Does “building in public” work?
laike9m.com
Does “building in public” work?
1–10 of 225 posts
Re: Does “building in public” work?
#2I’m not sure I understood the author’s point. This write up sounds like a collection of thoughts and observations about trends and the now saturated landscape of “build in public”/“indie hackers”
I’d like to have heard some perspective from people actively participating in this and how their experiences have been
Re: Does “building in public” work?
#3[deleted]
Re: Does “building in public” work?
#4Based on my observation, out of 10 "build in public" posts, probably 5 or 6 are sharing revenue
Based on my observation, all the social platforms are now circling the drain of optimizing for engagement, and posts about $$$ get 100x higher engagement than posts about product development insights, reflections, etc.
So the small subset of posts that actually make it to your timeline to be observed are often the ones about money.
That's been my experience building in public so far.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: Does “building in public” work?
#5I’m not sure I understood the author’s point. This write up sounds like a collection of thoughts and observations about trends and the now saturated landscape of “build in public”/“indie hackers” I’d like to have heard some perspective from people actively participating in this and how their experiences have been
IME, people who are building in public seem to spend more time letting people know they're building in public than actually building.
Re: Does “building in public” work?
#6I really dislike that so much of hacker culture is $$ 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.
Making money is a side effect of doing what you would do naturally because if you didn’t you would lose self respect.
Re: Does “building in public” work?
#7When it comes to marketing I think we can take a page from the Apple playbook. Never show anything incomplete. Critics and the general
public don’t understand the artistic process and will only become uneasy. nobody cares how you did it. Just show results.
Re: Does “building in public” work?
#8I 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.
Re: Does “building in public” work?
#9I’m not sure I understood the author’s point. This write up sounds like a collection of thoughts and observations about trends and the now saturated landscape of “build in public”/“indie hackers” I’d like to have heard some perspective from people actively participating in this and how their experiences have been
IME, people who are building in public seem to spend more time letting people know they're building in public than actually building.
When I started indie hacking, I looked around for how to grow an audience. Tried to model what various successful posters were doing, which lasted about a week, because turns out it’s like a full time job.
References, spreadsheets, scheduling, analytics, sourcing, markets, targeting, timing optimization, drafting, research, etc.
It gave me a lot more appreciation for the people who grow a large audience in this sort of manner, but also made it clear that it’s not for me. There isn’t enough time in the day for me to build the products I want to, I’ll just have to settle for posting randomly whatever I feel like.
PS:, recently there seems to have been some changes to the x algorithm. Just spontaneously posting and even shitposting seems to be doing a lot better than the formulaic stuff from a few years ago. YMMV
Re: Does “building in public” work?
#10Anecdotal, 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, incident monitoring, etc) or growth hacking tool (for social media, SEO, cold email, AI content, etc).
And you’ll probably get modest success fast, since indiehackers like tools that help them indiehack and if they follow you on social media to hear stories of how they can get rich quick, they’ll definitely buy a product from you promising to help them do that.
However, I think you’ll struggle to ever “cross the chasm” so to speak into building a company that’s bigger than whatever online personality you build (no mass markets or low churn businesses without pyramid scheme dynamics).