Does “building in public” work?

> > 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.

A related term is "audience capture". When you do things based on the approval of your followers, you can end up catering to some weird niches.

Water is extremely high-valued.

Another problem is that, as an indie, you probably aren't an experienced marketing person. I've been the one managing "build in the open" with a founder on a popular Kickstarter project and it was awful. If we posted a lot, people complained we weren't spending our time on building the thing. If we slowed down the communications to focus on the project, people said we weren't being transparent or we had taken off with the money. Half of the comments on our posts were from people angry because we hadn't said anything about a super niche feature that only they wanted, or because it didn't do something that even a 100x more expensive product could do.

Entire communities started up around our product. They communicated publicly with us constantly. Their favorite past times were thinking up wild new features that we absolutely must have and trying to devine what was happening internally by over analyzing everything we said. Many of the community members used the size of their community to try to bully us into doing what they wanted. I personally had several emails telling me I was an idiot and a fraud. We were a victim of our own success.

It's the same fate that every open source developer experiences. As soon as you open yourself up to the world, everybody wants something from you and they want it now. If you already have a mature product with a healthy sales funnel and a clear vision, you can market what you have as you wish. If you're in the middle of creating something and you talk about it with others, they will all want a say in what you create and they will be upset if you don't act on their suggestions.

Now that I'm in a large company but working on a new and exciting project, we have hit the same problem internally - everybody who hears about it wants us to build it to suit them and they are disappointed when we instead try to build something that works for everyone. Any other product we made we never talked about into it was largely built and ready to start selling and we never had that kind of bullying behavior.

Something about being on the early phases of development makes people think you want their suggestions and they get rather upset when you don't build what they have in mind. That's why it's better to keep to yourself while you get the foundations in place, then carefully choose who you discuss it with until it's ready for the world to start buying it.

Exactly, it's the opportunity cost.

When I was a young adult and especially a teenager, I spent a lot of time making things out of pure desire to because I didn't have to think too much about my financial situation (present and future). That unfortunately gave way with age, and now ~15 years later whenever I engage with these activities there's a voice in the back of my head nagging, asking how doing those things instead of something that could potentially bring a financial return might negatively impact ability to achieve short term goals, tide over periods of economic uncertainty, have enough money for retirement, etc.

It's probably not the right way to think since personal projects that might seem unprofitable on their face can bring benefits in unexpected ways, but it's a problem nonetheless.