Anecdotal, but it seems like all the people who “build in public” end up trapped by their chosen distribution strategy.
What I mean by this is, if you’re building in public there’s a 99% chance you’re going to end up building products for other indiehackers who are interested in following people who build in public.
This means you’re probably going to end up building yet another micro-Saas dev tool (Saas boilerplate, incident monitoring, etc) or growth hacking tool (for social media, SEO, cold email, AI content, etc).
And you’ll probably get modest success fast, since indiehackers like tools that help them indiehack and if they follow you on social media to hear stories of how they can get rich quick, they’ll definitely buy a product from you promising to help them do that.
However, I think you’ll struggle to ever “cross the chasm” so to speak into building a company that’s bigger than whatever online personality you build (no mass markets or low churn businesses without pyramid scheme dynamics).
This. I like listening to technical solo founders talk about they built. Its the less technical marketing guys building in public their AI "powered" crud apps or micro SaaS like you describe that really bother me. They remind me a lot of scammy people on Instagram talking about drop shipping or whatever the get rich quick scheme of the week is.
I see your point, but I would disagree with you somewhat.
Every new startup needs to navigate the transition from early adopters to bigger names and/or more mainstream users who give you credibility and higher revenue potential. But it’s almost always done as a stepping stone approach. You need to get the early adopters first or else none of the rest matters.
Doing this is not easy so any conceivable advantage is worth considering. Of course targeting build in public and indiehackers are not the only possible strategies for getting early users, but if it’s working for you, don’t underestimate how valuable that is.
Of course I do agree about going into it with both eyes open and knowing that if you’re successful enough, you will likely have to evolve somehow toward another customer segment. But again, this is almost always the case no matter what your early adopter channels are.
Definitely agree that startups have to find a foothold somewhere, and basically land and expand from there.
If we take B2B products for example, it's super common to niche down into a specific industry and then expand out to adjacent ones, and so on.
But the build-in-public industry/niche is unique in that those customers aren't "real" businesses with "real" problems. Most of the followers are wantreprenuers with imagined problems.
So the risk is, instead of building a solid foundation to expand from, you might just be building the wrong thing altogether and doing it on quicksand (those pyramid scheme dynamics I was talking about).
> if you’re building in public there’s a 99% chance you’re going to end up building products for other indiehackers who are interested in following people who build in public.
Every time I dip my toes into indiehacker communities it's this all the way down: Indie hackers building personal brands to sell products to other indie hackers via their Twitter or TikTok.
This is an issue with a lot of online creator communities and people using them for marketing too. Way too many would be authors, artists, game developers, YouTubers, musicians, etc end up marketing their work in communities for their choice of art/project rather than in places their actual audience visits.
Unfortunately as you point out, while that can work to a limited degree, it will usually cap off pretty quickly. Gotta market to customers, not other creators.
> What I mean by this is, if you’re building in public there’s a 99% chance you’re going to end up building products for other indiehackers who are interested in following people who build in public.
There must be some named law that states that the set of people you listen determine most of your thoughts. But it's something way wider in scope than Conway's Law.
There are some proverbs, because it's a very old observation. But there must be named laws too, because it's a very common observation.
I've seen so many indie hacker types who are allergic to talking to (would-be) customers, seeking validation exclusively from other indie hackers, who would never be customers.
Saw a tweet the other day of someone saying "to find a good business idea, first tweet about it and see if it gets love."
It's the same problem with indie game development. Lots of people get into gamedev and when they have a semblance of a game they start to think "how am I going to get players to try it?" Most of the venues for game developers are just full of other game developers.
The biggest problem is when the game leaves the cradle of a gamedev community that is nice to beginners and is thrown into the wilderness of actual gamers that don't know how much effort it takes to make a game and don't really care. They won't mince words.
I suppose it's just a common class of error to not think beforehand what your end game strategy is going to be? Step 1: make thing. Step 2: ?. Step 3: profit.
I've seen the other side of this, which is zero organic growth and enormous strain on founders to become salespeople and customer support for customers that perpetually keep your software in a trial period. Depending on where you want to allocate your resources that may or may not make sense compared to building in public.
That said, the bigger risk is building products for hobbyists/students/tourists because it won't have the ability to "cross the chasm" as you put it. At least with the hacker scene you have a few legit people to drive development forward.
Yes, the "public" they're building in isn't a very interesting one and already crowded by podcasts, blogs, tutorial sites, etc.
If instead you're building, e.g., construction software, then it makes sense to be public to the construction space and build excitement there. But everyone's "public" is where developers congregate, leading to building just for that crowd instead.
I think the right strategy is to use building in public to get a bunch of initial users and traction, then iterate on your product to the point where other channels like SEO/PPC are going to be profitable.
It's interesting how the urge is always to build something "bigger". When you run the numbers on a revenue per employee basis, the indiehackers are the biggest kids on the block.
I'd prefer a legion of small businesses that generate great wealth for the people around them, than a single, venture funded, loss making, mega-corp concentrated in SF.
I used to build in public (Candy Japan), and now don't.
Good things. It does bring customers directly. At least for blogging, building in public posts can get some backlinks, which is great for SEO. For some time I had the #1 result for my top search term. That might make it worth it overall.
Negative things. It motivates others to clone your project, as now people know that $X/month can be made doing that. Almost no-one will, but if your posts are seen by say 100k+ people then you'll have a few in there who might.
It warps your own thinking, as now you have a bunch of people on social media who see your project as your identity. You start buying into the narrative of being this X
project guy so you can't just go away to do Y, even if on a rational level you know no-one actually cares that much whether you do X or Y.
Seems @levelsio has been immune to this, as he's been smart to have his identity be a guy who ships a variety of things quickly vs. just being say the "Nomadlist Guy" forever.
With his influence and followers, I think @levelsio has made sure that, even if he has competitors, he's gonna gain more attraction than others and do better
I build in public, but I never share numbers. I find that it attracts the wrong sort of people, and a particularly boring kind of conversation about money and growth and the icky business-y bits.
I do work with the garage door open though. I share screenshots, ask for feedback, and show off the little details I spent a lot of time on. It’s basically a DVD commentary for the stuff I am about to release
This attracts the right kind of people, and sparks the right kinds of conversations. I am basically involving fellow builders in my design process, and hyping what I am working on to my audience and industry peers. It is a good way to make friends.
This is the thing that was weird to me about the article: it seemed to focus very heavily on the idea of sharing financial details. To me, that's not "building" in public. That's just... sharing your finances. Building in public is sharing all little details about your product development process that most outsiders would never know or hear about otherwise. It's about sharing the dead ends that never saw the light of day, about sharing the roadblocks that made it difficult to get a feature or even whole product done. It's about sharing how collaboration happens and decisions are made.
This focus on finance is distasteful to me. Not in the "it's a taboo subject" sense, but it just feels like focusing on the wrong thing.
I really like your phrase, "work with the garage door open".
I'm ambivalent. Especially in my domain of games where sharing the financial breakdown can indeed help those "wrong" kind of people realize how little money there is in non-AAA games once all the cuts come in.
So instead they make up shaky heuristics, see reviews and wishlists and must think "wow that game made a lot of money"... missing important context on how much was spent on labor/profit splits, or the area the team is in. Which muddies discussion on what a "successful" game even is (a topic already muddy even with all context).
BUT, then again the tides have shifted so much in that people just take a "should have" approach. "you shouldn't have done it in X genre. You shouldn't have used Y software. Your game sucks so it obviously failed". So maybe bringing up any finances will always attract that crowd, not cause them to look into another place to make money.
I, also, discovered build-in-public and indie hackers communities about 6-8 months ago, after I failed at "build it, and they will come". Since then, I have revived my Twitter/Mastodon/LinkedIn, followed some people with similar goals, and shared my progress.
Eventually, I have realized that like any community, most people are not willing to do the job and would rather flood the internet with low quality questions like "what payment provider should I chose". People would glorify the "build 432 in 12 months, and see what sticks" approach, thus making their content repetitive ("hey, just launched Y on PH, support my launch!!").
And even the "big players", like levelsio, would post irrelevant stuff such as criticism of EU. Sure, everyone can post what they want, but my desire was to follow people who are smarter, and more successful than me, in order to learn from them, and not be involved in politics. After ~8 months of being there (there = Twitter) on a daily basis -- I quit cold turkey. It's not worth it.
I shared some of my thoughts in my (other) blog [0].
Thanks for sharing. I had the same feeling that browsering Twitter timeline is not so helpful overall, though there are good posts from time to time so you still can't ignore it.
I actually enjoy reading levelsio's non-indie-related posts, but that 's me personally.
I'd rather read a book / listen to a podcast from someone like Rob Walling, then navigate the Twitter feed of endless "welp, someone copied my SaaS" in order to get an occasional gem.
I also like his tweets, but it has nothing to do with learning how to build a business.
Kudos on realizing this after only 8 months. The blog post is spot on. The snarky tweet about chad b2b dev is basically true, except it doesn't have to be B2B. B2C works, too. Just stay clear of the mother of all grifts: telling others how to make money online.
If I have to think on first principles, the reason why people are building things in public is because that's just a form of marketing and self-promotion. We're way past tech being the hard part of launching a product. The harder part is building the audience and trying to stand out. Building in public is probably the easiest way to build buzz, gain an audience, and name recognition.
I don't think there was ever a time when you could succeed in the marketplace on the merits of your tech. Once the tech reaches the relatively low bar of "good enough", the rest is sales and marketing. In the most lucrative enterprise market, the "good enough" bar is even lower than in the much less lucrative consumer market because the people who will actually have to use your tech aren't the ones buying it. Technical quality likely matters the most to "customers" who don't pay anything such as users of popular open source projects.
If you want to make money from a good product then becoming a social media influencer who talks about your product is the most straightforward way to advertise without having to pay for ads.
> In the most lucrative enterprise market, the "good enough" bar is even lower than in the much less lucrative consumer market because the people who will actually have to use your tech aren't the ones buying it.
This reminds me of the time Citi lost $900 million due to terrible software [0].
If success is financial then no. But you could build a reputation from some brilliant and easy to use/integrate tech. Which is in the hacker's spirit and the backbone of so many "successful" software.
It also set forth a very straightforward "success" path: make good software that the community praises and tech companies (who probably also use your code) will climb over each other to get you on their team. But I suppose those days are slowly ending as well now that many problems (for all but the biggest tech companies) are being solved. No need for a million dollar mastermind when a 100k mid-level can do the job.
I've got reasonable financial success in my software product mainly from the merits of the tech. Pretty much all the marketing I ever did was spamming a small mailing list once, making an anonymous website that subtly mentioned my product, got good Google ranking, and got referenced by other people, and eventually making a Wikipedia page which I'm not sure does any good. I got good ranking in Google early on without any particular effort, probably because there just aren't many competitors.
Other people have done a lot to help at their own initiative though. Resellers approach me and market it themselves, customers recommend it on forums, researchers mention it in their published papers, and one customer even wrote a chapter of a book about it - which was key to being eligible for a Wikipedia page.
I'm lucky though because it belongs to a slow moving, well-defined class of products that people in my target industry already understand so when they go looking for a cheaper alternative to the super-priced big names, they find mine. I'm not inventing a new market.
It's not free money though. It's very code-heavy and technical-understanding-heavy and I've spent nearly 20 years actively developing it by now. One man wouldn't be able to just smash one out in a year, and you'd need some reasonably deep domain knowledge.
The elephant behind the elephant in our room is an inability to be honest and upfront about this kind of stuff and instead we have to dance around it. This essentially means we can’t have a decent discussion on any topic that carries actual risk and instead we focus on low-risk banalities.
Also I should add there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times - certainly saying shit I’d never think about saying when I was their age, so with that we are on a treadmill of constantly seeing, mocking, relearning etc past mistakes.
I think there are a lot of honest people out there that just wanna make and share cool stuff. I also think the well was poisoned by grifters who wanted either clout of a quick buck. That seems to be a story that encompases the last 30 years of the tech industry as we know it.
>there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times
I don't mind those people. No one really wants to mentor these days, but people LOVE to correct. I'd treat that incoming flaming as an opportunity to learn from people who'd never speak up otherwise (after inevitably discarding 80% of replies that are simply non-constructive insults).
> certainly saying shit I’d never think about saying when I was their age, so with that we are on a treadmill of constantly seeing, mocking, relearning etc past mistakes.
Your post reminded me of that “ten thousand” xkcd about how mathematically not “everyone knows” something that feels like everybody should know. Not even close.
You said “treadmill of mistakes”… well there are a lot of people and eventually they all become one of the “lucky ten thousand”. I wonder if your frustration is watching yet another batch of 10,000 learn those “same mistakes”.
I dunno, it feels like a less cynical interpretation to me.
Hard part of launching _most_ products. But I agree, I'm not sure content marketing, regardless of topic, can have an actual downside in the majority of circumstances. Maybe just the opportunity cost.
Marketing a product seems easier than ever with social media, however the ocean is much larger.
Moreover the author could have easily written this post as "it's time to rethink 'thoughtleader blogging' and it would fit just as well. Most people don't write this stuff for their own pleasure, they write it for eyeballs. They write it for their readers. In that sense I suspect building in public works as well as blog posts like this for gaining a following. There's no one fits all answer to this.
The people described in the article tie the value/success of their product to how much buzz it creates. "Building in public" has shifted away from a way to get initial beta testers and feedback into an echo chamber of clout. This whole process is antithetical to the true success of any project.
There is way too much stuff about all the meta around making projects and just plain clout chasing rather than sharing intellectually interesting projects. I had twitter for an hour before I deleted it because I realized it was just a big popularity contest. The SNR was just too low.
I still think "building in public" is a good thing apart from the buzzword-y semantics it has taken on. The best way to do this is to talk only about the project and the technical challenges it has, and view "building in public" as a moral commitment rather than a marketing one. Perhaps "moral" is too strong a word. I really mean sharing things, not to boost your ego or flex status, but because you think it's actually cool/useful.
Yeah, I'm in the games and when I delved into this article comparing to games... it really just sounds like advertisement, not necesarily knowledge sharing. I thought maybe it'd be different for projects perhaps aimed at fellow hackers, but it sounds like it falls into the same traps of game development; treat it like PR, boost the wins, handwave the losses.
So you run into all the issues non-native ads have: you become noise and the act of talking about your product is a nuisance rather than one to build curiosity. Even for completely free games, sadly (you can thank mobile for that). the huge majority of nobody really cares about you until they do.
And tbf I get it: at least in a hacker scene you're usually trying to perform something somewhat novel and that brings in curious hackers. Games (especially indies as a business) rarely have any novel tech, especially since so many of them rely on the tech of a large engine to do the heavy lifting for you.
Counterargument: I started Canny and we were a "build in public" startup early on. Building in public was an invaluable marketing channel in the early days.
When you are just launching your product, it's really difficult to get those first users and any awareness at all.
If your target audience includes other people in tech, then building in public can be great marketing channel.
Posting about your ideas or your product just isn't that interesting. Posting how much money you're making is very interesting to other people who might want to follow your path.
Like all successful marketing channels, this channel is a lot more saturated these days than when we started (~2017), so it might not work as well anymore.
> If your target audience includes other people in tech, then building in public can be great marketing channel.
> Posting about your ideas or your product just isn't that interesting. Posting how much money you're making is very interesting to other people who might want to follow your path.
Hang on, it feels like there's a contradiction here. Is the audience customers, or is it people who want to follow your path? Or are you thinking that's substantially the same audience?
We are a Canny customer since the early days <3. And I feel that both product and financial information is interesting. I'm a user of your product, so how it works and how you think about it are significant to me as they'll affect my day to day life. But on the other hand, financial information is something that gives me confidence in you as a business. Both can create a sense of emotional investment beyond the transactional relationship we have.
But we're just a regular old software business, not indie hackers and nor does "building in public" describe how we work.
> Let's admit it, the main purpose of build in public is to attract attention and build a community
It's more like open sourcing your code. On one hand: yes, it's good marketing. On the other hand: you're creating positive externality, so random people show up, thank you for your contribution, and help you, monetarily, or by giving you valuable leads & feedback.
it's the same benefit of going to a conference & networking, just doing it continually. It's still useful even if everyone is doing it, because when someone stumbles on your work, they have an entry point/signal on whether there's mutual benefit in collaborating.
that's also just how you make friends. An increasingly hard aspect in western society these days as third places decrease. Yeah, you need to do something to attract attention, especially in a digital domain where all you are are a handle and maybe an avatar. building a community means more of a like-minded pool to potentially become friends with.
I'd kill for some local meetup spot to have already done all this for me, but this is the next best approach.
Readit News
What I mean by this is, if you’re building in public there’s a 99% chance you’re going to end up building products for other indiehackers who are interested in following people who build in public.
This means you’re probably going to end up building yet another micro-Saas dev tool (Saas boilerplate, incident monitoring, etc) or growth hacking tool (for social media, SEO, cold email, AI content, etc).
And you’ll probably get modest success fast, since indiehackers like tools that help them indiehack and if they follow you on social media to hear stories of how they can get rich quick, they’ll definitely buy a product from you promising to help them do that.
However, I think you’ll struggle to ever “cross the chasm” so to speak into building a company that’s bigger than whatever online personality you build (no mass markets or low churn businesses without pyramid scheme dynamics).
Every new startup needs to navigate the transition from early adopters to bigger names and/or more mainstream users who give you credibility and higher revenue potential. But it’s almost always done as a stepping stone approach. You need to get the early adopters first or else none of the rest matters.
Doing this is not easy so any conceivable advantage is worth considering. Of course targeting build in public and indiehackers are not the only possible strategies for getting early users, but if it’s working for you, don’t underestimate how valuable that is.
Of course I do agree about going into it with both eyes open and knowing that if you’re successful enough, you will likely have to evolve somehow toward another customer segment. But again, this is almost always the case no matter what your early adopter channels are.
If we take B2B products for example, it's super common to niche down into a specific industry and then expand out to adjacent ones, and so on.
But the build-in-public industry/niche is unique in that those customers aren't "real" businesses with "real" problems. Most of the followers are wantreprenuers with imagined problems.
So the risk is, instead of building a solid foundation to expand from, you might just be building the wrong thing altogether and doing it on quicksand (those pyramid scheme dynamics I was talking about).
Every time I dip my toes into indiehacker communities it's this all the way down: Indie hackers building personal brands to sell products to other indie hackers via their Twitter or TikTok.
Unfortunately as you point out, while that can work to a limited degree, it will usually cap off pretty quickly. Gotta market to customers, not other creators.
Sounds a bit like a variation on Conway's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
There are some proverbs, because it's a very old observation. But there must be named laws too, because it's a very common observation.
I've seen so many indie hacker types who are allergic to talking to (would-be) customers, seeking validation exclusively from other indie hackers, who would never be customers.
Saw a tweet the other day of someone saying "to find a good business idea, first tweet about it and see if it gets love."
1) what
The biggest problem is when the game leaves the cradle of a gamedev community that is nice to beginners and is thrown into the wilderness of actual gamers that don't know how much effort it takes to make a game and don't really care. They won't mince words.
I suppose it's just a common class of error to not think beforehand what your end game strategy is going to be? Step 1: make thing. Step 2: ?. Step 3: profit.
That said, the bigger risk is building products for hobbyists/students/tourists because it won't have the ability to "cross the chasm" as you put it. At least with the hacker scene you have a few legit people to drive development forward.
Selling stuff and growing is hard.
If instead you're building, e.g., construction software, then it makes sense to be public to the construction space and build excitement there. But everyone's "public" is where developers congregate, leading to building just for that crowd instead.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
Book by Geoffrey Moore.
quoted a lot by startups for a couple of decades plus.
had read it some years ago. quite interesting ...
If you build a product for indiehackers, you’ll never be able to sell it beyond that initial target market.
I feel like that’s a bit like saying a Social Media platform built for college students won’t never go mainstream.
So I’m wondering: is there any product that started as indiehacker product and eventually ended up becoming a mass market product?
I'd prefer a legion of small businesses that generate great wealth for the people around them, than a single, venture funded, loss making, mega-corp concentrated in SF.
I await your downvotes :)
Good things. It does bring customers directly. At least for blogging, building in public posts can get some backlinks, which is great for SEO. For some time I had the #1 result for my top search term. That might make it worth it overall.
Negative things. It motivates others to clone your project, as now people know that $X/month can be made doing that. Almost no-one will, but if your posts are seen by say 100k+ people then you'll have a few in there who might.
It warps your own thinking, as now you have a bunch of people on social media who see your project as your identity. You start buying into the narrative of being this X project guy so you can't just go away to do Y, even if on a rational level you know no-one actually cares that much whether you do X or Y.
Seems @levelsio has been immune to this, as he's been smart to have his identity be a guy who ships a variety of things quickly vs. just being say the "Nomadlist Guy" forever.
and the guy ships like a machine good lord
"just code more carefully" jesus
I do work with the garage door open though. I share screenshots, ask for feedback, and show off the little details I spent a lot of time on. It’s basically a DVD commentary for the stuff I am about to release
This attracts the right kind of people, and sparks the right kinds of conversations. I am basically involving fellow builders in my design process, and hyping what I am working on to my audience and industry peers. It is a good way to make friends.
This focus on finance is distasteful to me. Not in the "it's a taboo subject" sense, but it just feels like focusing on the wrong thing.
I really like your phrase, "work with the garage door open".
So instead they make up shaky heuristics, see reviews and wishlists and must think "wow that game made a lot of money"... missing important context on how much was spent on labor/profit splits, or the area the team is in. Which muddies discussion on what a "successful" game even is (a topic already muddy even with all context).
BUT, then again the tides have shifted so much in that people just take a "should have" approach. "you shouldn't have done it in X genre. You shouldn't have used Y software. Your game sucks so it obviously failed". So maybe bringing up any finances will always attract that crowd, not cause them to look into another place to make money.
The stuff in the OP is mainly just marketing/trends driven by social media platforms which has grown under the brand of "building in public".
"Working with the garage door open" is a great phrase.
I, also, discovered build-in-public and indie hackers communities about 6-8 months ago, after I failed at "build it, and they will come". Since then, I have revived my Twitter/Mastodon/LinkedIn, followed some people with similar goals, and shared my progress.
Eventually, I have realized that like any community, most people are not willing to do the job and would rather flood the internet with low quality questions like "what payment provider should I chose". People would glorify the "build 432 in 12 months, and see what sticks" approach, thus making their content repetitive ("hey, just launched Y on PH, support my launch!!").
And even the "big players", like levelsio, would post irrelevant stuff such as criticism of EU. Sure, everyone can post what they want, but my desire was to follow people who are smarter, and more successful than me, in order to learn from them, and not be involved in politics. After ~8 months of being there (there = Twitter) on a daily basis -- I quit cold turkey. It's not worth it.
I shared some of my thoughts in my (other) blog [0].
[0] https://thesolopreneur.blog/posts/on-buildinpublic-and-indie...
I actually enjoy reading levelsio's non-indie-related posts, but that 's me personally.
I also like his tweets, but it has nothing to do with learning how to build a business.
If you want to make money from a good product then becoming a social media influencer who talks about your product is the most straightforward way to advertise without having to pay for ads.
This reminds me of the time Citi lost $900 million due to terrible software [0].
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c...
It also set forth a very straightforward "success" path: make good software that the community praises and tech companies (who probably also use your code) will climb over each other to get you on their team. But I suppose those days are slowly ending as well now that many problems (for all but the biggest tech companies) are being solved. No need for a million dollar mastermind when a 100k mid-level can do the job.
Other people have done a lot to help at their own initiative though. Resellers approach me and market it themselves, customers recommend it on forums, researchers mention it in their published papers, and one customer even wrote a chapter of a book about it - which was key to being eligible for a Wikipedia page.
I'm lucky though because it belongs to a slow moving, well-defined class of products that people in my target industry already understand so when they go looking for a cheaper alternative to the super-priced big names, they find mine. I'm not inventing a new market.
It's not free money though. It's very code-heavy and technical-understanding-heavy and I've spent nearly 20 years actively developing it by now. One man wouldn't be able to just smash one out in a year, and you'd need some reasonably deep domain knowledge.
Also I should add there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times - certainly saying shit I’d never think about saying when I was their age, so with that we are on a treadmill of constantly seeing, mocking, relearning etc past mistakes.
>there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times
I don't mind those people. No one really wants to mentor these days, but people LOVE to correct. I'd treat that incoming flaming as an opportunity to learn from people who'd never speak up otherwise (after inevitably discarding 80% of replies that are simply non-constructive insults).
Your post reminded me of that “ten thousand” xkcd about how mathematically not “everyone knows” something that feels like everybody should know. Not even close.
You said “treadmill of mistakes”… well there are a lot of people and eventually they all become one of the “lucky ten thousand”. I wonder if your frustration is watching yet another batch of 10,000 learn those “same mistakes”.
I dunno, it feels like a less cynical interpretation to me.
Marketing a product seems easier than ever with social media, however the ocean is much larger.
Moreover the author could have easily written this post as "it's time to rethink 'thoughtleader blogging' and it would fit just as well. Most people don't write this stuff for their own pleasure, they write it for eyeballs. They write it for their readers. In that sense I suspect building in public works as well as blog posts like this for gaining a following. There's no one fits all answer to this.
There is way too much stuff about all the meta around making projects and just plain clout chasing rather than sharing intellectually interesting projects. I had twitter for an hour before I deleted it because I realized it was just a big popularity contest. The SNR was just too low.
I still think "building in public" is a good thing apart from the buzzword-y semantics it has taken on. The best way to do this is to talk only about the project and the technical challenges it has, and view "building in public" as a moral commitment rather than a marketing one. Perhaps "moral" is too strong a word. I really mean sharing things, not to boost your ego or flex status, but because you think it's actually cool/useful.
So you run into all the issues non-native ads have: you become noise and the act of talking about your product is a nuisance rather than one to build curiosity. Even for completely free games, sadly (you can thank mobile for that). the huge majority of nobody really cares about you until they do.
And tbf I get it: at least in a hacker scene you're usually trying to perform something somewhat novel and that brings in curious hackers. Games (especially indies as a business) rarely have any novel tech, especially since so many of them rely on the tech of a large engine to do the heavy lifting for you.
When you are just launching your product, it's really difficult to get those first users and any awareness at all.
If your target audience includes other people in tech, then building in public can be great marketing channel.
Posting about your ideas or your product just isn't that interesting. Posting how much money you're making is very interesting to other people who might want to follow your path.
Like all successful marketing channels, this channel is a lot more saturated these days than when we started (~2017), so it might not work as well anymore.
> Posting about your ideas or your product just isn't that interesting. Posting how much money you're making is very interesting to other people who might want to follow your path.
Hang on, it feels like there's a contradiction here. Is the audience customers, or is it people who want to follow your path? Or are you thinking that's substantially the same audience?
We are a Canny customer since the early days <3. And I feel that both product and financial information is interesting. I'm a user of your product, so how it works and how you think about it are significant to me as they'll affect my day to day life. But on the other hand, financial information is something that gives me confidence in you as a business. Both can create a sense of emotional investment beyond the transactional relationship we have.
But we're just a regular old software business, not indie hackers and nor does "building in public" describe how we work.
On the contrary, I wouldn’t be using Capacities if they didn’t have their entire development roadmap on your product, so thanks
It's more like open sourcing your code. On one hand: yes, it's good marketing. On the other hand: you're creating positive externality, so random people show up, thank you for your contribution, and help you, monetarily, or by giving you valuable leads & feedback.
it's the same benefit of going to a conference & networking, just doing it continually. It's still useful even if everyone is doing it, because when someone stumbles on your work, they have an entry point/signal on whether there's mutual benefit in collaborating.
I'd kill for some local meetup spot to have already done all this for me, but this is the next best approach.