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Does “building in public” work?

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Re: Does “building in public” work?

#151

Post by j45 »

Building in public to speak to your customers pain points as an audience is one thing.

Building in public for entrepreneurs as audience porn to -feel good about feeling good is a lot harder unless its a product for them.

To me, it's doesn't always make sense to uncover unmet demand in public. But, my own bias in that sentence is I'm aware of that enough to perhaps know the difference, and I very well still might done it if I was starting out.

It's good to speak to the problems of your clients - building in that public is what can be helpful.

I like the indiehackers community a lot, but there's no shortage of lurkers who will imitate. The goal is getting ahead and staying ahead and leveraging positioning others may never understand.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#153

Post by kelnos »

sokoloff wrote: post #8
patrickhogan1 wrote: post #6

I really dislike that so much of hacker culture is $$ focused now. 1. Being a hacker means walking the world being constantly dissatisfied by all of the inefficiency you see on a daily basis and wanting to fix it. 2. Being a hacker means feeling like most of the software world is fraudulent and you are going to build a solution that actually works. 3. Being a hacker means building something because it is fun or cool.…

If no one will pay for the solution, the problem might not be that important.

Sure, but that's not relevant to hacking. Hackers often hack for the sake of it, not because doing so will solve an important problem.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#154

Post by kelnos »

nicbou wrote: post #59

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 t…

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".

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#155

Post by ocean_moist »

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.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#156

Post by kelnos »

al_borland wrote: post #119
RevEng wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of stupidly successful and wealthy people have risen up by getting people to pay attention to them. Jobs, Bankman-Freid, Musk, and so many others found their success largely on cultivating their public image moreso than on their products.

There does need to be a good product to back them up for long term success. That's where Bankman-Freid failed. Jobs was successful, and the products/company he created have outlived him and his image.

That's one of the things I still find impressive about Steve Jobs and his legacy. While Apple isn't the same company as it was when Jobs was alive, it's still a wildly-successful, innovative company. They still do "unheard-of" things, like designing and building their own SoCs and taking a stab into product categories like Vision Pro (regardless of whether or not it ends up being successful).

I think a lot of people (myself included, to some extent) thought Apple would lose its way (again) after Jobs died. It's a testament to the company he (re-)built and the culture and mindset he curated that it's still doing well.

Bankman-Fried, meanwhile, built a whole lot of nothing, and had no integrity.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#158

Post by johnnyanmac »

ocean_moist wrote: post #155

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 intel…

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.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#159

Post by bruce511 »

patrickhogan1 wrote: post #24
sokoloff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no one will pay for the solution, the problem might not be that important.

100% Meaning that if you solve valuable problems you will [probably] make money. So spend all your time solving valuable problems not posting about $$

>> So spend all your time solving valuable problems

Just make sure that you understand the the valuable problems are marketing and sales, not code.

Writing code is not hard. (Even an AI can do that.) Building a product is harder, but that's the easy part.

The harder part is reaching people who would benefit from consuming your value. Facebook and Google offer value to you in this space, and because this space is hard they make the big bucks.

Once you've reached the market convincing them to part with money is the next hard problem.

So yes, by all means solve a problem. Build the app, write the code. That is necessary but not sufficient.

>> not posting about $$

Honestly it doesn't really matter what you're posting about. Posting is marketing. Building an audience. It's one way, and yes feel free to do what works for you. Try and be different, don't just follow the herd.

Coding is easy. Marketing is hard.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#160

Post by johnnyanmac »

bdw5204 wrote: post #44
charlie0 wrote: post #27

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. Technic…

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.

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