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Does “building in public” work?

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Re: Does “building in public” work?

#191

Post by rikroots »

Stem0037 wrote: post #189

Interesting take. I've been in the indie hacker scene for a while and I've noticed the same trend. The "build in public" movement has definitely become oversaturated. While transparency can be valuable, I agree that many are overdoing it, especially with revenue posts. It often feels like peacocking rather than genuine sharing of insights. I think the key is to focus on providing actual value to your audience. Instea…

I have a canvas library which was in serious need of a community. One of the things I tried to find that community was joining the indie hackers website - I mean, building in public is the sort of thing I'm already doing with my library's public GitHub repos yes?

I made an intro post and started to setup a profile. On the profile page it says: "Create a founder profile to show off your products, your revenue, and your most ambitious goals and ideas" ... and that's when I realised this wasn't what I wanted. I'm not a founder; I don't have a product to sell. Everybody on the site is shouting about how many customers they've got and how they've cleared their first $100k - but I couldn't see anyone keen to discuss the intricacies of coding up a 2d canvas filter.

So my library still doesn't have a community of people who want to discuss all things 2D canvas. It would be nice if I could find such a community (not on Reddit), or build one, but I'm glad I decided not to hustle with all the rest of the indie hacker crowd building stuff in public.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#192

Post by EnigmaFlare »

atomicnature wrote: post #188
EnigmaFlare wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What's the product if I may ask? Or at least the general category of products you operate in - if you don't mind mentioning it.

I'm a bit shy about the details but it's used by engineers. Actually there's a lot of opportunity in software for engineers. They pay huge prices and the quality of what they have is often poor. I'm aware of some gaps in the market. For example, modeling thermal distortion due to robot welding. That's not what my product does but that's one where the existing solutions are something like $50,000/year and it's a hard problem in part because the software has to run faster than an actual welding robot making a prototype to be economical to model it in the first place. It takes some clever research to invent the secret sauce to get those speeds.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#193

Post by ssijak »

fsndz wrote: post #168

True, most indie hacker apps serve the needs or curiosity of other indie hackers or tech-curious people (think PhotoAI, SaaS boilerplates, etc.). The unwillingness of their creators to scale the business by hiring more developers and shipping additional features—making the apps B2B-worthy, for example—means these apps often remain within that niche. However, when you're already making millions per year, like Levels.i…

But most indie founders really do not want to have a big team or have a VC with their own incentives. And that is very valid. Many people put value in other things than seeking maximum growth. "small growth" or earning enough to be financially independent is good enough for a lot of people.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#194

Post by jwxz »

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…

> 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].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c...

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#196

Post by mattgreenrocks »

mvkel wrote: post #138
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,…

Well said. 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

This is the result of indie hackers believing that social media success is an integral part of building something.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#197

Post by mattgreenrocks »

Aurornis wrote: post #145
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,…

> 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.

It’s such a joke. Its nearly impossible to find decent places to talk about it online because of this.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#198

Post by ozim »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #165
kelnos wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

There is a lot of that just like people think opening pizza place is a great business - if they look only cost of wheat and water, cheese; it sounds like god knows what margins are there, $1 ingredients and sell for $20. In reality margins are much lower and if you don’t have a good spot you probably will loose money.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#199

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

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,…

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.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#200

Post by mattgreenrocks »

rikroots wrote: post #191
Stem0037 wrote: post #189

Interesting take. I've been in the indie hacker scene for a while and I've noticed the same trend. The "build in public" movement has definitely become oversaturated. While transparency can be valuable, I agree that many are overdoing it, especially with revenue posts. It often feels like peacocking rather than genuine sharing of insights. I think the key is to focus on providing actual value to your audience. Instea…

I have a canvas library which was in serious need of a community. One of the things I tried to find that community was joining the indie hackers website - I mean, building in public is the sort of thing I'm already doing with my library's public GitHub repos yes? I made an intro post and started to setup a profile. On the profile page it says: "Create a founder profile to show off your products, your revenue, and you…

The problem with these places is they attract grifter-types who trainwreck the discussion because they are are focused more on taking than giving. Instead of talking about how they can serve their customers well, it’s all about them.
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