Why I want to stop building in public...
I've been building in public over the past two years, but lately, I've considered bringing this to an end.
I've started to see more discussions about whether building in public is an effective strategy for indie hackers to follow, so I wanted to share my own thoughts...
I started using Indie Hackers 2 years ago and instantly fell in love with the level of transparency from BIP posts.
I did everything I could to follow the trend and was completely transparent with everything I created.
So after 2 years of transparency, why am I ready to stop? 🤔
There's 3 key reasons crossing my mind...
1️⃣ Competition
As an indie hacker, my business isn't unique in a revolutionary way. It wouldn't take much for someone else to come along and start to copy the exact playbook I'm writing.
Although this might not hurt larger companies with a dominant advantage, if someone was to take away just 10 of my customers, it'd have a significant impact on my revenue.
I'd always believed that the threat of competition should never be an excuse.
That was until I'd finally built a profitable product that sustains my lifestyle.
I have everything to lose now.
2️⃣ My customers
In my scenario, some of my customers follow me on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. The last thing I'd want them to see is me sharing how much I made in a month from their purchases.
My goal is to consistently provide them with value, not discuss how much value I'm receiving from them.
3️⃣ Distribution
When you're in the early stages of creating a product, building in public is a great way to acquire your initial customers.
As you grow and find more sustainable distribution channels, the incentive to continue building in public only decreases.
Instead of creating content Twitter content in the hope that I might acquire a new customer, I'd rather allocate the time to optimising a more consistent distribution channel.
IN SUMMARY 👇
If I was to stop sharing my revenue numbers, I'd be curious to know what information I could continue sharing in lieu that you would still be useful to makers.
If you're an experienced maker, I'd also love to know if you're still focused on BIP not?
If you found this post insightful, I'd recommend following my Twitter profile where I share weekly insights about indie hacking.
Thanks for sharing! Great to see some counter arguments, was useful to have the context as well for why in your current situation it doesn't help anymore
Thanks! Always happy to try and maintain as much transparency as I can.
Your reasons to start sharing less are totally valid. You might want to be helpful to other indies hackers, it doesn't mean you can allow yourself to endanger your business, with other developers who could copy your ideas or with customers feeling they are just numbers for you. And it's true building in public is primordial at the beginning of the adventure, but becomes less of a priority with time.
In any case, thank you for everything you've shared and are willing to keep sharing with us, I'm sure we're plenty to have learnt a lot from your posts.
Appreciate it!
I'd still be eager to try and share relevant content in the form of high-level insights in some way.
I couldn't agree more with your reasons to not build in public. My team and I have been building in secret for a little under 4 years now and the main reason is so we can be first to market with our idea. We don't want to give any potential competition an opportunity to launch our idea before we do. We're a small team and I've self funded this venture with my developers working part time. We will launch our service when we are ready and that will be our potential competition's starting point. Thank you for validating our process.
Thanks for sharing!
I'd be curious to know how you've gone about talking with target customers if you're building in secret? Are you still working closely with them to solve their problem, then just not sharing those insights publically.
My target customers for my tech venture that I'm working on are also my current customers for my 9-5 job. I'm currently providing a product to them but at the same time able to gain insights on how my tech service could be more beneficial to them once launched. I've been able to use some of them to get through our MVP (minimum viable product) stage, which tested very well.
Regarding the problem I plan to solve for them with my tech venture. It's being done manually now and plan to help streamline the process for them in the near future.
Hi Lachlan,
Thank you very much for your post, which sums up the main arguments very well, especially the topic of competition.
For about 6 months I have been thinking about whether I should build my next startup publicly or not. And I do. The main reason is talking to a successful DJ 🎧 in Berlin. The music industry has always been ahead of the curve in terms of technology trends over the past 20 years (for example: streaming as a sales channel and the democratization of the means of production through software). So I asked him, how do you think the software industry will develop? And without ever hearing about Build In Public, he said: You need 1 million followers. That is the most important differentiating factor.
In the music industry today, anyone can make good music. Very good or excellent music alone is no longer enough for success because there is just so much music created every day. It's nearly impossible to be above the noise. Therefore, today, if you are an artist, you first have to have an audience. This is your primary differentiator.
I found the idea very exciting because I've been doing startups for almost 10 years and the production costs for software have been falling continuously. Conversely, it is more and more difficult to differentiate yourself, even if you use new technologies such as GPT-3 or similar.
That's why I want to try the risk and adventure Build In Public and I wouldn't make stopping dependent on sales. I think your arguments are absolutely valid and it may very well be that you are right, especially from a competition point of view. Personally, I'm always drawn to ideas that are risky somewhere and actually sound wrong. But when they work, they are a real competitive advantage.
And finally, it's really fun to do this rollercoaster entrepreneurship with people.
Thanks Lachlan for sharing! These points are so valid!
Def think that building in public is more suitable for certain types of builders and certain stages. While you can still remain to be a transparent person, the depth of information shared can change over time.
E.g. instead of sharing numbers, focus more on sharing key business lessons to others.
I love that you're re-evaluating this instead of just doing it for the sake of doing it :)
Thanks Kevon. You make a great point. Moving forward, I think this will be the approach I take.
What about offering a paid subscription to unlock the higher value content like revenue or specific results?
I like the idea, but I think I'd rather allocate this time into building out my core product itself. At this point, that would have the greater reward.
Agree with you 100%. The #buildinpublic seems to have just become "let me just brag about how much $$$ I've made"
I like reading about indie's struggles, since we all have them, but sharing revenue simply looks like asking for trouble :)
Good to hear your perspective! Always happy to share my failures and struggles (given that I've had so many).
Experienced maker here (actually wrote an article for Make Magazine when "maker" had more of a physical connotation - glad to see it being adopted by makerpad etc)
Definitely started building in public less as business started taking off. But now I'm starting something new and am back at it.
Why? because I missed it. And because all of our moderate success (> $500k YRR) came from BIP the first time around (early customers, partners, media). Doesn't bother me that the comment thread of my first new BIP post is mostly explaining to another IH how (s)he could offer the same service. For me it beats "building in secret for a little under 4 years" as @Bmj800 wrote. But then I was always taught that startup ideas are worthless by themselves (perhaps Paul Graham's early essays should be required reading on IH). Experience and execution is far more important.
If your business is mainly selling courses perhaps start sharing your customer's revenue (with their permission of course). Seems knowing how others use your work to achieve success is even more important social proof than how much you make selling your work.
Appreciate you taking the time to share!
I think there's definitely still a way to share the insights I learn along the way without needing to openly share revenue.
Looking forward to following more of your content for examples.
You make good points but as a course provider I think it's actually good to share revenue numbers.
If someone can say "I sold 50k worth of this course" they get social proof and you think to yourself "wow, it must be good!" and then you buy it and they make more etc
Also, I don't think indie people care about seeing how people spend money they make. I mean the person who makes Bannerbear literally has motorbikes he wants to buy on his open page, haha
Valid point about the social proof. It hadn't crossed my mind!
Just got a chance to check out the Bannerbear page. Actually love the idea of the visual goals.
Are you still sharing revenue numbers each month?
Yeah, leavemealone have a boat on their page!
I share on twitter - it's too much work to put on website each month, plus it can be bad for b2b standpoint perhaps.