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, 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).
This. I like listening to technical solo founders talk about they built. Its the less technical marketing guys building in public their AI "powered" crud apps or micro SaaS like you describe that really bother me. They remind me a lot of scammy people on Instagram talking about drop shipping or whatever the get rich quick scheme of the week is.
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 they were much smaller.
I see your point, but I would disagree with you somewhat.
Every new startup needs to navigate the transition from early adopters to bigger names and/or more mainstream users who give you credibility and higher revenue potential. But it’s almost always done as a stepping stone approach. You need to get the early adopters first or else none of the rest matters.
Doing this is not easy so any conceivable advantage is worth considering. Of course targeting build in public and indiehackers are not the only possible strategies for getting early users, but if it’s working for you, don’t underestimate how valuable that is.
Of course I do agree about going into it with both eyes open and knowing that if you’re successful enough, you will likely have to evolve somehow toward another customer segment. But again, this is almost always the case no matter what your early adopter channels are.
Definitely agree that startups have to find a foothold somewhere, and basically land and expand from there.
If we take B2B products for example, it's super common to niche down into a specific industry and then expand out to adjacent ones, and so on.
But the build-in-public industry/niche is unique in that those customers aren't "real" businesses with "real" problems. Most of the followers are wantreprenuers with imagined problems.
So the risk is, instead of building a solid foundation to expand from, you might just be building the wrong thing altogether and doing it on quicksand (those pyramid scheme dynamics I was talking about).
> 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.
This is an issue with a lot of online creator communities and people using them for marketing too. Way too many would be authors, artists, game developers, YouTubers, musicians, etc end up marketing their work in communities for their choice of art/project rather than in places their actual audience visits.
Unfortunately as you point out, while that can work to a limited degree, it will usually cap off pretty quickly. Gotta market to customers, not other creators.
> 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.
There must be some named law that states that the set of people you listen determine most of your thoughts. But it's something way wider in scope than Conway's Law.
There are some proverbs, because it's a very old observation. But there must be named laws too, because it's a very common observation.
Rob Hardy wrote about this phenomenon (it's not exclusive to indie hackers) and he call it "the pattern":
> If you’ve ever wondered why so much of the creator economy looks like a pyramid scheme—with course creators who teach other creators how to sell courses to creators who eventually sell their own courses on course creation to other unsuspecting creators—mimesis is at the heart of the matter.
From his article: The Ungated Manifesto: The Pattern, and the Battle for the Soul of the Internet.
> > 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.
> There must be some named law that states that the set of people you listen determine most of your thoughts. But it's something way wider in scope than Conway's Law.
A related term is "audience capture". When you do things based on the approval of your followers, you can end up catering to some weird niches.
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."
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.
I've seen the other side of this, which is zero organic growth and enormous strain on founders to become salespeople and customer support for customers that perpetually keep your software in a trial period. Depending on where you want to allocate your resources that may or may not make sense compared to building in public.
That said, the bigger risk is building products for hobbyists/students/tourists because it won't have the ability to "cross the chasm" as you put it. At least with the hacker scene you have a few legit people to drive development forward.
I think the right strategy is to use building in public to get a bunch of initial users and traction, then iterate on your product to the point where other channels like SEO/PPC are going to be profitable.
It's the same problem with indie game development. Lots of people get into gamedev and when they have a semblance of a game they start to think "how am I going to get players to try it?" Most of the venues for game developers are just full of other game developers.
The biggest problem is when the game leaves the cradle of a gamedev community that is nice to beginners and is thrown into the wilderness of actual gamers that don't know how much effort it takes to make a game and don't really care. They won't mince words.
I suppose it's just a common class of error to not think beforehand what your end game strategy is going to be? Step 1: make thing. Step 2: ?. Step 3: profit.
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 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-one will, but if your posts are seen by say 100k+ people then you'll have a few in there who might.
It warps your own thinking, as now you have a bunch of people on social media who see your project as your identity. You start buying into the narrative of being this X
project guy so you can't just go away to do Y, even if on a rational level you know no-one actually cares that much whether you do X or Y.
Seems @levelsio has been immune to this, as he's been smart to have his identity be a guy who ships a variety of things quickly vs. just being say the "Nomadlist Guy" forever.
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
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.
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.
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 the right kind of people, and sparks the right kinds of conversations. I am basically involving fellow builders in my design process, and hyping what I am working on to my audience and industry peers. It is a good way to make friends.
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".
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 team is in. Which muddies discussion on what a "successful" game even is (a topic already muddy even with all context).
BUT, then again the tides have shifted so much in that people just take a "should have" approach. "you shouldn't have done it in X genre. You shouldn't have used Y software. Your game sucks so it obviously failed". So maybe bringing up any finances will always attract that crowd, not cause them to look into another place to make money.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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. Technical quality likely matters the most to "customers" who don't pay anything such as users of popular open source projects.
If you want to make money from a good product then becoming a social media influencer who talks about your product is the most straightforward way to advertise without having to pay for ads.
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.
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.
> 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].
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.
Hard part of launching _most_ products. But I agree, I'm not sure content marketing, regardless of topic, can have an actual downside in the majority of circumstances. Maybe just the opportunity cost.
Marketing a product seems easier than ever with social media, however the ocean is much larger.
Moreover the author could have easily written this post as "it's time to rethink 'thoughtleader blogging' and it would fit just as well. Most people don't write this stuff for their own pleasure, they write it for eyeballs. They write it for their readers. In that sense I suspect building in public works as well as blog posts like this for gaining a following. There's no one fits all answer to this.
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 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.
I think there are a lot of honest people out there that just wanna make and share cool stuff. I also think the well was poisoned by grifters who wanted either clout of a quick buck. That seems to be a story that encompases the last 30 years of the tech industry as we know it.
>there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times
I don't mind those people. No one really wants to mentor these days, but people LOVE to correct. I'd treat that incoming flaming as an opportunity to learn from people who'd never speak up otherwise (after inevitably discarding 80% of replies that are simply non-constructive insults).
> 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.
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.
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.
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. Instead of just posting numbers, share the strategies that led to those numbers, or the challenges you faced along the way. That's much more useful for other founders.
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.
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.
Counterargument: I started Canny and we were a "build in public" startup early on. Building in public was an invaluable marketing channel in the early days.
When you are just launching your product, it's really difficult to get those first users and any awareness at all.
If your target audience includes other people in tech, then building in public can be great marketing channel.
Posting about your ideas or your product just isn't that interesting. Posting how much money you're making is very interesting to other people who might want to follow your path.
Like all successful marketing channels, this channel is a lot more saturated these days than when we started (~2017), so it might not work as well anymore.
> If your target audience includes other people in tech, then building in public can be great marketing channel.
> Posting about your ideas or your product just isn't that interesting. Posting how much money you're making is very interesting to other people who might want to follow your path.
Hang on, it feels like there's a contradiction here. Is the audience customers, or is it people who want to follow your path? Or are you thinking that's substantially the same audience?
We are a Canny customer since the early days <3. And I feel that both product and financial information is interesting. I'm a user of your product, so how it works and how you think about it are significant to me as they'll affect my day to day life. But on the other hand, financial information is something that gives me confidence in you as a business. Both can create a sense of emotional investment beyond the transactional relationship we have.
But we're just a regular old software business, not indie hackers and nor does "building in public" describe how we work.
> Let's admit it, the main purpose of build in public is to attract attention and build a community
It's more like open sourcing your code. On one hand: yes, it's good marketing. On the other hand: you're creating positive externality, so random people show up, thank you for your contribution, and help you, monetarily, or by giving you valuable leads & feedback.
it's the same benefit of going to a conference & networking, just doing it continually. It's still useful even if everyone is doing it, because when someone stumbles on your work, they have an entry point/signal on whether there's mutual benefit in collaborating.
that's also just how you make friends. An increasingly hard aspect in western society these days as third places decrease. Yeah, you need to do something to attract attention, especially in a digital domain where all you are are a handle and maybe an avatar. building a community means more of a like-minded pool to potentially become friends with.
I'd kill for some local meetup spot to have already done all this for me, but this is the next best approach.
To me, it always seemed like the "build in public" folks were doing it more for themselves. A way to not feel so alone on the journey, while ultimately working alone. If it helped with marketing and launch, that would be a bonus.
This is my read too. People refer to it as a "community". There's an emotional attachment to being an "indie hacker" that goes beyond "this is a marketing strategy". Of course, as the existence of the community becomes more valuable as a marketing channel, that may shift, and maybe the OP is noticing that it already has shifted?
Building something big alone is really tough and demoralizing. If this is a way they can mitigate that until they can find others to join them, more power to them. However, I've also heard of the dangers of oversharing early and losing the incentive to finish the project because you already got the attention dopamine hit.
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.
I’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
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.
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
I think the idea is as a growth hacking strategy, people lost their way. The space is crowded and now it usually means people are posting positive numbers go up charts. What value is in that? Why is my chart more engaging than other people's charts?
It's not interesting, engaging, or educational. So as an growth strategy, it sharply slumps off after the initial launch post, and there's zero value to the reader aside from knowing it exists (again, initial launch post).
So it's a call to arms to reevaluate what you're doing. If you're posting number goes up, it's really no different from building in private, it's likely a wasted effort on your part and unnecessary noise to the community. Or maybe return to the old meaning of building in public. Create value for people, actually have a dialogue, and that'll pay dividends (that's the hope anyways) .
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.
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.io, you might decide that's enough. This is especially true since indie hacking often embraces an ethos opposed to strategies like VC funding or building large teams, which typically drive scaling.
Some indie hacker projects do scale into successful bootstrapped businesses with teams of developers or receive VC funding, but that is the exception. Scaling requires the founder to have a larger vision beyond just making quick bucks and remaining independent—independence being a core motivation of indie hacking in the first place.
https://www.lycee.ai/blog/levelsio-and-the-dilemma-of-premat...
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.
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 is what kids with rich parents whos trust fund hasnt matured yet do to kill time nowdays?
> Its like energy looking for a place to be used but in the meantime why not run in place till we drop?
Reminds me of the crypto space during the peak of its hype, where people wrote a flood of articles and software, attracting attention, claiming to be important and world-changing. Yet a year or two later, have evaporated into much ado about nothing. I'm not discounting the possibility that some of it will eventually become popular and practical, but there was sure a lot of smoke and mirrors.
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.
I tried it, but it’s not very effective. The central problem is the following: The people who are building, aren’t interested in your posts on Twitter. They’re busy building. For the most part in those groups, I saw people’s earnest attempts at getting attention but every moment you spend on self-promotion is a moment you’re not adding features.
The people who do end up getting a lot of attention, they’re better at marketing, but not necessarily building. This is how you end up with people creating pretty-looking tools and products that aren’t particularly innovative but make for nice screenshots.
> retty-looking tools and products that aren’t particularly innovative but make for nice screenshots.
I'm not as cynical with the idea, but you identified the core issue (be it the algorithm or people that came first is an exercise for the reader): Code doesn't make for good engagement with the current structure of social media. your web design or visualization or even simple pie charts of performance differences (obligatory https://www.hackingsap.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/dilbert_p...) is what gets people in. visuals what may or may not be the actual selling point of your project.
I don't really know how to get over that hump. You need some base audience first, and you want to make sure you aren't forgotten. So some public building will always be needed to maintain that.
> I really dislike that so much of hacker culture is $$ focused now.
I don’t think that’s hacker culture. It’s just the mainstream adoption of hacker culture, don’t let it replace the real thing in your mind. When lots and lots of people started playing candy crush on phones, it wasn’t gamer culture that changed, just the public perception of gaming.
There are still people out there who conform to the description you laid out. Are there lots and lots of them? No. It does seem to be a growing segment though.
Thank you for sharing that, it’s awesome to see so many of us still around!
(Not trying to gatekeep—anyone can be a hacker, no matter when they start. Just sharing some fun memories—I still remember upgrading from a 386 to a 486, then to a Pentium 133. Or the LAN parties. Or when IRC splits let you take over a popular channel for a while! Fun times! The new tools being built today, especially around AI, are just as exciting and remind me of the early days of the internet. There's so much more to create!)
There's another very large subgroup you're missing: the hackers that build things (even for $0) because they're fun/cool, not because they solve a specific annoying problem/inefficiency.
Thank you for pointing that out. I updated my comment to include that group. Personally, my motivation comes from the part of me that feels compelled to fix things that are inefficient, but I love being a part of a community that builds useful/fun/cool things & each of us are driven by our own motivations.
“hacking” is the challenge of making something work in ways it was never intended - for example unlocking a car with wireless entry using a laptop and DIY electronics instead of the normal car key.
Doing it to your own car is obviously very different from stealing someone else’s, however it’s not illegal to “hack” your own car. The theft part is what gets you in trouble.
Hacking seems to have taken on so many different meanings.
I've always known hacking as a term specifically related to bypassing security in digital systems. Think Matthew Broderick gaining access to government networks via a phone line. This was hacking that would always get you in trouble if caught.
I'm not quite sure when "hacking" was repurposed as a term for using something in a way it wasn't intended ("life hacks" or "kitchen hacks", etc).
Now hacking is about challenging social norms? I'm very lost at this point, in an "old man shakes fist at clouds" kind of way.
It’s an ideal, and like any ideal we manage to capture in a six-letter word, 99% will get it completely backwards.
For example, everyone knows and agrees with the value of the phrase “think outside the box,” but only a minority ever recognizes “the box” they should be thinking outside of, and even fewer bother to fully apply the wisdom by making a habit out of finding the box that’s currently holding them at any given moment.
I think it's less about money and more about the endless access to metrics and analytics which will impact how you feel about your project. A forum of maybe a few dozen people you somewhat know loving something 20 years ago would have sufficed but now it all tends towards vague bigger numbers of people you have minimal knowledge of to feel at all good about the effort put in.
In lieu of 10,000 likes, which might ultimately feel hollow anyway, making a couple hundred dollars will probably suffice.
I made a super niche modding tool a few weeks ago; it's got one star on GitHub but the two nerds that have actually used it are delighted with it and I'm very happy about that. The notion another few in the future will find it is oddly nice to think about
When I was a young adult and especially a teenager, I spent a lot of time making things out of pure desire to because I didn't have to think too much about my financial situation (present and future). That unfortunately gave way with age, and now ~15 years later whenever I engage with these activities there's a voice in the back of my head nagging, asking how doing those things instead of something that could potentially bring a financial return might negatively impact ability to achieve short term goals, tide over periods of economic uncertainty, have enough money for retirement, etc.
It's probably not the right way to think since personal projects that might seem unprofitable on their face can bring benefits in unexpected ways, but it's a problem nonetheless.
Great question. The feeling clearly isn't based in logic; somehow watching a TV show or playing a game (neither of which is financially productive) instead of working on "just for fun" side projects doesn't elicit the same mental response unless I really couch potato out and do those things for hours on end. That makes it a bit more difficult to work with.
Probably because of the feeling that you only have so much energy for each bucket. Watching TV isn’t taking energy from the dev bucket, but working on a fun but personal project does take energy from the dev bucket.
Of course, this isn’t how it actually seems to work - there is some truth to it for most people, but if you “overdraw” from one bucket and “neglect” another bucket, they will change sizes.
In order to experience the upper tiers of relaxation and life enjoyment capitalism offers (pure free time with no external pressures to sell your labor), you have to be successful by capitalistic metrics. You aren't going to be a billionaire so power under capitalism isn't available to you, so instead you'll need to sell your labor until you have enough money to exploit and sell someone else's labor at little cost to you. If the word "exploit" makes you feel icky, think of it more positively, like the way one might exploit a gold mine: by mining it.
At 4 million in the bank (and various assets) you should be good to "escape," if by escape you mean "not need to sell your labor to live" anymore. 4 million gives you more than enough residuals to live off until death. Less if some of that is in property so you don't have to pay rent. Less if you retire to southeast Asia and engage in geographic arbitrage. You spent years paying for carrier groups and precision missiles, why not reap the rewards?
So far as I can judge, this is the only way the system permits escape.
If you're interested in permitless escape, one of my favorite introductions to the subject is "Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow, a wonderful amalgamation of hacker culture, anarchism, sustainability, anti capitalism, and communism. Even if you think some of those are dirty words, if you're at all interested in EV tech, 3d printing, batteries, solar, zero trust ID, or transhumanism, you'll probably enjoy that book. He basically just answers every "but what if..." you could think of for a group of hackers living in an abandoned rust belt town.
Personally I'm right now very interested in food forests and tech projects researching local supply chain production of equipment, such as https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ the global village construction set and https://simplifier.neocities.org whoever this person is that's been documenting their efforts building things like solar panels and circuit boards in their garage from raw materials for nearly the last decade.
Lots of people won't pay for journalism anymore. You'd have a hard time convincing me (or most other people on here) that journalism is no longer important.
It's the diamonds vs water paradox of value. Diamonds are highly valued yet practically useless to most people. Water is extremely low-valued, yet essential to all life on earth.
High-quality, investigative journalism is an essential institution for a functioning democracy, yet it's not valued by the people it is most important to: average citizens.
This is the short-sightedness of market fundamentalism. To take this to a ridiculous extreme, if I decide that taking care of my children is no longer ROI-positive, should I just decide this market has shrunk and the prudent thing to do is invest in new markets?
While this is true in broad strokes, I think money fails to capture non quantifiable quality of life improvements. Hacker culture being close to the users could solve them, but being driven by money would definitely hinder that development
This is something that has come up many times for our company over the last 20 years. You can't sell the bean counters on quality of life. You need to show lower costs, higher quality results, or faster time to market - that's what gets you in the door.
The thing that keeps you in the door and makes usage grow is the quality of life. Especially in the business world, most software is terrible. If people like using your software, they will tell others about it and they will be more accepting when things inevitably go wrong. The ease of use of our software and the immediate service we provide when customers ask for help are time and again the things they say keep them using our tools. With good support, even a frustrated bug report can turn into a happy experience.
In broad strokes, yes you are right in some cases.
But in most cases you don't see quality of life improvements unless you also get users.
In other words building it is not enough. Lives need to use it to be improved.
Monetizing an app forces you to concentrate on articulating that value. It frees up resources (ie money) to spend on spreading the word. It offers you feedback on whether this is a meaningful use of your time or not.
Dont get me wrong. An app can add value to a single person. You can give it away for free. There's nothing wrong with that.
"If you make it they will come" has been shown to be false time and time again. Just because your product is useful doesn't mean anybody knows about it or that they recognize the value it has. Lots of things we take for necessity today were once seen as a pointless waste of time. You still need to spend a significant amount of time marketing to get other people to want your product.
But posting about all the money you are making is just silly unless you want a pat on the back. If you really are making bank and you want to get someone to buy you out, then start talking directly to the big players in your market. Then again, you won't have to, because they won't want to talk to you until you are a real threat to their business, at which point they'll be coming to you. Bragging to your early adopter community about your success just keeps them hyped for a bit.
>> 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.
You are making the same mistake as youtubers chasing their numbers rather than having a personality and a point and an interest and something to say of their own.
The ONLY reason I have any interest in someone's output is if it is something they themselves actually care about, what they actually think, etc. I want to know what they have to say. There is absolutely no value in them trying to say what they think I want to hear, worse, what they think most people want to hear.
The second someone says "tell me what you want" I'm out. If I have to tell them that I'm interested in x, and then they go investigate x, what value is that to anyone? What insight can they bring to me about the topic of x? Why should I care what they have to say about x when 2 seconds ago they had no knowledge of it? No one's mere personality is so awesome that just having them do the same exact google search I can do and read the same exact intro material I can read and blatting out their initial reactions based on just that, results in something worthwhile.
Whether your numbers (or your sales) are good or bad, it is a factor to consider, but it can't be the fundamental point of your existence. You have to have some legitimate point that stands on it's own, and only then, maybe, you can live off of it somehow.
If you only care that you somehow get money, and don't care how, what value is that to me? Why would I as a customer give you money for anything? Even if you were trying to pander to exactly what I said I wanted, if I don't perceive that you are deeply knowldgeable and insightful and experienced in that topic, or at least maybe new but genuinely interested in working in that field or on that problem, but just trying to say yes to anything, no way in the world am I choosing you to supply that need.
The ONLY reason I have any interest in someone's output is if it is something they themselves actually care about, what they actually think, etc. I want to know what they have to say. There is absolutely no value in them trying to say what they think I want to hear, worse, what they think most people want to hear.
MrBeast's leaked production document is pretty much exactly this: trying to anticipate what people will click on, what will go viral, and throwing all their weight behind it.
Now it's fair to say that you, personally, place no value in viral content such as that. On the other hand, it's clearly not the case that this content is of no value to anyone. Very broad-based entertainment like this is about providing a small amount of value to a very large number of people.
I don't think it's so clear. I watch Mr. Beast from time to time, and it seems to me that it's basically video junk food. Is it really more entertaining, or more thought provoking, or more valuable in any way than how I would have spent that 20 minutes otherwise?
"If no one will pay for the solution, it may be because of a base factor of reality itself has collided a near universal facet of human nature," wherein the first might take the value of although information might require the expenditure of resources to create, replication of the created information is often difficult to stymie and lacks even the approach to similar levels of consumed resources and the second value of most humans are, unsurprisingly common as a trait of great objective value in any species with a history of billions of years evolving in environments wherein at least some resources are painfully limited, often unwilling to expend resources if they do not have to.
The former is the nature of data itself, the latter having come into the existence the first time a creature with more than a handful of neurons was capable of making the choice to take what was right in front of it as opposed to venturing far afield for something similar. Both predate humans by millions of years at the least, and do not require the abstractions of market and money, or even the homo sapiens which first coined these concepts.
While these two give rise to the freeloading scamp who attempts to read entire magazine at the news stand if they can get away with it, the printing press or coinage are not specifically required, and, if we were to ever meet other aliens with some kind of civilization, they would likely have situations parallel enough to end up in our eventual xenoanthropology textbooks. Assuming they're not so busy coming up with their own copies of To Serve Man that we haven't the time for us to write said texts.
True, but important software doesn't (by and large) benefit very many people. Instead it makes a very few people extremely wealthy, and makes a somewhat larger number of comfortably upper middle class engineers' lives a little easier. Often those engineers are building products which actually harm most of their users.
I labor in this industry because I enjoy the work and it pays better than anything else I could do, and I try to work for companies doing good things, but I have some misgivings about seeing unpaid open source work in the same light as volunteering. To be clear, as an engineer who benefits I'm grateful, but I'd rather developers were compensated fairly.
EDIT: given the down votes, let me pose it as a question--Is software obviously a public good? Are we actually making things better on balance?
>Making money is a side effect of doing what you would do naturally because if you didn’t you would lose self respect.
Most hackers some 20 years ago weren't worried about money, so they could naturally explore their curiosities in their free time. Hustle culture in general seems to rise and fall inversely to the economic situtation, so I'm not too surprised that we're shifting to $$ over curiosity at the moment.
> 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 is exactly the question that charging money answers: Do people just say they want your app or are they willing to “put their money where their mouth is” and actually buy it?
(Also note that not all things are paid for with money. Some are paid for with time or attention, so adjust for that if necessary.)
By that logic, isn't building a family something one should never do? There is no market to sell your family, so that must be a clear signal that your attention and energy should go elsewhere...?
I'm sure this analogy is a bit absurd (and I'd love to see it torn apart), but I hope it opens readers to the premise that some highly desirable and important emotional, intellectual and social objects should exist even when there is no market for some of their forms
Edit: I can’t tell if you’re willfully misreading what I wrote or just trying to be cute. At no point did I assert that nothing should be created without a market. But if you’re creating something for other people then those other people are, by definition, your market, and you should pay close attention to signs that they actually want what you’ve created (like a willingness to trade dollars or time or attention).
I definitely resonate with #1 and #3, but I got bills to pay. And some of the things I want to see in the world, well, they would require a lot of money.
This resonates with me. Maybe I’m just nostalgic because I started my career during the hacking scene of the early 2010’s, but it really feels like we’ve lost our way as an industry since then.
It’s weird to say but the whole startup culture has shifted, from founder to hacker and everywhere in between. It’s a victim of its own success because no one is writing feature pieces in media on quants or finance bros with the same gusto as they did in the 2010s for tech founders.
So the attention combined with the desire to escape the grind which is only offered in combination by tech founder, has nearly fully been consumed in the broader machine of capitalism.
When we ran out of stored resources to consume, we unsustainably consumed our own attention, and then when that was gone, we turned our attention to the money machine that made it possible, and started eating that.
In the good ol times, being a hacker meant you love tinkering with tech and are good at it.
Then media started using it to mean "computer criminal", which was annoying.
Then "I don't code I solve problems" tech bros coopted it, which is worse. Looks like now you're a hacker if you identify a need and monetize it.
I am fully cognizant I am writing this on a VC-backed founder oriented site called Hacker News, but I like to think there's still some good ol hacker spirit here, YC being named after an extremely nerdy thing and not "SaaS Launchpad" or somesuch.
(yes yes old man yelling at cloud, get off my lawn, etc)
I think building a business can encompass the hacker spirit as well if it’s approached in that way. Financial sustainability is a necessary component to solving problems on a large scale in a durable way. Why should a hacker draw the line at purely technical challenges?
That's why I think parent's comment is kind of funny. This site is VC news. If you're looking for actual hacker culture, this ain't it. This website is mostly VC devs, not hackers.
What an awful way to live, with the sense that everyone else is a fraud and you’re the only one that’s real. It sounds terribly lonely, and equally unattractive. Who would want to work with, or be around someone, with such a terrible opinion of others?
They’re entrepreneurs who don’t really care what you call them. Of course people will try to make money, not everyone can afford to (or is willing to) maintain whole side projects for fun. Some people have side projects unrelated to their main line of work.
Making money doesn’t necessarily imply value is being created. For example casinos create the illusion of value and generate a lot of money.
Unfortunately, like a casino a lot of tech is an illusion, e.g. social media- you walk in and it’s flashy and exciting, but you walk out having lost hours of your time and possibly a few brain cells.
Building in public comes down to a few core things: marketing your product, staying sane, and getting noticed. It’s a way to get people talking about what you’re building before it’s even done. The journey itself becomes the story, pulling in an audience that feels connected to your work.
For a lot of solo founders, though, it’s not just about visibility. It’s about support. Building something alone can be isolating, and sharing your progress becomes a way to stay connected, even when you’re grinding away in a room by yourself. The openness keeps you grounded and helps ward off the burnout that comes with long stretches of isolation.
It also puts you on the radar of other entrepreneurs and investors. They see what you’re up to and can offer feedback, partnerships, or even funding without you having to chase them down. You’re essentially creating a public portfolio of your work in real time.
Some people also use it as a humblebrag—a way to show off without being too obvious about it. That’s fine if that’s your thing, but for most, it’s a way to turn the lonely process of building into something more connected and human.
Definitely agree. Sorry if the article sounds a bit negative, but I'm overall still in favor of building in public, for various reasons like the ones you mentioned.
I assume in most cases people use it as a way to motivate them to finish their side projects. The projects might or might not make it but I found it interesting to follow.
Of course there are outliers like those who keep sharing their MRR, ARR, etc and then down the line sell an e-book on how to replicate their "success". I have followed enough "baits" to notice the pattern and ignore.
Designer here. Got real into no-code back in 2021 as it was really heating up. Seemed like a natural move as I could better understand the logic of what's happening on the back end and also build products solo. Build in public (BIP), somewhat frustratingly for me, was a huge part of a few of the communities I got into. One was led by a marketing-minded "maker", and the other a great inspiring guy who was a bit the inverse.
Everyone in each community became pretty evangelical about BIP due to group think. I bought in at first but became very skeptical eventually as well. Not only do I question the actual efficacy here both in $$ and quality of work, but I think it's a bit inconsiderate to expect everyone to be on board with being this open with their work or push as hard as they did.
I'll occasionally post a bit of what i'm working on but I also after following many "makers" and the like, started becoming really bored with every detail of what they are working on. I say just show me a case study usually unless I'm already intrigued with the end product or you are doing something of great interest/impact
I'm fully in support of people who decide to 'build in public', but personally, I'm not a fan. While building in public can be a good marketing channel, it can also a pretty massive distraction, especially when you're still so small. I think people still underestimate the distraction and timesink that these social media platforms cause and would often be better off heads-down improving their product and talking directly with their users.
Based 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.
I keep sharing my thoughts and what I'm working on. Those posts barely get any impressions, but I don't want to post stuff just to please the algorithm.
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.
Anyway, as I work as a developer, even if it fails, it doesn't matter. I'll learn a lot by doing it.
That it all still depends on your twitter persona to build audience, with twitter being a maga show (I only follow devs, still get tons of content I do not want). I find it a very toxic place but seems it's needed if you want to get anywhere sales wise.
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.
I think the phenomenon of a relatively niche social market getting flooded is nothing new and unfortunately it’s going to continue (see also: app stores). I do wonder if eventually people will catch on to the fact that it is the state of the modern open commons, and a new dynamic will need to be devised if they don’t like this one or wish to continue chasing the frontier.
> If you follow enough indiehackers like me, Twitter/X will start recommending posts for you.
I think there's your first problem right there. I recommend seeking dev communities on more federated social networks. I have found there to be more support and less clout/lore building than on Twitter. And supportive communities ship products!
Author here. I'm glad to see so many meaningful discussions triggered by this post. Despite raising concerns, overall I still see "building in public" as a positive trend. Like all trends, things emerge and change over time, so we'll see how "building in public" evolves.
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I'm also on Twitter/X and Mastodon. I'll share more thoughts in the future:
It might be effective at building an audience for a new app but it requires much more engagement in social media than I'm up for. Reddit, on the other hand, I've found to be a pretty good place to build an audience and mostly without the toxicity of X.
This is just an extension of the LinkedIn/YouTube/X "thoughtfluencer" epidemic. If the person sharing has a successful track record in the field and is genuine about sharing/helping - great! 99% of them are, however, only interested in building clout and expanding their personal brand.
The term is "build in public" not "talk about money in public". If you enjoy chatting about the esoteric details of building a useful thing then great. If you're mostly trying to attract customers and you don't enjoy it, then don't do it.
For anyone interested in a counter-point (ie; "Transparency is not inherently good and here's why"), the paper "Transparency is Surveillance" is a nice read: https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUTIS.pdf
It basically talks about how people will change their reasoning to suit public opinion when they work publically. You might imagine a scientist who gets a public grant and is required to share their findings publically.
In this hypothetical scenario, let's say their findings are required to be explainable to the public at large. The reality is that when you're building anything (whether it's a theory or a product), the reality is that causes and effects are not always clear nor will they ever be as we see with the human body for example.
As such, while we might think imposing transparency would increase trust, the reality is you'll often find ad-hoc justifications for why things are the way they are rather than just saying "We don't know why X or Y".
When 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.
At a more microscopic level, the same goes for git commits. Complete, sensible ideas are much easier to interact with and understand than someone's chaotic half thought through work-in-progress. There's value to this approach at all scales of magnification--completeness and polish aids digestibility and helps {colleagues, users, buyers, prospects} understand the value proposition.
As far as I know the first Apple computer was not really a computer but a box of parts that the customer had to assemble themselves. The early days of Apple is probably the best example of "building in public" because so much of it was actually just selling the dream. In any case, the opposite is infinitely worse. Too many people wasted away for years "building in private". If and when they did finally release it was to the sound of crickets. Hacking for pleasure is one thing. If you're trying to build a business then you must be always be selling and marketing.
That's true. But despite being the same legal entity, there is very little in common between 70s Apple and the Apple of today. We shouldn't really expect consistent behavior.
The way I see it, those are just a spin on "I did X for Y months and here's what I learned" articles. Clickbait at best but mostly those are just articles that fill void with words. Whenever I stumble upon those, I am never really buy into them. I am a huge believer in the idea of the American dream but in a functioning economy, this can only work a handful of times. Over the years I've attempted creating a startup and bootstrap it on my own or with a small team of friends and the one thing I've learned from those attempts(see what I did there...) is that it's practically impossible, even if you have the right idea and you get the timing right. Arguably I didn't get the timing right on a few occasions and I was way too early for the party. Had I waited for a few years, those might have picked up but the truth is, I sincerely doubt it. At this point, whenever I land on one of those indie gigs, I instinctively roll my eyes and click away.
Another problem is that, as an indie, you probably aren't an experienced marketing person. I've been the one managing "build in the open" with a founder on a popular Kickstarter project and it was awful. If we posted a lot, people complained we weren't spending our time on building the thing. If we slowed down the communications to focus on the project, people said we weren't being transparent or we had taken off with the money. Half of the comments on our posts were from people angry because we hadn't said anything about a super niche feature that only they wanted, or because it didn't do something that even a 100x more expensive product could do.
Entire communities started up around our product. They communicated publicly with us constantly. Their favorite past times were thinking up wild new features that we absolutely must have and trying to devine what was happening internally by over analyzing everything we said. Many of the community members used the size of their community to try to bully us into doing what they wanted. I personally had several emails telling me I was an idiot and a fraud. We were a victim of our own success.
It's the same fate that every open source developer experiences. As soon as you open yourself up to the world, everybody wants something from you and they want it now. If you already have a mature product with a healthy sales funnel and a clear vision, you can market what you have as you wish. If you're in the middle of creating something and you talk about it with others, they will all want a say in what you create and they will be upset if you don't act on their suggestions.
Now that I'm in a large company but working on a new and exciting project, we have hit the same problem internally - everybody who hears about it wants us to build it to suit them and they are disappointed when we instead try to build something that works for everyone. Any other product we made we never talked about into it was largely built and ready to start selling and we never had that kind of bullying behavior.
Something about being on the early phases of development makes people think you want their suggestions and they get rather upset when you don't build what they have in mind. That's why it's better to keep to yourself while you get the foundations in place, then carefully choose who you discuss it with until it's ready for the world to start buying it.
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.
I think as a general rule, any shiny new market strategy will perform worse in year 10 than it will in year 1. Law of diminished returns and all. And that's before factoring in any platform enshittification.
No, it doesn't work. If you actually are solving a problem, then you can do some sort of like beta testing publicly, just how games do play testing, which can be public or not. But other than that, building it in public makes no sense. You might give updates every now and then about what you're building, but that's about it.
I was very skeptical when I saw this headline, but you got me to click! So, good clickbait?
I love the discussion. I think you may just have self-biased your Twitter feed, and so to you it looks like the world is building in public, but to 99% of the population it's very rare.
Loved the discussion though, and your portfolio and blog are great.
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, 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).
This. I like listening to technical solo founders talk about they built. Its the less technical marketing guys building in public their AI "powered" crud apps or micro SaaS like you describe that really bother me. They remind me a lot of scammy people on Instagram talking about drop shipping or whatever the get rich quick scheme of the week is.
They are those people, just a bit more technical.
That seems a bit harsh. They aren't forcing anyone to watch or scamming anyone by building in public.
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 they were much smaller.
Thanks!
[flagged]
do you have any examples?
I see your point, but I would disagree with you somewhat.
Every new startup needs to navigate the transition from early adopters to bigger names and/or more mainstream users who give you credibility and higher revenue potential. But it’s almost always done as a stepping stone approach. You need to get the early adopters first or else none of the rest matters.
Doing this is not easy so any conceivable advantage is worth considering. Of course targeting build in public and indiehackers are not the only possible strategies for getting early users, but if it’s working for you, don’t underestimate how valuable that is.
Of course I do agree about going into it with both eyes open and knowing that if you’re successful enough, you will likely have to evolve somehow toward another customer segment. But again, this is almost always the case no matter what your early adopter channels are.
Definitely agree that startups have to find a foothold somewhere, and basically land and expand from there.
If we take B2B products for example, it's super common to niche down into a specific industry and then expand out to adjacent ones, and so on.
But the build-in-public industry/niche is unique in that those customers aren't "real" businesses with "real" problems. Most of the followers are wantreprenuers with imagined problems.
So the risk is, instead of building a solid foundation to expand from, you might just be building the wrong thing altogether and doing it on quicksand (those pyramid scheme dynamics I was talking about).
> 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.
This is an issue with a lot of online creator communities and people using them for marketing too. Way too many would be authors, artists, game developers, YouTubers, musicians, etc end up marketing their work in communities for their choice of art/project rather than in places their actual audience visits.
Unfortunately as you point out, while that can work to a limited degree, it will usually cap off pretty quickly. Gotta market to customers, not other creators.
is there like a right way to do it?
> 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.
Sounds a bit like a variation on Conway's Law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
There must be some named law that states that the set of people you listen determine most of your thoughts. But it's something way wider in scope than Conway's Law.
There are some proverbs, because it's a very old observation. But there must be named laws too, because it's a very common observation.
Rob Hardy wrote about this phenomenon (it's not exclusive to indie hackers) and he call it "the pattern":
> If you’ve ever wondered why so much of the creator economy looks like a pyramid scheme—with course creators who teach other creators how to sell courses to creators who eventually sell their own courses on course creation to other unsuspecting creators—mimesis is at the heart of the matter.
From his article: The Ungated Manifesto: The Pattern, and the Battle for the Soul of the Internet.
> > 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.
> There must be some named law that states that the set of people you listen determine most of your thoughts. But it's something way wider in scope than Conway's Law.
A related term is "audience capture". When you do things based on the approval of your followers, you can end up catering to some weird niches.
You are what you eat
The Bandwagon effect, maybe?
Product Hunt Law?
oh boy, spot on
Demagoguery.
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.
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.
I've seen the other side of this, which is zero organic growth and enormous strain on founders to become salespeople and customer support for customers that perpetually keep your software in a trial period. Depending on where you want to allocate your resources that may or may not make sense compared to building in public.
That said, the bigger risk is building products for hobbyists/students/tourists because it won't have the ability to "cross the chasm" as you put it. At least with the hacker scene you have a few legit people to drive development forward.
Selling stuff and growing is hard.
>However, I think you’ll struggle to ever “cross the chasm” so to speak
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
Book by Geoffrey Moore.
quoted a lot by startups for a couple of decades plus.
had read it some years ago. quite interesting ...
I think the right strategy is to use building in public to get a bunch of initial users and traction, then iterate on your product to the point where other channels like SEO/PPC are going to be profitable.
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...
Font awesome? They made a huge crowdfunding for a new Web Awesome project with much bigger scope
It's the same problem with indie game development. Lots of people get into gamedev and when they have a semblance of a game they start to think "how am I going to get players to try it?" Most of the venues for game developers are just full of other game developers.
The biggest problem is when the game leaves the cradle of a gamedev community that is nice to beginners and is thrown into the wilderness of actual gamers that don't know how much effort it takes to make a game and don't really care. They won't mince words.
I suppose it's just a common class of error to not think beforehand what your end game strategy is going to be? Step 1: make thing. Step 2: ?. Step 3: profit.
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 :)
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-one will, but if your posts are seen by say 100k+ people then you'll have a few in there who might.
It warps your own thinking, as now you have a bunch of people on social media who see your project as your identity. You start buying into the narrative of being this X project guy so you can't just go away to do Y, even if on a rational level you know no-one actually cares that much whether you do X or Y.
Seems @levelsio has been immune to this, as he's been smart to have his identity be a guy who ships a variety of things quickly vs. just being say the "Nomadlist Guy" forever.
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
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
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.
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 the right kind of people, and sparks the right kinds of conversations. I am basically involving fellow builders in my design process, and hyping what I am working on to my audience and industry peers. It is a good way to make friends.
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".
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 team is in. Which muddies discussion on what a "successful" game even is (a topic already muddy even with all context).
BUT, then again the tides have shifted so much in that people just take a "should have" approach. "you shouldn't have done it in X genre. You shouldn't have used Y software. Your game sucks so it obviously failed". So maybe bringing up any finances will always attract that crowd, not cause them to look into another place to make money.
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.
My take: the valuable parts of "building in public" are actually "learning in public" per https://www.swyx.io/learn-in-public
The stuff in the OP is mainly just marketing/trends driven by social media platforms which has grown under the brand of "building in public".
"Working with the garage door open" is a great phrase.
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...
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.
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.
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. Technical quality likely matters the most to "customers" who don't pay anything such as users of popular open source projects.
If you want to make money from a good product then becoming a social media influencer who talks about your product is the most straightforward way to advertise without having to pay for ads.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Hard part of launching _most_ products. But I agree, I'm not sure content marketing, regardless of topic, can have an actual downside in the majority of circumstances. Maybe just the opportunity cost.
Marketing a product seems easier than ever with social media, however the ocean is much larger.
Moreover the author could have easily written this post as "it's time to rethink 'thoughtleader blogging' and it would fit just as well. Most people don't write this stuff for their own pleasure, they write it for eyeballs. They write it for their readers. In that sense I suspect building in public works as well as blog posts like this for gaining a following. There's no one fits all answer to this.
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 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.
I think there are a lot of honest people out there that just wanna make and share cool stuff. I also think the well was poisoned by grifters who wanted either clout of a quick buck. That seems to be a story that encompases the last 30 years of the tech industry as we know it.
>there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times
I don't mind those people. No one really wants to mentor these days, but people LOVE to correct. I'd treat that incoming flaming as an opportunity to learn from people who'd never speak up otherwise (after inevitably discarding 80% of replies that are simply non-constructive insults).
Say more.
> 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.
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.
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.
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. Instead of just posting numbers, share the strategies that led to those numbers, or the challenges you faced along the way. That's much more useful for other founders.
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.
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.
Counterargument: I started Canny and we were a "build in public" startup early on. Building in public was an invaluable marketing channel in the early days.
When you are just launching your product, it's really difficult to get those first users and any awareness at all.
If your target audience includes other people in tech, then building in public can be great marketing channel.
Posting about your ideas or your product just isn't that interesting. Posting how much money you're making is very interesting to other people who might want to follow your path.
Like all successful marketing channels, this channel is a lot more saturated these days than when we started (~2017), so it might not work as well anymore.
> If your target audience includes other people in tech, then building in public can be great marketing channel.
> Posting about your ideas or your product just isn't that interesting. Posting how much money you're making is very interesting to other people who might want to follow your path.
Hang on, it feels like there's a contradiction here. Is the audience customers, or is it people who want to follow your path? Or are you thinking that's substantially the same audience?
We are a Canny customer since the early days <3. And I feel that both product and financial information is interesting. I'm a user of your product, so how it works and how you think about it are significant to me as they'll affect my day to day life. But on the other hand, financial information is something that gives me confidence in you as a business. Both can create a sense of emotional investment beyond the transactional relationship we have.
But we're just a regular old software business, not indie hackers and nor does "building in public" describe how we work.
> Posting about your ideas or your product just isn't that interesting.
On the contrary, I wouldn’t be using Capacities if they didn’t have their entire development roadmap on your product, so thanks
> Let's admit it, the main purpose of build in public is to attract attention and build a community
It's more like open sourcing your code. On one hand: yes, it's good marketing. On the other hand: you're creating positive externality, so random people show up, thank you for your contribution, and help you, monetarily, or by giving you valuable leads & feedback.
it's the same benefit of going to a conference & networking, just doing it continually. It's still useful even if everyone is doing it, because when someone stumbles on your work, they have an entry point/signal on whether there's mutual benefit in collaborating.
that's also just how you make friends. An increasingly hard aspect in western society these days as third places decrease. Yeah, you need to do something to attract attention, especially in a digital domain where all you are are a handle and maybe an avatar. building a community means more of a like-minded pool to potentially become friends with.
I'd kill for some local meetup spot to have already done all this for me, but this is the next best approach.
To me, it always seemed like the "build in public" folks were doing it more for themselves. A way to not feel so alone on the journey, while ultimately working alone. If it helped with marketing and launch, that would be a bonus.
This is my read too. People refer to it as a "community". There's an emotional attachment to being an "indie hacker" that goes beyond "this is a marketing strategy". Of course, as the existence of the community becomes more valuable as a marketing channel, that may shift, and maybe the OP is noticing that it already has shifted?
Attention seeking activity... I guess it's one form of marketing, but if the attention is on the builder, probably not
Building something big alone is really tough and demoralizing. If this is a way they can mitigate that until they can find others to join them, more power to them. However, I've also heard of the dangers of oversharing early and losing the incentive to finish the project because you already got the attention dopamine hit.
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.
I’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
Letting people know how strong your grindset is requires 4am starts and grinding out social media threads all weekend.
I think the idea is as a growth hacking strategy, people lost their way. The space is crowded and now it usually means people are posting positive numbers go up charts. What value is in that? Why is my chart more engaging than other people's charts?
It's not interesting, engaging, or educational. So as an growth strategy, it sharply slumps off after the initial launch post, and there's zero value to the reader aside from knowing it exists (again, initial launch post).
So it's a call to arms to reevaluate what you're doing. If you're posting number goes up, it's really no different from building in private, it's likely a wasted effort on your part and unnecessary noise to the community. Or maybe return to the old meaning of building in public. Create value for people, actually have a dialogue, and that'll pay dividends (that's the hope anyways) .
Building in public is not a single, defined activity. Nor people doing it has the same motivation for it.
Some share numbers, some don’t. Some share everything, some goes with outlines. Some… you get the idea.
I do it because it’s boring to build alone, month after month, year after year. I’ve joined the community 2 years ago and couldn’t be happier.
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
KTool looks great! Where would you BIP nowadays? Usual spots seem to have a lot more noise than signal.
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.io, you might decide that's enough. This is especially true since indie hacking often embraces an ethos opposed to strategies like VC funding or building large teams, which typically drive scaling.
Some indie hacker projects do scale into successful bootstrapped businesses with teams of developers or receive VC funding, but that is the exception. Scaling requires the founder to have a larger vision beyond just making quick bucks and remaining independent—independence being a core motivation of indie hacking in the first place. https://www.lycee.ai/blog/levelsio-and-the-dilemma-of-premat...
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.
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 is what kids with rich parents whos trust fund hasnt matured yet do to kill time nowdays?
> Its like energy looking for a place to be used but in the meantime why not run in place till we drop?
Reminds me of the crypto space during the peak of its hype, where people wrote a flood of articles and software, attracting attention, claiming to be important and world-changing. Yet a year or two later, have evaporated into much ado about nothing. I'm not discounting the possibility that some of it will eventually become popular and practical, but there was sure a lot of smoke and mirrors.
The Hustle - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
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.
I tried it, but it’s not very effective. The central problem is the following: The people who are building, aren’t interested in your posts on Twitter. They’re busy building. For the most part in those groups, I saw people’s earnest attempts at getting attention but every moment you spend on self-promotion is a moment you’re not adding features.
The people who do end up getting a lot of attention, they’re better at marketing, but not necessarily building. This is how you end up with people creating pretty-looking tools and products that aren’t particularly innovative but make for nice screenshots.
> retty-looking tools and products that aren’t particularly innovative but make for nice screenshots.
I'm not as cynical with the idea, but you identified the core issue (be it the algorithm or people that came first is an exercise for the reader): Code doesn't make for good engagement with the current structure of social media. your web design or visualization or even simple pie charts of performance differences (obligatory https://www.hackingsap.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/dilbert_p...) is what gets people in. visuals what may or may not be the actual selling point of your project.
I don't really know how to get over that hump. You need some base audience first, and you want to make sure you aren't forgotten. So some public building will always be needed to maintain that.
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.
Making money is a side effect of doing what you would do naturally because if you didn’t you would lose self respect.
> I really dislike that so much of hacker culture is $$ focused now.
I don’t think that’s hacker culture. It’s just the mainstream adoption of hacker culture, don’t let it replace the real thing in your mind. When lots and lots of people started playing candy crush on phones, it wasn’t gamer culture that changed, just the public perception of gaming.
There are still people out there who conform to the description you laid out. Are there lots and lots of them? No. It does seem to be a growing segment though.
Thank you for sharing that, it’s awesome to see so many of us still around!
(Not trying to gatekeep—anyone can be a hacker, no matter when they start. Just sharing some fun memories—I still remember upgrading from a 386 to a 486, then to a Pentium 133. Or the LAN parties. Or when IRC splits let you take over a popular channel for a while! Fun times! The new tools being built today, especially around AI, are just as exciting and remind me of the early days of the internet. There's so much more to create!)
>Not trying to gatekeep
You really should. Without gates everything of value is stolen and we're left with nothing but grifters.
There's another very large subgroup you're missing: the hackers that build things (even for $0) because they're fun/cool, not because they solve a specific annoying problem/inefficiency.
See for example: https://justforfunnoreally.dev/
Discussed on Hacker News here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33255920 and more recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41496725
Thank you for pointing that out. I updated my comment to include that group. Personally, my motivation comes from the part of me that feels compelled to fix things that are inefficient, but I love being a part of a community that builds useful/fun/cool things & each of us are driven by our own motivations.
That’s not hacking, that’s called a hobby. Hacking is something that challenges social norms or might even get you in trouble.
“hacking” is the challenge of making something work in ways it was never intended - for example unlocking a car with wireless entry using a laptop and DIY electronics instead of the normal car key.
Doing it to your own car is obviously very different from stealing someone else’s, however it’s not illegal to “hack” your own car. The theft part is what gets you in trouble.
> it’s not illegal to “hack” your own car
I'm certain some car company will sue you if they get to know that you did.
Maybe it’s not really your car, then. (Same with some mobile phones, tractors, etc.)
Hacking seems to have taken on so many different meanings.
I've always known hacking as a term specifically related to bypassing security in digital systems. Think Matthew Broderick gaining access to government networks via a phone line. This was hacking that would always get you in trouble if caught.
I'm not quite sure when "hacking" was repurposed as a term for using something in a way it wasn't intended ("life hacks" or "kitchen hacks", etc).
Now hacking is about challenging social norms? I'm very lost at this point, in an "old man shakes fist at clouds" kind of way.
What you’re describing are sometimes consequences of the hacker ethic, they’re not core features.
Hacking, at it's very core, is the exploration and enjoyment of systems. Anything else beyond that raw definition is extra and varies.
It’s an ideal, and like any ideal we manage to capture in a six-letter word, 99% will get it completely backwards. For example, everyone knows and agrees with the value of the phrase “think outside the box,” but only a minority ever recognizes “the box” they should be thinking outside of, and even fewer bother to fully apply the wisdom by making a habit out of finding the box that’s currently holding them at any given moment.
I think it's less about money and more about the endless access to metrics and analytics which will impact how you feel about your project. A forum of maybe a few dozen people you somewhat know loving something 20 years ago would have sufficed but now it all tends towards vague bigger numbers of people you have minimal knowledge of to feel at all good about the effort put in. In lieu of 10,000 likes, which might ultimately feel hollow anyway, making a couple hundred dollars will probably suffice.
I made a super niche modding tool a few weeks ago; it's got one star on GitHub but the two nerds that have actually used it are delighted with it and I'm very happy about that. The notion another few in the future will find it is oddly nice to think about
There’s a general feeling of pressure for a lot of people to monetise hobbies.
Exactly, it's the opportunity cost.
When I was a young adult and especially a teenager, I spent a lot of time making things out of pure desire to because I didn't have to think too much about my financial situation (present and future). That unfortunately gave way with age, and now ~15 years later whenever I engage with these activities there's a voice in the back of my head nagging, asking how doing those things instead of something that could potentially bring a financial return might negatively impact ability to achieve short term goals, tide over periods of economic uncertainty, have enough money for retirement, etc.
It's probably not the right way to think since personal projects that might seem unprofitable on their face can bring benefits in unexpected ways, but it's a problem nonetheless.
I am in this boat with you. How do we get out?
Great question. The feeling clearly isn't based in logic; somehow watching a TV show or playing a game (neither of which is financially productive) instead of working on "just for fun" side projects doesn't elicit the same mental response unless I really couch potato out and do those things for hours on end. That makes it a bit more difficult to work with.
Probably because of the feeling that you only have so much energy for each bucket. Watching TV isn’t taking energy from the dev bucket, but working on a fun but personal project does take energy from the dev bucket.
Of course, this isn’t how it actually seems to work - there is some truth to it for most people, but if you “overdraw” from one bucket and “neglect” another bucket, they will change sizes.
In order to experience the upper tiers of relaxation and life enjoyment capitalism offers (pure free time with no external pressures to sell your labor), you have to be successful by capitalistic metrics. You aren't going to be a billionaire so power under capitalism isn't available to you, so instead you'll need to sell your labor until you have enough money to exploit and sell someone else's labor at little cost to you. If the word "exploit" makes you feel icky, think of it more positively, like the way one might exploit a gold mine: by mining it.
At 4 million in the bank (and various assets) you should be good to "escape," if by escape you mean "not need to sell your labor to live" anymore. 4 million gives you more than enough residuals to live off until death. Less if some of that is in property so you don't have to pay rent. Less if you retire to southeast Asia and engage in geographic arbitrage. You spent years paying for carrier groups and precision missiles, why not reap the rewards?
So far as I can judge, this is the only way the system permits escape.
If you're interested in permitless escape, one of my favorite introductions to the subject is "Walkaway" by Cory Doctorow, a wonderful amalgamation of hacker culture, anarchism, sustainability, anti capitalism, and communism. Even if you think some of those are dirty words, if you're at all interested in EV tech, 3d printing, batteries, solar, zero trust ID, or transhumanism, you'll probably enjoy that book. He basically just answers every "but what if..." you could think of for a group of hackers living in an abandoned rust belt town.
Personally I'm right now very interested in food forests and tech projects researching local supply chain production of equipment, such as https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ the global village construction set and https://simplifier.neocities.org whoever this person is that's been documenting their efforts building things like solar panels and circuit boards in their garage from raw materials for nearly the last decade.
If no one will pay for the solution, the problem might not be that important.
Lots of people won't pay for journalism anymore. You'd have a hard time convincing me (or most other people on here) that journalism is no longer important.
Lots of people won't pay for something they can otherwise get for free, even if the free option is mediocre.
This does not mean that journalism isn't valuable enough to some people. It just means that the market for journalism shrank.
It's the diamonds vs water paradox of value. Diamonds are highly valued yet practically useless to most people. Water is extremely low-valued, yet essential to all life on earth.
High-quality, investigative journalism is an essential institution for a functioning democracy, yet it's not valued by the people it is most important to: average citizens.
Water is extremely high-valued.
You're in luck! I have water to sell you. Get out that checkbook!
How about a bullet? :)
https://theworld.org/stories/2024/08/27/a-rise-in-water-rela...
Water is given or taken. It does not transact.
Let me guess: so say the natives of Arrakis?
This is the short-sightedness of market fundamentalism. To take this to a ridiculous extreme, if I decide that taking care of my children is no longer ROI-positive, should I just decide this market has shrunk and the prudent thing to do is invest in new markets?
While this is true in broad strokes, I think money fails to capture non quantifiable quality of life improvements. Hacker culture being close to the users could solve them, but being driven by money would definitely hinder that development
This is something that has come up many times for our company over the last 20 years. You can't sell the bean counters on quality of life. You need to show lower costs, higher quality results, or faster time to market - that's what gets you in the door.
The thing that keeps you in the door and makes usage grow is the quality of life. Especially in the business world, most software is terrible. If people like using your software, they will tell others about it and they will be more accepting when things inevitably go wrong. The ease of use of our software and the immediate service we provide when customers ask for help are time and again the things they say keep them using our tools. With good support, even a frustrated bug report can turn into a happy experience.
In broad strokes, yes you are right in some cases.
But in most cases you don't see quality of life improvements unless you also get users.
In other words building it is not enough. Lives need to use it to be improved.
Monetizing an app forces you to concentrate on articulating that value. It frees up resources (ie money) to spend on spreading the word. It offers you feedback on whether this is a meaningful use of your time or not.
Dont get me wrong. An app can add value to a single person. You can give it away for free. There's nothing wrong with that.
Totally agree. Things that you work on often start off as intellectual curiosity of “why does the world work this way?”
Money often comes as a side effect but not the motivation that drives you to build in the first place.
100%
Meaning that if you solve valuable problems you will [probably] make money. So spend all your time solving valuable problems not posting about $$
"If you make it they will come" has been shown to be false time and time again. Just because your product is useful doesn't mean anybody knows about it or that they recognize the value it has. Lots of things we take for necessity today were once seen as a pointless waste of time. You still need to spend a significant amount of time marketing to get other people to want your product.
But posting about all the money you are making is just silly unless you want a pat on the back. If you really are making bank and you want to get someone to buy you out, then start talking directly to the big players in your market. Then again, you won't have to, because they won't want to talk to you until you are a real threat to their business, at which point they'll be coming to you. Bragging to your early adopter community about your success just keeps them hyped for a bit.
>> 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.
You are making the same mistake as youtubers chasing their numbers rather than having a personality and a point and an interest and something to say of their own.
The ONLY reason I have any interest in someone's output is if it is something they themselves actually care about, what they actually think, etc. I want to know what they have to say. There is absolutely no value in them trying to say what they think I want to hear, worse, what they think most people want to hear.
The second someone says "tell me what you want" I'm out. If I have to tell them that I'm interested in x, and then they go investigate x, what value is that to anyone? What insight can they bring to me about the topic of x? Why should I care what they have to say about x when 2 seconds ago they had no knowledge of it? No one's mere personality is so awesome that just having them do the same exact google search I can do and read the same exact intro material I can read and blatting out their initial reactions based on just that, results in something worthwhile.
Whether your numbers (or your sales) are good or bad, it is a factor to consider, but it can't be the fundamental point of your existence. You have to have some legitimate point that stands on it's own, and only then, maybe, you can live off of it somehow.
If you only care that you somehow get money, and don't care how, what value is that to me? Why would I as a customer give you money for anything? Even if you were trying to pander to exactly what I said I wanted, if I don't perceive that you are deeply knowldgeable and insightful and experienced in that topic, or at least maybe new but genuinely interested in working in that field or on that problem, but just trying to say yes to anything, no way in the world am I choosing you to supply that need.
The ONLY reason I have any interest in someone's output is if it is something they themselves actually care about, what they actually think, etc. I want to know what they have to say. There is absolutely no value in them trying to say what they think I want to hear, worse, what they think most people want to hear.
MrBeast's leaked production document is pretty much exactly this: trying to anticipate what people will click on, what will go viral, and throwing all their weight behind it.
Now it's fair to say that you, personally, place no value in viral content such as that. On the other hand, it's clearly not the case that this content is of no value to anyone. Very broad-based entertainment like this is about providing a small amount of value to a very large number of people.
I don't think it's so clear. I watch Mr. Beast from time to time, and it seems to me that it's basically video junk food. Is it really more entertaining, or more thought provoking, or more valuable in any way than how I would have spent that 20 minutes otherwise?
I fully agree with you, it is video junk food. People spend a lot of money on junk food as well. They value it.
Whether this is good or bad for society is a different question. Markets have never been able to solve that problem.
Well, that pretty much rules out email, maps/navigation, messaging, and quite a bit more.
Somehow, this suggests that perhaps your rubric needs amending.
Paid services for all of these things existed before some global monopoly with insane profits launched competing versions for free.
I'd amend it to: "If no one will pay for the solution, the problem might not be that important, or the solution is already commoditized."
"If no one will pay for the solution, it may be because of a base factor of reality itself has collided a near universal facet of human nature," wherein the first might take the value of although information might require the expenditure of resources to create, replication of the created information is often difficult to stymie and lacks even the approach to similar levels of consumed resources and the second value of most humans are, unsurprisingly common as a trait of great objective value in any species with a history of billions of years evolving in environments wherein at least some resources are painfully limited, often unwilling to expend resources if they do not have to.
The former is the nature of data itself, the latter having come into the existence the first time a creature with more than a handful of neurons was capable of making the choice to take what was right in front of it as opposed to venturing far afield for something similar. Both predate humans by millions of years at the least, and do not require the abstractions of market and money, or even the homo sapiens which first coined these concepts.
While these two give rise to the freeloading scamp who attempts to read entire magazine at the news stand if they can get away with it, the printing press or coinage are not specifically required, and, if we were to ever meet other aliens with some kind of civilization, they would likely have situations parallel enough to end up in our eventual xenoanthropology textbooks. Assuming they're not so busy coming up with their own copies of To Serve Man that we haven't the time for us to write said texts.
People happily pay for every one of those things.
Fastmail, Garmin, Slack etc. WhatsApp had a paid model until Facebook bought it.
Or: you've built 67% of a solution, and it only really crosses into financial sense for most buyers once you pass 89%.
But you cannot measure these stuff, only argue about them with co-founders haha
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.
If someone will pay for the solution, the problem may still be utterly unimportant. So this tells us nothing.
volunteers do un paid work all the time that is actually important. not everything needs a price tag to matter.
True, but important software doesn't (by and large) benefit very many people. Instead it makes a very few people extremely wealthy, and makes a somewhat larger number of comfortably upper middle class engineers' lives a little easier. Often those engineers are building products which actually harm most of their users.
I labor in this industry because I enjoy the work and it pays better than anything else I could do, and I try to work for companies doing good things, but I have some misgivings about seeing unpaid open source work in the same light as volunteering. To be clear, as an engineer who benefits I'm grateful, but I'd rather developers were compensated fairly.
EDIT: given the down votes, let me pose it as a question--Is software obviously a public good? Are we actually making things better on balance?
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>Making money is a side effect of doing what you would do naturally because if you didn’t you would lose self respect.
Most hackers some 20 years ago weren't worried about money, so they could naturally explore their curiosities in their free time. Hustle culture in general seems to rise and fall inversely to the economic situtation, so I'm not too surprised that we're shifting to $$ over curiosity at the moment.
> 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 is exactly the question that charging money answers: Do people just say they want your app or are they willing to “put their money where their mouth is” and actually buy it?
(Also note that not all things are paid for with money. Some are paid for with time or attention, so adjust for that if necessary.)
By that logic, isn't building a family something one should never do? There is no market to sell your family, so that must be a clear signal that your attention and energy should go elsewhere...?
I'm sure this analogy is a bit absurd (and I'd love to see it torn apart), but I hope it opens readers to the premise that some highly desirable and important emotional, intellectual and social objects should exist even when there is no market for some of their forms
I don’t build my family for other people either.
Edit: I can’t tell if you’re willfully misreading what I wrote or just trying to be cute. At no point did I assert that nothing should be created without a market. But if you’re creating something for other people then those other people are, by definition, your market, and you should pay close attention to signs that they actually want what you’ve created (like a willingness to trade dollars or time or attention).
The issue is that you responded to stuff around reasons for being a hacker with a requirement that isn't a requirement for hacking.
Hacking doesn't require something to be built for other people.
Ah, I see that the post I responded to (and quoted) has been completely rewritten.
> 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
I definitely resonate with #1 and #3, but I got bills to pay. And some of the things I want to see in the world, well, they would require a lot of money.
Agreed. Hackers build software because it's fun, not because it will make them money.
This resonates with me. Maybe I’m just nostalgic because I started my career during the hacking scene of the early 2010’s, but it really feels like we’ve lost our way as an industry since then.
It’s weird to say but the whole startup culture has shifted, from founder to hacker and everywhere in between. It’s a victim of its own success because no one is writing feature pieces in media on quants or finance bros with the same gusto as they did in the 2010s for tech founders.
So the attention combined with the desire to escape the grind which is only offered in combination by tech founder, has nearly fully been consumed in the broader machine of capitalism.
When we ran out of stored resources to consume, we unsustainably consumed our own attention, and then when that was gone, we turned our attention to the money machine that made it possible, and started eating that.
In the good ol times, being a hacker meant you love tinkering with tech and are good at it.
Then media started using it to mean "computer criminal", which was annoying.
Then "I don't code I solve problems" tech bros coopted it, which is worse. Looks like now you're a hacker if you identify a need and monetize it.
I am fully cognizant I am writing this on a VC-backed founder oriented site called Hacker News, but I like to think there's still some good ol hacker spirit here, YC being named after an extremely nerdy thing and not "SaaS Launchpad" or somesuch.
(yes yes old man yelling at cloud, get off my lawn, etc)
I think building a business can encompass the hacker spirit as well if it’s approached in that way. Financial sustainability is a necessary component to solving problems on a large scale in a durable way. Why should a hacker draw the line at purely technical challenges?
this is a great comment, you took the words out of my mouth and described what I think is wrong with Twitter culture
Honestly, if you're money-focused, you're not a part of hacker culture.
Edit: Deleted a claim that was probably stronger than I meant.
+1, well said
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Sir, this is a hacker news not VC news.
That's why I think parent's comment is kind of funny. This site is VC news. If you're looking for actual hacker culture, this ain't it. This website is mostly VC devs, not hackers.
I think it’s actually a pretty healthy mix. That’s what makes HN so cool imo.
What an awful way to live, with the sense that everyone else is a fraud and you’re the only one that’s real. It sounds terribly lonely, and equally unattractive. Who would want to work with, or be around someone, with such a terrible opinion of others?
You’re saying they’re no true Scotsmen.
They’re entrepreneurs who don’t really care what you call them. Of course people will try to make money, not everyone can afford to (or is willing to) maintain whole side projects for fun. Some people have side projects unrelated to their main line of work.
You misunderstand me.
If you solve valuable problems you will make money.
If you have a side project then spend all your time solving valuable problems not posting about $$
Making money doesn’t necessarily imply value is being created. For example casinos create the illusion of value and generate a lot of money.
Unfortunately, like a casino a lot of tech is an illusion, e.g. social media- you walk in and it’s flashy and exciting, but you walk out having lost hours of your time and possibly a few brain cells.
Building in public comes down to a few core things: marketing your product, staying sane, and getting noticed. It’s a way to get people talking about what you’re building before it’s even done. The journey itself becomes the story, pulling in an audience that feels connected to your work.
For a lot of solo founders, though, it’s not just about visibility. It’s about support. Building something alone can be isolating, and sharing your progress becomes a way to stay connected, even when you’re grinding away in a room by yourself. The openness keeps you grounded and helps ward off the burnout that comes with long stretches of isolation.
It also puts you on the radar of other entrepreneurs and investors. They see what you’re up to and can offer feedback, partnerships, or even funding without you having to chase them down. You’re essentially creating a public portfolio of your work in real time.
Some people also use it as a humblebrag—a way to show off without being too obvious about it. That’s fine if that’s your thing, but for most, it’s a way to turn the lonely process of building into something more connected and human.
And I think that shouldn’t be discouraged.
Definitely agree. Sorry if the article sounds a bit negative, but I'm overall still in favor of building in public, for various reasons like the ones you mentioned.
I assume in most cases people use it as a way to motivate them to finish their side projects. The projects might or might not make it but I found it interesting to follow.
Of course there are outliers like those who keep sharing their MRR, ARR, etc and then down the line sell an e-book on how to replicate their "success". I have followed enough "baits" to notice the pattern and ignore.
Designer here. Got real into no-code back in 2021 as it was really heating up. Seemed like a natural move as I could better understand the logic of what's happening on the back end and also build products solo. Build in public (BIP), somewhat frustratingly for me, was a huge part of a few of the communities I got into. One was led by a marketing-minded "maker", and the other a great inspiring guy who was a bit the inverse.
Everyone in each community became pretty evangelical about BIP due to group think. I bought in at first but became very skeptical eventually as well. Not only do I question the actual efficacy here both in $$ and quality of work, but I think it's a bit inconsiderate to expect everyone to be on board with being this open with their work or push as hard as they did.
I'll occasionally post a bit of what i'm working on but I also after following many "makers" and the like, started becoming really bored with every detail of what they are working on. I say just show me a case study usually unless I'm already intrigued with the end product or you are doing something of great interest/impact
I'm fully in support of people who decide to 'build in public', but personally, I'm not a fan. While building in public can be a good marketing channel, it can also a pretty massive distraction, especially when you're still so small. I think people still underestimate the distraction and timesink that these social media platforms cause and would often be better off heads-down improving their product and talking directly with their users.
Based 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)_/¯
I do build in public: https://x.com/XCSme
I keep sharing my thoughts and what I'm working on. Those posts barely get any impressions, but I don't want to post stuff just to please the algorithm.
I get doing it to feel less alone in the journey, but unless your target customer is other indie hackers it just invites unnecessary competition.
I get that ‘it’s not about the idea - the execution is what matters,’ but why make an already difficult journey that much harder?
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.
Anyway, as I work as a developer, even if it fails, it doesn't matter. I'll learn a lot by doing it.
That it all still depends on your twitter persona to build audience, with twitter being a maga show (I only follow devs, still get tons of content I do not want). I find it a very toxic place but seems it's needed if you want to get anywhere sales wise.
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.
I've noticed the effectiveness for bringing in customers taper-off over the years.
I still build in public (https://maxrozen.com/articles?q=diaries), but spend more of my time on traditional marketing efforts instead.
I think the phenomenon of a relatively niche social market getting flooded is nothing new and unfortunately it’s going to continue (see also: app stores). I do wonder if eventually people will catch on to the fact that it is the state of the modern open commons, and a new dynamic will need to be devised if they don’t like this one or wish to continue chasing the frontier.
> If you follow enough indiehackers like me, Twitter/X will start recommending posts for you.
I think there's your first problem right there. I recommend seeking dev communities on more federated social networks. I have found there to be more support and less clout/lore building than on Twitter. And supportive communities ship products!
>it seems people are more willing to post about their achievements, rather than ideas and plans about their products.
Other people can steal your plans and ideas, they can't steal your revenue.
Also, rather than declaring that other people should rethink what they are doing, maybe just reconsider your choice to be involved in it.
Full "build in public" isn't for me, if it matters.
Author here. I'm glad to see so many meaningful discussions triggered by this post. Despite raising concerns, overall I still see "building in public" as a positive trend. Like all trends, things emerge and change over time, so we'll see how "building in public" evolves.
If you'd like to sponsor my work, feel free to check out an app I developed:
https://xylect.app/
With one-click, Xylect explains your selected text using an AI knowledge engine, no matter which app you're currently using. It's like bringing Perplexity + dictionary to every app.
I'm also on Twitter/X and Mastodon. I'll share more thoughts in the future:
- https://twitter.com/laike9m
- https://mastodon.social/@laike9m
It might be effective at building an audience for a new app but it requires much more engagement in social media than I'm up for. Reddit, on the other hand, I've found to be a pretty good place to build an audience and mostly without the toxicity of X.
This is just an extension of the LinkedIn/YouTube/X "thoughtfluencer" epidemic. If the person sharing has a successful track record in the field and is genuine about sharing/helping - great! 99% of them are, however, only interested in building clout and expanding their personal brand.
The term is "build in public" not "talk about money in public". If you enjoy chatting about the esoteric details of building a useful thing then great. If you're mostly trying to attract customers and you don't enjoy it, then don't do it.
Well, to answer the titular question: I’m sure a few people here have read it.
What is the “indie hacker community”?
Frontenders or marketers writing micro SaaS thinking that they are building the next Salesforce. Mostly lead gen and other sales support apps.
Indie hacking has gone mainstream with the rise of inflation, which makes a lot of the content incredibly banal and formulaic.
For anyone interested in a counter-point (ie; "Transparency is not inherently good and here's why"), the paper "Transparency is Surveillance" is a nice read: https://philpapers.org/archive/NGUTIS.pdf
It basically talks about how people will change their reasoning to suit public opinion when they work publically. You might imagine a scientist who gets a public grant and is required to share their findings publically.
In this hypothetical scenario, let's say their findings are required to be explainable to the public at large. The reality is that when you're building anything (whether it's a theory or a product), the reality is that causes and effects are not always clear nor will they ever be as we see with the human body for example.
As such, while we might think imposing transparency would increase trust, the reality is you'll often find ad-hoc justifications for why things are the way they are rather than just saying "We don't know why X or Y".
The author also presented the same ideas as a talk for anyone who prefers video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcEJY61FKIc
When 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.
Yes I feel like this "public" work only for non-veblen goods, else it just devaluates the whole creation process.
At a more microscopic level, the same goes for git commits. Complete, sensible ideas are much easier to interact with and understand than someone's chaotic half thought through work-in-progress. There's value to this approach at all scales of magnification--completeness and polish aids digestibility and helps {colleagues, users, buyers, prospects} understand the value proposition.
As far as I know the first Apple computer was not really a computer but a box of parts that the customer had to assemble themselves. The early days of Apple is probably the best example of "building in public" because so much of it was actually just selling the dream. In any case, the opposite is infinitely worse. Too many people wasted away for years "building in private". If and when they did finally release it was to the sound of crickets. Hacking for pleasure is one thing. If you're trying to build a business then you must be always be selling and marketing.
That's true. But despite being the same legal entity, there is very little in common between 70s Apple and the Apple of today. We shouldn't really expect consistent behavior.
Yeah and Apple didn’t make any money until after that phase.
> If you're trying to build a business then you must be always be selling and marketing.
Yes. I am only giving marketing advice. Sales is unfortunately embedded in so many other areas of life besides commerce.
The way I see it, those are just a spin on "I did X for Y months and here's what I learned" articles. Clickbait at best but mostly those are just articles that fill void with words. Whenever I stumble upon those, I am never really buy into them. I am a huge believer in the idea of the American dream but in a functioning economy, this can only work a handful of times. Over the years I've attempted creating a startup and bootstrap it on my own or with a small team of friends and the one thing I've learned from those attempts(see what I did there...) is that it's practically impossible, even if you have the right idea and you get the timing right. Arguably I didn't get the timing right on a few occasions and I was way too early for the party. Had I waited for a few years, those might have picked up but the truth is, I sincerely doubt it. At this point, whenever I land on one of those indie gigs, I instinctively roll my eyes and click away.
Another problem is that, as an indie, you probably aren't an experienced marketing person. I've been the one managing "build in the open" with a founder on a popular Kickstarter project and it was awful. If we posted a lot, people complained we weren't spending our time on building the thing. If we slowed down the communications to focus on the project, people said we weren't being transparent or we had taken off with the money. Half of the comments on our posts were from people angry because we hadn't said anything about a super niche feature that only they wanted, or because it didn't do something that even a 100x more expensive product could do.
Entire communities started up around our product. They communicated publicly with us constantly. Their favorite past times were thinking up wild new features that we absolutely must have and trying to devine what was happening internally by over analyzing everything we said. Many of the community members used the size of their community to try to bully us into doing what they wanted. I personally had several emails telling me I was an idiot and a fraud. We were a victim of our own success.
It's the same fate that every open source developer experiences. As soon as you open yourself up to the world, everybody wants something from you and they want it now. If you already have a mature product with a healthy sales funnel and a clear vision, you can market what you have as you wish. If you're in the middle of creating something and you talk about it with others, they will all want a say in what you create and they will be upset if you don't act on their suggestions.
Now that I'm in a large company but working on a new and exciting project, we have hit the same problem internally - everybody who hears about it wants us to build it to suit them and they are disappointed when we instead try to build something that works for everyone. Any other product we made we never talked about into it was largely built and ready to start selling and we never had that kind of bullying behavior.
Something about being on the early phases of development makes people think you want their suggestions and they get rather upset when you don't build what they have in mind. That's why it's better to keep to yourself while you get the foundations in place, then carefully choose who you discuss it with until it's ready for the world to start buying it.
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.
I think as a general rule, any shiny new market strategy will perform worse in year 10 than it will in year 1. Law of diminished returns and all. And that's before factoring in any platform enshittification.
No, it doesn't work. If you actually are solving a problem, then you can do some sort of like beta testing publicly, just how games do play testing, which can be public or not. But other than that, building it in public makes no sense. You might give updates every now and then about what you're building, but that's about it.
I was very skeptical when I saw this headline, but you got me to click! So, good clickbait?
I love the discussion. I think you may just have self-biased your Twitter feed, and so to you it looks like the world is building in public, but to 99% of the population it's very rare.
Loved the discussion though, and your portfolio and blog are great.
Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.youtube.com/embed/10SIY3jE...
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