You Can't Build a Community with Code Alone
Why I co-founded Cobay, and what organizing founder meetups has taught me about building for people instead of just users.
On May 20, I co-founded Cobay, a community that brings AI builders and founders together through local events and a shared product platform.
I knew how to build a website. I did not yet know how to build a room people would want to return to.
That difference has shaped almost everything I have learned since.
Why Cobay
There are more tools than ever for building a product alone. An idea can become a prototype in days, sometimes hours. But builders themselves are still fragmented.
Someone may have strong engineering ability but no access to people who understand distribution. Another person may know a market deeply but lack a technical co-founder. Many promising projects remain isolated—not because the people behind them lack ambition, but because the right conversations never happen.
Cobay is our attempt to create more of those conversations.
We focus on bringing founders, engineers, product builders, and local AI communities into real rooms. The goal is not networking for its own sake. It is to create an environment where people can share unfinished ideas, compare what they are learning, and discover collaborators they would not have met otherwise.
Building the Room
My first responsibility is organizing offline founder meetups.
That work is different from shipping a software feature. A meetup has no compiler and no test suite. Its quality depends on the people invited, the expectations set before they arrive, and whether the format helps honest conversations happen.
The visible event may last only a few hours, but the real work is creating the conditions around it: defining the purpose, coordinating the details, connecting participants, and making sure the room feels useful rather than transactional.
The best outcome is not a full room. It is a room where someone leaves with a clearer idea, a useful introduction, or the beginning of a collaboration.
Building the System Behind It
My second responsibility is technical. I develop Cobay’s website and the product that supports the community.
This is the part of the work that feels more familiar: turning needs into interfaces, structuring information, and building systems that can grow. But community software has a particular challenge. It cannot manufacture trust. It can only make trustworthy interactions easier to discover and continue.
That changes how I think about product decisions. The website is not the community; it is the connective layer around the community. An event page, a member profile, or a project record matters only if it helps a real person take the next step.
Community Is Also a Product
Before Cobay, most of my projects were tools. Their feedback loops were relatively direct: write code, test behavior, fix what breaks.
A community has a slower and more human feedback loop. People do not return because every button works. They return because an interaction gave them value, because they felt understood, or because they believe the next room may contain someone worth meeting.
That does not make community building less technical. It makes the system larger. The product includes the software, the event format, the communication, the curation, and the trust created over time.
Co-founding Cobay is teaching me to work across all of those layers. I am still writing code, but now the code is only one part of what I am building.
Explore the community at cobay.tech.