right time for me and one of their members, who introduced me to the community and I met coincidentally in person, had rubbed me the wrong way.

As in they turned out to be fake friendly/nice and this put me off wanting to join a community with such members.

However, they were somewhat successful with their online business and were traveling full-time. They had said a lot of good things about Location Indie, the founders and of the supportive community itself.

So I still decided to share this one here, as it could be a good fit.

Blogging For Devs

The last one in this other section is the most unproven and newest community. This is one that I would keep my eye on to see how it turns out, as it could have a lot of potential.

It is very community driven and the founder (Monica Lent) has some really good articles on her site. It’s primarily focused on SEO and would be really good for people who have blogs as the center of their strategies. Or for sites that want to increase their organic traffic through blogging.

My one concern is that the focus is on developers, but not all of them want to start businesses. Therefore some community members may have quite weak business knowledge and wouldn’t be very like-minded with myself.

In reading one of her posts, it seemed like there was only a small subset of her audience that would meet my criteria.

Anyways, I’m still curious to see how this community evolves and where it will be in 1 year. So I included it, since it has some good pieces of information.