No One Builds in Public
Since joining the indie hacker community a few months ago, I've been observing what everyone is doing with great curiosity. One thing I immediately noticed, is that everyone talks about "build in public". In case you're unfamiliar with the term:
(build in public) is an intentional practice of creating content and sharing your company’s story as it unfolds — with transparency, openness and vulnerability.
A common practice of build in public is to share the revenue of your products. I picked a random tweet just to showcase what it looks like:
At first I thought, "OK, everyone is doing it, it must be good". But a few months later, I'm starting to have some questions.
My first question: are people overdoing it?
If you follow enough indiehackers like me, Twitter/X will start recommending posts for you. When I said "random tweet", I really meant it: similar posts are all over my timeline, and I literally picked the first one which took less than 5 secs. Based on my observation, out of 10 "build in public" posts, probably 5 or 6 are sharing revenue, mixed with posts like "how I boosted sales 100x in 3 months".
To be clear, I'm not against these posts. If I crossed the 1k milestone, I want to share it with the world too. But the issue is that, it seems people are more willing to post about their achievements, rather than ideas and plans about their products. Maybe it's because the achievement posts attract more attention? I don't know. But if I follow someone because of a product, I'm more interested in the product itself than the person behind it: I want to know what features are being added, what are the long-term plans, etc. Though, It could just be me.
On the other hand, it feels like some of the posts are merely just bragging. Sure, you made 10k, 100k MMR, congratulations. But do you really need to talk about it repeatedly like every day? How does it benefit the customers/followers, what value does it bring? None. It's just clickbait. Once and twice, it's inspiring and eye-opening, but more times, it just gets boring.
My second question: does it actually work?
Ten years ago, when @levelsio was still a nobody, "build in public" was a brand new thing. You see, when everyone still followed the traditional route of build -> launch (mostly as a one-off effort), suddenly there's this guy who started sharing everything in a way that no one had seen before: what he was building, what worked and what did not, how much he made, etc. This naturally gained him a lot of attention and made him famous (ofc, along with good products).
Back in the days, "indiehacking" was also new, with few people doing it. Nowadays, things are completely different. The "Build in Public" community on Twitter has 33.3k members, r/indiehackers has 20k members, and indiehackers.com has 100K subscribers. The field of indiehacker is no longer a deserted square at midnight, it's now flooded with people: young students who dropped out of college, people who quit their 9-5 jobs to peruse a bigger dream, and people who get laid off and decided to never do it again. As Google trends shows, before Oct 2016, there were little searches of "indiehacker" or "indie hacker". Look at what it is today.
You might have guessed what I'm want to say:
When everyone builds in public, no one builds in public.
Let's admit it, the main purpose of build in public is to attract attention and build a community, so you can keep selling products. But when everyone is doing so (and some doing it exceptionally well), how much attention can you get?
It's weird to say this, but let's not forget that it's still the product that ultimately matters. Many successful indiehackers and solopreneurs don't build in public, or at least not in the popular way. Nick Moore (who built PopClip) tweets very little, and posted to the user forum only when there's a big update. Danny Lin (who built OrbStack) never shared its revenue, and only tweets occasionally. They build some of the best softwares that ever existed, and they don't build in public. All I'm trying to say is, build in public may be good and work for some, but it's not the only way, and you (as an indiehacker) should not feel any pressure for not doing it.
Final Words
I'm still new and exploring. I wrote about my questions, but I don't believe I have an answer for them. If you'd like to discuss more on this topic, I'm on Twitter/X and Mastodon.
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