Dive into how creators can curate and scale online communities as a key monetisation and engagement lever with Abhishek the chief curator of the Remote Indian Community. Abhishek is the creator of the RemoteIndian project - A vibrant community of more than 1400 members in India, some of whom are working at Doist, Gumroad, Gitlab, Prisma etc. This community enables Indian professionals to help each other navigate, balance and grow in a remote career. 

Insights from the episode can be translated in context of a specific show, target audience and value to be provided.

The idea of normalising remote work in India came after Abhishek found a lot of joy working remotely as a Ruby on Rails developer in 2016. But he also realised that loneliness and lack of information is a big problem in remote work and he thought it would be more fun to solve these unique challenges as a group.

Reach out to Abhishek -

Remote Indian - https://remoteindian.com/ 

e-mail - abhishek@remoteindian.com

Reach out to Naga – 

Twitter - @n1n3stuff / @PassionPeop1 (https://twitter.com/ThePassionPeop1 )

Facebook - The Passion People Podcast

email - naagasubramanya@gmail.com

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thepassionpeoplepodcast/

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Sound Attribution and Credits - Music from Pipo and Wowa(you should check out their music on Spotify here - https://open.spotify.com/artist/6zZPxLiRfbGUnoEAJmfJJN) from Unminus. All music other than the jingle on the episode is under the CC0 License and downloaded from freesound.org , freemusicarchive.org and unminus.com

Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Abhishek: [00:00:00 ] I was always curious about this question, that, okay what is a good life

[00:00:04 ] the interesting part is now I actually feel heard and I feel understood. And that's the great part about, , building a community you're scratching your itch, but then you also realize there are so many other, , human needs, which are being fulfilled.

[00:00:20 ] The biggest of which is, , being connected with each other

[00:00:23 ] I wanted to. Take this microphone that I had, and  give it now to the community  you don't want to be a place where you're the only person holding the microphone.

[00:00:32 ] I want to keep it as open and accessible  they might,   feel that social debt of sorts to support the community

[00:00:38 ] Naga S: [00:00:38 ] H ey Abhishek hello and welcome to the passionate people podcast.

[00:00:41 ]Abhishek: [00:00:41 ] Hey Naga, It's my pleasure to be here.

[00:00:43 ]Naga S: [00:00:43 ] Abhishek in the current season. We're talking about creators and how they're monetizing in the context of COVID and in, in the spectrum of monetization. I believe that community creation is a very important aspect that a lot of creators either miss out on, or don't think about it in the right way.

[00:01:00 ]The reason I'm excited to be talking to you is because you have successfully,  , conceptualized an idea for a community and scaled it to over a thousand members. So I'm really, really looking forward to our conversation.

[00:01:13 ]Abhishek: [00:01:13 ] Thanks. Thanks for having me, man.

[00:01:15 ] Naga S: [00:01:15 ] Super. So I think a good place to start would be just to give our listeners a background of who you are and also some background on remote Indian and we'll take it from there.

[00:01:24 ] Abhishek: [00:01:24 ] I'm a computer science grad passed out in 2010 and started off working in an MNC.  This was quite a while back.

[00:01:34 ]I knew that, , this was something which I was always curious about this question, that, okay what is a good life and somewhere,the feeling was that going to an office job and,  not having any say in where you could,  , work from. I, I felt that wasn't right.

[00:01:54 ] And obviously I am a guy who likes to pursue my curiosities or [00:02:00 ] pursue my questions very seriously. So, that's how,  this whole journey started. It took awhile, but after three years, I really decided that I needed to shift paths, learn Ruby on rails, on my own followed a bunch of people on Twitter and.

[00:02:16 ]Saw that, , they were   developers like me who were making remote , work for them. And I knew that this was something better than what I had   so that's how  I started off with my remote journey and in August, 2017, I was working out of a coworking space in a tropical Island called Colandra.

[00:02:43 ] This is in Thailand. And I was,  feeling really blessed and this was not the first time that I had this overwhelming feeling of joy. I had,  , spent two years of working remote till then, but My fear was that this joy could be short-lived. I wanted to build some resilience into this, this joy.

[00:03:04 ]So one example that I,  would like to give is what happens , if my client goes away or if I lose my job. when I used to speak to my friends their answers weren't, , very helpful. they would say that you could reach out to recruiters or you could,  , LinkedIn is a platform that you could use, but then I knew that, the journey that I was on, it would not work out for me.

[00:03:28 ] And. That's where, , the idea of remote Indian started it was just a, way to build some resilience into this remote working career of sorts. And I thought that if I could be connected to folks who were working  in similar companies  that way,  if they had any open opportunity in the company, chances were that I could have, , first dibs on it.

[00:03:51 ]So, yeah, but over the past three years of running the community,  I started this in August, 2017. So I've been doing this for [00:04:00 ] more than three years now.  The interesting part is now I actually feel heard and I feel understood. And that's the great part about, , building a community you're scratching your itch, but then you also realize there are so many other, , human needs, which are being fulfilled.

[00:04:17 ] The biggest of which is, , being connected with each other.  That's pretty much, , my story now and we have grown to more than thousand members, obviously Covid had some role to play there. And as you can see, a lot of people have now started working remotely and let's see, I think I'm quite excited to see where, we can go with this

[00:04:41 ]Naga S: [00:04:41 ] Are you also continuing your remote job currently or taking care of the community? a full-time gig?

[00:04:47 ] Abhishek: [00:04:47 ] I was working till the end of last year.  I felt that. Remote Indian was something which could be my life's work. And I had  this financial runway of sorts. Like I had some savings, which I could, take a leap of faith here by,   trying to see if remote Indian can be sustainable and.

[00:05:08 ]Yeah, I think this was the year where I, I hadn't planned that, things were like there would be a pandemic and all of these uncertainties would come about, but I'm happy to say that this has also been a great learning experience for me. Like just focusing only on one thing, which is remote Indian, I think helped me to clarify a lot of ideas.

[00:05:31 ]Naga S: [00:05:31 ] You mentioned about having a financial runway that allowed you to take the jump. Can you elaborate a little bit in terms of how you thought about it? How long this runway span and why that linked gave you the comfort?

[00:05:45 ]Abhishek: [00:05:45 ] Definitely. I am from a very   , normal family.

[00:05:48 ] In my family, nobody understands what I do for a living. So in order to have that Let's say sanity, I would say like just having a a [00:06:00 ] safety net of sorts.

[00:06:01 ] I think that gives you a lot of , confidence to teach, to do whatever you want to do. So I didn't want to,  I have that thought behind my head that, Hey, I'm actually, , I don't have money to pay my bills and things like that. So I had saved around one year of , my living expenses.

[00:06:19 ] And that's, that's how I kind of reasoned about it. Th