[pembrook]

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).

[TechDebtDevin]

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.

[mattgreenrocks]

They are those people, just a bit more technical.

[winwang]

Currently a technical solo founder. Got any video recs?

[TechDebtDevin]

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.

[winwang]

Thanks!

[colecut]

That seems a bit harsh. They aren't forcing anyone to watch or scamming anyone by building in public.

[reportgunner]

Forcing no, tricking yes

[moneywoes]

do you have any examples?

[danenania]

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.

[pembrook]

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).

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[mattgreenrocks]

It’s such a joke. Its nearly impossible to find decent places to talk about it online because of this.

[reportgunner]

Same like cryptobros selling signals or trading courses to other cryptobros.

[CM30]

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.

[wheatgreaser]

is there like a right way to do it?

[CM30]

Market in places your customers frequent in addition to developer/creator related communities. Have a social media presence, post in relevant subreddits/Discord servers/forums, target your actual audience with paid ads if you go that route, try to get coverage from sites and creators that target your customers, present at events that your customers visit etc.

You really want to be known as an 'authority' in your area of choice and have your product in front of as many people in its target audience as possible, so people trust you know what you're doing and take you seriously.

[andyjohnson0]

> 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

[mattgreenrocks]

Product Hunt Law?

[MavisBacon]

oh boy, spot on

[marcosdumay]

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.

[lightandlight]

> > 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.

[YounesDz]

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.

[lelandfe]

You are what you eat

[citboin]

The Bandwagon effect, maybe?

[cromulent]

Demagoguery.

[mvkel]

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

[mattgreenrocks]

This is the result of indie hackers believing that social media success is an integral part of building something.

[AlienRobot]

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.

[duped]

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.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

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.

[fuzztester]

>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 ...

[a13n]

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.

[baxtr]

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?

[meiraleal]

Font awesome? They made a huge crowdfunding for a new Web Awesome project with much bigger scope

[laike9m]

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...

[cynicalpeace]

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 :)