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Does “building in public” work?

laike9m.com

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Re: Does “building in public” work?

#171

Post by skwee357 »

Can agree with the post.

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...

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#172

Post by inquisitor26234 »

bemmu wrote: post #164

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…

thing about levelsio is you can copy his ideas but you don't have his existing audience, connections, and resources

and the guy ships like a machine good lord

"just code more carefully" jesus

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#173

Post by laike9m »

bemmu wrote: post #164

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…

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

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#174

Post by raverbashing »

jt2190 wrote: post #65
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.…

> Would you still build that app, because it solves an annoying real world problem even if you got paid $0? Assuming you’re talking about building an app for other people , I personally would not, no. The market is sending a clear signal that it values the app at zero dollars. In other words, they don’t want it. > If not then the problem you are solving is probably not important and a waste of your time anyway. This…

> The market is sending a clear signal that it values the app at zero dollars

Oh but those are very different things

An app that people would pay $0 is still more valuable (and might I say, a lot more valuable) than an app that people wouldn't install for free

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#175

Post by laike9m »

baxtr wrote: post #88
pembrook wrote: post #10

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,…

What your basically saying is: 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?

Good question. I'm curious as well. From what I can tell, more and more indiehackers seem to be focusing on building tools for other indiehackers...

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#176

Post by laike9m »

skwee357 wrote: post #171

Can agree with the post. 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…

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.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#177

Post by EnigmaFlare »

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…

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.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#179

Post by winwang »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #112
winwang wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently a technical solo founder. Got any video recs?

The SaaS Podcast by Omer Khan has some solid technical interviews including lots on growth and matketing with solo devs and small teams who are actually serious and not just grifting and wrapping apis with no-code solutions. The World Of DaaS by Auren Hoffman has some decent episodes. These tend to be interviews with more established entrepreneurs but lots of bootstrapping/ early growth stories from devs/teams when t…

Thanks!

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#180

Post by skwee357 »

laike9m wrote: post #176
skwee357 wrote: post #171

Can agree with the post. 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…

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.

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