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Does “building in public” work?

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Re: Does “building in public” work?

#201

Post by elicksaur »

inquisitor26234 wrote: post #172
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

Does he ship like a machine, or are his products relatively simple GenAI wrappers?

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#202

Post by WA »

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…

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.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#203

Post by inquisitor26234 »

elicksaur wrote: post #201
inquisitor26234 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does he ship like a machine, or are his products relatively simple GenAI wrappers?

ships like a machine yes

his products being genai wrappers, some are partly yes.

in his interview with lex fridman he explains how he built his recent photo ai one, yes most of it is wrapper on some ai service, but his team goes the extra mile of training models on their own so it looks more photorealistic than the generally available ones

he built products before ai like nomadlist and remoteok.

his hit and miss rates are as real as it gets

https://x.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#204

Post by longnguyen »

I used to "build in public" with my first app 2 years ago, KTool[0]

But back then most indie hackers only share numbers in their monthly reports, me included[1]. And it's not just MRR screenshots with no content.

Many shared their lessons, experiments, personal struggles... I can't stress enough how helpful this was. To me and to many founders I've talked with. It helps us with the loneliness and we learned from each other's mistakes...

I made a lot of online friends during this period. We were (still are?) inexperienced founders who trying to bootstrap a profitable business and share the experience.

I stopped BIP now, mostly because it takes more time and effort than I could afford. And posting MRR screenshots only is bragging in public, not building in public.

BUT I still believe in the value of BIP, especially when for a newcomer.

You may find people who genuinely support your journey, and if you're lucky, you might build a decent following on Twitter.

Your customers root for you because of your personal and authentic "brand".

Seasoned founders might reach out and point out what you're doing wrong, avoiding making the same mistakes (I did get a lot of valuable advice from successful founders—to me, this has been the biggest value I get out of BIP)

BUT if you treat it as a marketing channel, it probably won't work. Like others mentioned, it's saturated and you're only attracting the wrong kind of audience.

If I was to start again, I would treat BIP as the sandbox to launch my product: ask for feedback, search for a few early adopters who might benefit from my product but not necessarily my ICP.

[0]: https://ktool.io

[1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/ktool

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#205

Post by chuckadams »

surfingdino wrote: post #170
pipes wrote: post #91

Every time I see "building in public" I cringe. Not sure why. Anyway I have an app idea for a very small annoyance in my daily life. Listening to Pieter Levels inspired me to at least try and ship it. But there's no way I'm comfortable with all the other indy hacker shite I'd need to do to, like build a twitter profile etc. My only hope is probably showing it on a sub Reddit and seeing if anyone finds it useful. Anyw…

I post on LinkedIn where people who make procurement decisions spend more time than on Twitter. LI is even weirder than Twitter.

> LI is even weirder than Twitter.

Yeah but it’s less toxic politics, more corporate sycophancy, lots of “How I became an effective cog maximally aligned with the company goals”. People fueling their careers by burning their dignity.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#206

Post by mattgreenrocks »

longnguyen wrote: post #204

I used to "build in public" with my first app 2 years ago, KTool[0] But back then most indie hackers only share numbers in their monthly reports, me included[1]. And it's not just MRR screenshots with no content. Many shared their lessons, experiments, personal struggles... I can't stress enough how helpful this was. To me and to many founders I've talked with. It helps us with the loneliness and we learned from each…

KTool looks great! Where would you BIP nowadays? Usual spots seem to have a lot more noise than signal.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#207

Post by cruffle_duffle »

stonethrowaway wrote: post #33
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.

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 sayin…

> 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.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#208

Post by mattgreenrocks »

citizenpaul wrote: post #143

Wow, I looked at that buildinpublic hashtag and got serious stock market trader forum energy feeling from the posts. Yea people are doing work but its the same kinda thing where the stock people will post a 3000 word write up everyday about their market thoughts but are still not really doing anything. Its like energy looking for a place to be used but in the meantime why not run in place till we drop? I guess this i…

They'll call it "hustle" because other similarly-bored/don't-want-to-do-the-work people will look at it and comment, believing it to be the same as real work.

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#209

Post by cynicalpeace »

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,…

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 await your downvotes :)

Re: Does “building in public” work?

#210

Post by elicksaur »

inquisitor26234 wrote: post #203
elicksaur wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does he ship like a machine, or are his products relatively simple GenAI wrappers?

ships like a machine yes his products being genai wrappers, some are partly yes. in his interview with lex fridman he explains how he built his recent photo ai one, yes most of it is wrapper on some ai service, but his team goes the extra mile of training models on their own so it looks more photorealistic than the generally available ones he built products before ai like nomadlist and remoteok. his hit and miss rate…

Yeah, kudos where kudos are due for making something that is easily tweaked, but I was thinking of a recent example of his “speed”.

Adding a “comic book” style in “4 minutes”: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1836735235658072144

If all you need to do to ship a new feature is add a prompt option in a configuration somewhere, yeah you can ship fast. And, again, all the props for making something that can iterate like that!

I think what I wanted to but failed to convey by being pithy is: For the people out there comparing themselves and think they’re “slow”, they might be trying to solve a problem that can’t be solved with a configuration tweak. It’s ok that it takes more time then.

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