[cheph]

> "Build it and they will come" doesn't work anymore.

Did it ever? I feel like this omits the mechanism for people to get to know there is something to come to and reasons for them to come. Not sure why this saying really exists.

If someone builds a pile of garbage, I won't come, even if I knew about it, and I definitely won't be telling other people about it either.

EDIT: so the phrase is a variation on some phrase from a film from the 1980s where some guy was having auditory hallucinations ... https://samuelmullen.com/articles/startup-fallacies-if-you-b...

[AndrewKemendo]

The saying from the movie Field of Dreams, wherein a mentally ill man hallucinates a voice telling him to build a baseball field for ghosts.

The quote is only applicable to people who are building baseball fields for ghosts.

[Natsu]

I have visited that specific baseball diamond in the corn fields of Iowa and it's pretty much a ghost town, so I don't think it works even then.

[prawn]

It used to be trivial to rank well in search engines with minimal effort, so if "build it" includes the few seconds to submit to one search engine, yeah, it used to work. You could buy a 2-3 word keyphrase domain, submit it to Google and get traffic for a few minutes of work. I used to rank top 1-2 in my country for "make money" with a random single page site I built in 30 minutes. Had another site (which took half a day to build) make $20k/y with zero ongoing effort.