Farewell, Building in Public

https://www.coryzue.com/writing/building-in-private/

by herbertl • 4 years ago

324 114 4 years ago

buf3• 4 years ago

I build in public and think about these two things often.

As an indie dev, I make around $800k per year on my two saas companies.

Copycats: There have been some, but the saas companies that I've build have such a hard cold start problem (they're social marketplaces), that all the ones I've seen pop-up flatline. If you have a product that has no moat, sure, don't build in public.

Bragging: In fact, it's the opposite. When I post something, and the comments start rolling in, it's only then that I realize mistakes I've made or things I could've done better.

---

I think building in public is still a decent way to build an audience and to get free insights.

majani• 4 years ago

Strong moat or an original IP like Minecraft

artemonster2• 4 years ago

How did you find your niche?

buf3• 4 years ago

It was a hobby I did in college. Then, the usual -- browsing subreddits, niche forums.

thecoppinger4• 4 years ago

Agreed—it really comes down to what you’re building, and how.

dutchbrit• 4 years ago

I always love seeing numbers and other peoples success. It motivates. I think the majority don’t see it as bragging, it shows you can bootstrap your own startups.

Oras2• 4 years ago

Building in public is mostly screenshots and meaningless info. I say mostly, as sometimes I see some value, like suggesting products for day to day usage.

It can motivate some people to see others progress and succeed in entrepreneurship or side projects. Still, the reality is, running a startup is far more complicated than being squished in tweets and screenshots.

buf3• 4 years ago

I disagree.

Building in public is public roadmap, being active in forums/chats as a rep of your product, putting out questions on debated topics, and of course, screenshots.

The meaningless info you're referring to are IMO copycats of Levels who thinks build in public is just screenshots of MRR.

Oras2• 4 years ago

Why do you need a product to participate in online forums/chats? And how's posting your roadmap building in public? Isn't that a necessity?

WA2• 4 years ago

Building in public is marketing for people who sell to other people who want to leave their 9-to-5.

nmfisher• 4 years ago

I'm starting the transition from "building in private" to "building in public" (emphasis on the "build", though, because the product still isn't ready so it's not like there's any real financials to discuss).

To be honest, my heart does skip a beat when I think about being completely open about everything. It's the same feeling I'd get if I were naked in public - there's nothing wrong with it, I'd just feel very....exposed. I'm not even sure what people would be interested in hearing. How I blew almost $150k on my first venture? How many followers/signups I got from posting X/Y/Z to platforms A/B/C? How much I paid for designs that I didn't like? I suppose a lot of it is experimentation/trial-and-error, but it's tough to go against my natural instinct to hide behind my IDE.

antipotoad2• 4 years ago

How I blew almost $150k on my first venture?

Sounds like a great story waiting to be told, especially because you survived it.

thekillingtree• 4 years ago

all of these are good topics to discuss. coming from the design world in my previous career, i think there's value in discussing how you paid for designs you didn't like!

nicbou2• 4 years ago

I always took "build in public" as a prompt to share what you're working on, and interesting tidbits about your work. In my case, it's mostly because I don't get to talk shop otherwise. My posts are a mix of German bureaucracy updates, web development "TIL"s and new handmade illustrations.

I find that talking about income fosters the wrong kind of discussions with the wrong kind of people. These discussions tend to be extractive rather than conversational.

ignoramous• 4 years ago

There are all kinds of building in public. GitLab sometimes even has CEO meetings and sales pitches streamed to public!

ommarab• 4 years ago

This is my first time learning of the term Building In Public. However a few weeks ago I discovered and fell in love with the GitLab Handbook, and the term I've been using to proselytize to my teammates (lol) was "Open Source Company" or "Documentation as Company."

Of course, GitLab doesn't share everything, and certainly not Money as a Dashboard (you will find live dashboards scattered throughout the Handbook, though). As with most things I've read, they are very transparent and intentional about the decisions they've made to make certain data public vs. limited access vs. internal.

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/confidential...

Open Sourcing accounting internals about a for-profit business always seemed to me a non-starter. Interesting that other companies have experimented with that business model

antipotoad2• 4 years ago

I think you’d also enjoy Posthog’s handbook: https://posthog.com/handbook

artemonster2• 4 years ago

I am always so inspired when someone posts open info like this. But as everything is in life, we cant have nice things because of few assholes that ruin it for everyone :(

berjin6• 4 years ago

I empathise with the comments about copycats. I made a web game and initially put it up on github pages. It was inspired by a similar web game which had been abandoned and I wanted to add features etc so I re-created it from scratch.

Within a week it was cloned and put up on a nice domain with a different logo and the copycat was impersonating me on social media and ranking quite well on Google. It's no longer open source. The copy cat site now has adverts up and links to a network of copycat web games. Many copy cat sites are now embedding my site proxied (to avoid CORS) and surrounded with adverts. These sites rank really well on Google because the copy cat sites link to each other. The game is at https://redactle-unlimited.com if you want to check it out. I haven't made a life changing amount from donations but it actually might be a significant amount for people in poorer economies.

The bottom line is that you need to have a moat by having a trusted brand or database/codebase that can't be imitated.

teddyh2• 4 years ago

You’re being purposefully vague. This is not a good thing if you want to convince people. All the things you refer to could be easily linked to, or referred to by name. You don’t even link to (or name) your own product, or the original abandoned web game.

EDIT: I now see the link in your comment. If it was there originally and I missed it, then I apologize. Otherwise, thank you for adding a link to it!

forrestthewoods• 4 years ago

Sounds like something a copycat would say!

jansan• 4 years ago

You don’t even link to (or name) your own product

GP actually put the link of his game into his comment. It is

redactle-unlimited.com

T-Winsnes• 4 years ago

This reminds me of the 90s when sites where hosted inside iframes to inject ads. ISPs were notorious for doing this. Every site started running javascript to break out of iframes because of it. I'm not sure if this would work for you, but something like this could help you

if (window.location.hostname !== 'your host name') { window.location.replace('url on your website');

_the_inflator• 4 years ago

Thanks for this reminder. You gotta love frames and the corresponding reloads.

beardyw• 4 years ago

So you don't own red*ctle.com?

It's a really good game, just the right level of difficulty.

taink• 4 years ago

From redactle-unlimited.com's About modal:

    About

    Redactle Unlimited was inspired by the original game at redactle.com which was inspired by Wordle. A random Wikipedia article is displayed with important words redacted (hence the original name Redactle). Redactle Unlimited has many useful features: multiplayer, smart guessing to match plurals and inflections (lemmatization), annotations and of course no daily game limit.

So, GP's game is a more feature-rich version of the original sitting at redactle.com if I understood correctly.

berjin6• 4 years ago

Nobody has heard from the redactle.com dev for around a year now. The main difference with redactle unlimited is that the 1 game per day limit is removed and the multiplayer feature is a lot of fun if you're stuck. Just make sure you go to redactle-unlimited.com and NOT the one without the dash!

Narann• 4 years ago

Open source emulation scene have similar problems. Some talented devs basically stop to work on open source emulator because of highly successful copycat (here, RetroArch)[1].

*[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/si2v5s/duckstati...

EMIRELADERO2• 4 years ago

because of highly successful copycat (here, RetroArch)

Is it a copycat if it publicly discloses the original?

noirscape2• 4 years ago

RA spats don't really focus on it being a copycat/multisystem "emulator combiner" from my experience (in fact, non-RA stuff with a similar goal like OpenEmu usually doesn't tend to be at the source for people quitting the emudev scene). It's typically problems with maintainer; he's a huge narcissist who pretty much thinks he's the kingmaker of the emulation scene.

With the sole exception of MAME and mGBAs conflicts with RA (which respectively are about having extremely old cores in RA & the fact that their PS3 port uses a dubiously legal homebrew SDK that uses components from Sonys own proprietary SDK), the overwhelming majority of spats tend to occur because the maintainer has a bad habit of throwing hissy fits over his personal opinions of emulation.

Specifically, the guy gets pissed whenever someone doesn't want to put in extra legwork to support libretro (which due to it being too overengineered is not an insignificant amount of work), gets angry whenever someone licenses out their emulator for a paid device (since RA can't legally be licensed out due to being a mess in terms of licenses) and so on and so forth. It tends to result in said emudev getting a cavalcade of angry IRC messages from the maintainer, backtalking in RetroArch IRC channels and public whining on the RA twitter account/blog (which due to their reach tends to result in users of RA with barely an understanding of the situation sending further angry messages to the emudev) and in at least one notable case, anonymously complaining about other emudevs on 4chan (but being so transparent about it that he was easily identifiable).

Just generally really immature stuff.

air7• 4 years ago

X-Frame-Options: DENY

Adding this HTTP header makes your site not work if embedded.

berjin6• 4 years ago

The embedding is more sophisticated than just an iframe or object tag. Generally they'll proxy the target site to their own origin and strip headers.

ilyt• 4 years ago

Go read the article!

That is trivial to remove via proxying, which author mentioned them doing.

Really, anything you add to the page can be just removed that way. Only thing you can try is to somehow differentiate attacker traffic from normal users but with ubiquity of VPN providers good luck

sourcecodeplz• 4 years ago

In the old times people would just shoot you or before clubbed to the head and take your cow/wife/house etc.

Yes, now we have some laws and all that but in reality: stealing is still rampant, just a different kind!?

moffkalast2• 4 years ago

The worst kind of stealing, the kind where you still have your property!

thecoppinger4• 4 years ago

I reflect on this often. There’s something to be said for the lost ways of retribution of old, and the evolution that came with it.

If modern bankers and sycophantic politicians et al tried their modus operandi back in the era of tribes, I’m quite sure they were removed from the gene pool fairly quickly.

terryf2• 4 years ago

Sorry to be that guy, but this is exactly why lawyers and IP protection were invented.

As a hacker, I hate that these are needed. As a member of society that tries to be considerate and respectful of others, this seems like a ridiculous and wateful overhead.

However, as a realist with some experience in being brain-raped by a bigger company, unfortunately you need to protect yourself from the people that aren't nice or don't care.

bmitc• 4 years ago

How are those useful when it is likely that the copycats are in a different country?

prakhar8973• 4 years ago

I'm the owner of https://github.com/prakhar897/awesome-wordle.

You can mail me the details of your site and the competitor's site.

I'll make sure to add a red flag against their sites to publicly condone this behaviour. I know this might not do much but it'll be a start.

rojobuffalo• 4 years ago

"condone" means accept, allow, approve. I think you intended the opposite.

prakhar8973• 4 years ago

*Condemn instead of condone. I'm not able to edit the last comment.

gjm114• 4 years ago

I'd like to remark for anyone not already familiar with the game in question that ...

* Redactle Unlimited is a big improvement on original-Redactle

* Redactle is (at least for those who like such things) a terrific game, and you should totally go to redactle-unlimited.com and take a look

* as berjin says, the creator of original-Redactle hasn't been heard from in ages and shows every sign of having completely abandoned the game, so Redactle Unlimited isn't an unethical name-grab

(It looks as if redactle-unlimited.com is #2 on Google and the main clone site is #1; on DuckDuckGo it's the other way around, so well done DDG.)

gjm114• 4 years ago

I see this got downvoted. I vigorously endorse everyone's right to downvote things they think are bad, but I'm baffled as to what is supposed to be bad about the above, and if I've done something bad without knowing it I'd like to find out what. If whoever downvoted it happens to be around and willing to explain, your chances of making me not do whatever-you-didn't-like in the future are much better if you do so; your downvote unfortunately literally can't do that since I don't know what it's for.

(Top hypotheses: 1. too much thread drift; 2. suspicion that I'm some sort of a shill for Redactle Unlimited; 3. actually it wasn't meant to be a downvote at all and it's just because the up/down arrows are easy to misclick on mobile devices. For what it's worth, it doesn't feel to me like an unreasonable amount of thread drift, I have no connection to RU other than enjoying playing it, and I entirely agree that the arrows are fiddly on mobile.)

jrmg• 4 years ago

Redactle Unlimited (launched in July) looks like it launched about three months after Redactle (launched in April), and is using the name of the original one in its name.

I’m not sure what I feel about this if the original really is abandoned (is something ‘abandoned’ if it is working fine and just hasn’t been updated in eight months?) - but it definitely feels a little rich that the Redactle Unlimited author is complaining about copycats.

systems_glitch• 4 years ago

This has put our open-source hardware efforts out of public development. It stopped when I'd posted a picture of one of our prototypes, and it was ripped off before I even got a final quote from a metals vendor.

I feel like doing it behind closed doors results in many projects getting completed way slower. It still gets released as open source (and eventually ripped off anyway), but now there's no visibility into the process from the outside, which had been a big source of personal motivation in the past.

mysterydip• 4 years ago

I'm working on a webgame right now, so I appreciate the perspective. I was planning to open the source, but this changed my stance on that.

pnt12• 4 years ago

I learned about the game and I found it a neat challenge! Thanks for that.

tablet2• 4 years ago

Building in public is fun and attracts customers that share your culture and attitude. Thus they are more loyal.

https://fibery.io/open-startup

esskay2• 4 years ago

Only when done right. When low-effort posting of said build in public data is done it just looks spammy. It's the IndieHackers problem, that whole site is full of people going "I agree, I did that with <mysite>.com"

tablet2• 4 years ago

Everything looks spammy if you do it without craft, quality and soul.

saimiam3• 4 years ago

IndieHackers used to be such a brilliant resource for genuine conversation and camaraderie. I think the homepage layout revamp with a hundred different columns and tabs and tags and sh!t completely ruined the earlier ethos.

I remember posts routinely getting dozens of comments and responses. Nowadays, if a post gets low double digit comments, it is doing very well. Sad, imho.

marban• 4 years ago

I find the whole BIP movement somewhere between cringe and naive. Also, while it might be a cheap way to promote your product (Though I doubt the audience will also be your customers), it's the equivalent of the reason why someone works out — Do I want to impress the other guys, or am I doing it for health benefits?

urthor• 4 years ago

That's an unfair comparisom to gym braggarts I'd say.

Unlike with working out, build in public provides a valuable source of engagement and feedback.

Those are real, concrete reasons, to build in public.

wenbin• 4 years ago

I resonate with everything said in the post based on my experience building my own projects over the past decade.

I'd say that indie hackers don't need to feel pressured to build in public. You have the freedom to share or not share anything. It's your work. If you don't feel comfortable sharing too much, it's totally okay. People might blame you not open source your entire project. People might blame you for not sharing your personal income. Ignore them. Be yourself.

spiffytech• 4 years ago

It's certainly not obligatory, but sharing one's journey is very edifying.

I found patio11's old blog inspirational, both for the specific learnings and for showing what a lone person can do. I'd like to someday inspire others in the same way.

It's a sad loss for the world if bad actors ruin this.

waboremo• 4 years ago

I don't believe sharing one's journey is going away any time soon, but it's going to be far more reflective in nature and also more polished. Due to moving away from building in public, you're also not going to get to see the gritty mistakes they make in their codebase along the way.

Which is great news if you want more patio11 blogs, as his were very reflective and less about the direct building in public. Not so great if you want more levelsio type blogs from lesser known folks.

seydor• 4 years ago

The problem starts in the inability to create an audience. All the roads are taken.

julianeon• 4 years ago

It’s funny that this guy mentions Pieter Levels as being “inspiring” when he does it. That guy has a huge audience so when he debuts some new product it’s like… cool, good for you, but why does that matter for an indie dev? The most relevant part of that success - having 100,000 eyeballs checking out everything you do - is the hardest to achieve.

WA2• 4 years ago

I think it's the story of Pieter. He started at zero several years ago and build his way up with no prior coding experience. That's the inspiring part. It's not what he does now, because as you said: he has an audience and launching within that audience makes a big difference.

tchock23• 4 years ago

There is a newsletter that finds stories of people being successful building in public and gives readers ideas for how to clone them.

Ironically, that newsletter has also been cloned multiple times.

Entrepreneurship is difficult enough. I don’t get why you would want to build in public these days (at least to the degree some people do).

k__2• 4 years ago

The copycat issue sounds like a capitalism problem.

If a process is good and easy to be copied, it's actually a good thing. It's just that our incentivisation mechanisms currently don't capture it.

davidjfelix• 4 years ago

First, I completely agree.

I think this is where a lot of IP proponents would argue that IP is a way to form capital where it doesn't exist - around formalizing ideas and processes into something that you are legally entitled to rent. I think this really dangerously damages ideas that can help people and I think that it's a terrible crutch for a bad system.

czue2• 4 years ago

I agree, though information asymmetry (what you know that your competition doesn't) is a huge competitive advantage in a capitalistic market. Building in public erodes that information asymmetry away, giving away much of your competitive advantage.

k__2• 4 years ago

Yes, and that's sad.

typpo• 4 years ago

I relate to this a lot. I used to do a yearly roundup of all my side projects, which were generally well received by HN. Then some of my projects started making money and the copycats came.

Carving out a niche is more important to me than building in public. I'm not one of those guys on Twitter making $1M/yr and I don't need a personal brand.

Good luck to Cory - I've enjoyed reading his stuff.

publicbuilder30• 4 years ago

Relatives coming after your money lol?

komali2• 4 years ago

I guess it could be considered arrogant to talk about making lots of money, but in this specific instance, given that the author shares so much information, it's far more valuable than braggardly.

To be considered braggardly would mean that we accept a capitalist definition of value and worth being how much money someone earns or makes. That means that we accept both that the market efficiently rewards societal contributions with money (lmao no) AND that those that are rich because they got a good spawn point are as valuable to society as someone that has the same net worth through their own work "from scratch."

I reject this and therefore I'm disheartened that this person will stop being radically transparent. The information is valuable. I understand the copycat thing though, that makes sense.

I try to avoid linking my own shit on here but I did literally just last week write a post on this subject: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/share-your-salary/ after a similar conversation with someone who makes a lot of money, and how they felt uncomfortable sharing their salary cause they didn't wanna seem like they're bragging. No ads or trackers or anything (other than goatcounter).

alin23• 4 years ago

Now I feel that sharing the revenue over and over looks a bit by bragging, but I'm pretty sure it's just because I've already seen too many #buildinpublic tweets.

I'm always reminded by the fact that I myself started selling Lunar (https://lunar.fyi) specifically because in a private discussion with the developer of rotato.app, he told me he makes $16k/month with his apps. I was making less than half of that, working on things that felt useless and ready to be scrapped by the next manager, and feeling miserable every day.

Because of this, I also started sharing my revenue in comments from time to time, in the hope that someone would be inspired as I was.

But I strive to do this as rarely as possible. Some of these #buildinpublic journeys create the false impression that it's easy to get that kind of money. It isn't, a lot of it is chance.

Since Lunar, I've put my countless ideas into some other apps at https://lowtechguys.com, but very few generate more than $100/month of revenue. There is room to grow, but hitting a niche is usually the biggest factor in getting sustained revenue high enough to live on.

nicbou2• 4 years ago

I come across your path every once in a while, and I appreciate how you talk about your work.

Honesty and openness is really hard to come by when you need it the most. When you're in a position to share, you start to understand why: it's all downsides.

indymike• 4 years ago

Building in public has always seemed to be an interesting marketing strategy where you trade gaining customers now for having more competitors later.

breck2• 4 years ago

IMO you have some misguided views on what we are all doing here on earth. It's not a zero sum game, we should all be building bigger and better things.

You shouldn't worry about people copying your old stuff, because you should be on to the next thing. Building the next bigger, better thing.

#buildInPublic has worked great for you—you reached the next level. But now you are considering pulling the ladder up, so you can look down on people, rather than looking ahead to the next hill to climb.

I'd urge you to not only not stop building in public, but to double down and build even more in public. For starters, ditch the copywrong and go public domain. After all, this world wide web that you are 100% dependent on to make your business was built by TBL and released to the public domain.

czue2• 4 years ago

(author here)

This is an interesting take, and I agree with a lot of it. As I mentioned in the post, I'm not going to stop building in public entirely, and to some extent part of why I'm changing up what I'm doing is to be on to the next bigger, better thing. I felt the current version was leading to stagnation. "More bigger swings" is an emerging theme for me.

I didn't understand your last point - possibly because "copywrong" and "TBL" are new terms to me...

breck2• 4 years ago

TBL = Tim Berners Lee

copywrong = A better term than the one we use. Sorry, I've been involved with the "Intellectual Freedom Movement" for about 17 years. We say IP = "imaginary property" and we say things like (c)opywrong and (c)hains.

Farewell, Building in Public

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