Harsh Gandhi's Blog

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Harsh Gandhi
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What is Hashnode

Hashnode is a publishing platform for developers. It has three sides to it:

  • A world-class blogging platform that abstracts away the boring parts of tech blogging and lets developers focus on creating content. Users can map a custom domain for free and get access to a built-in developer community to build an audience.

  • A central feed where readers discover interesting content and engage with them

  • (New) An AI search engine called Rix helps readers consume knowledge in a completely new way

Since Hashnode is two-sided marketplace, we're uniquely positioned to benefit from the changing consumer behaviour of relying on AI to consume knowledge. If Hashnode can attract high-quality writers to publish on platform, and get acess to their content, it will have huge power to leverage AI to generate knowledge in the future and build a high-quality comunity, especially when data is going to be very expensive.

Solution

Enter "Centralized Community and Decentralized Publishing (CCDP)".

As the next step, we connect all these independent blogs using a centralized community at hashnode.com. The product has the following offerings:

Hashnode's challenge

As developers go from 0 -> 1 on Hashnode, they consider having their homegrown blogging solution so that they can have unlimited control over their data and retain flexibility. This behavior will be amplified in the future where data and content ownership become more important. This means as we create more and more quality content creators, we risk losing them because Hashnode has limited flexibility when it comes to extensibility, monetization, and customization.

To keep our amazing writers around, Hashnode is excited to open source it's blog engine and develops top-notch APIs! This way every developer can have blast personalizing there blogs to their heart's content. 😄

  • A world-class blog engine that provides unlimited flexibility to its writers to attract high-quality content creators. This ensures Hashnode keeps getting access to high-quality data.

  • An AI-powered Q&A engine which synthesizes knowledge based on the knowledge produced by the creators

    • Available on the web, as a browser extension and on code editors like VS Code

  • A mix of AI + humans to answer any programming question, where AI serves as the first line of assistance

By doing this, Hashnode can build the biggest developer community beyond what Stack Overflow and GitHub can offer.

Mission

The core problem we're aiming to solve is that many developers are either lost in the noise of larger platforms or are isolated in their independent blogs. By combining community engagement/learning (centralized) with content sovereignty (decentralized), we're building a unique developer community that values the content and data ownership of its users.

Vision

The broader goal for the future is to redefine how developers share and consume knowledge. By merging a centralized discovery with decentralized ownership, Hashnode is not only looking to change the status quo but to set a new, global standard for both content creation and consumption.

Potential monetization plans

TLDR: The business model is building a high-quality community that capitalizes on the power of AI and selling access to businesses. We offer everything else for free to individuals. For example, AI-based learning is completely free, and so is the blogging platform.

  • Community: Build a high-quality community of humans sharing their narratives, personalized experiences, and answers that enhance AI responses, and sell access to this community to businesses

    • We are already seeing significant traction here through online hackathons. We have sold nearly USD 1M worth of hackathons by partnering with various dev tool companies like AWS, Netlify, Vercel, MindsDB and so on over the past 12 months.

  • Ad-based model: Hashnode becomes the first company to inject Ads into AI responses. Hashnode can also consider sharing a % cut with the authors whose content we use for generating responses so that they continue to share content with Hashnode.