How Building in Public Lost Its Way (And How We Can Save It)
Here are the untold truths about the dark side of building in public, and how we can save BIP from going RIP.
I made my first $3K in 3 days, one month before building the product in 2021. I shared the exact strategy I used to achieve this, only to delete it a couple of months later. Why?
Here are the untold truths about the dark side of building in public, and how we can save BIP from going RIP.
First the strategy
The strategy was straightforward. I shared what I was working on and created a pre-order campaign offering a 50% discount in exchange for honest feedback while building the product. It was the Lean Startup approach taken to the extreme.
This approach also helped me reach 100 customers in 20 days. I then shared a detailed case study of how I did it in a blog post. That was the last time I ever shared revenue in public.
That’s because during this period, I was flooded with people copying my product and landing page; some even tried to pose as us.
I quickly learned that it attracted the wrong crowd. My intention was to help other builders and give back to the community that helped me enter this field.
Instead, I discovered that publicly sharing detailed revenue numbers attracts people who are only in it for quick money. While we're all in this game to make money, those who are solely focused on quick cash play a short-term game, which is bad for everyone.
Play the long term game
People playing the short-term game don't care much about the product they're building, their customers, other players, or even the community they're in. They're simply parasites. These people will take every shortcut available, and they don't just copy, they steal.
any organism can only withstand a small number of parasites. When the parasitic element gets too far out of control, you die.
— @naval
The building-in-public community nowadays is filled with these types of people. However, I don't blame them because they're a result of everyone constantly broadcasting how much money they're making. This is why the community attracts such people in the first place.
Building in public is slowly becoming just another "making money online" community. If this continues, what's next? Making videos with leased Lamborghinis and mansions while telling everyone how poor and miserable they are?
In real life, you don't go around shouting to everyone you know how much money you make or have without expecting to be exploited or stolen from. So why would you do it online? To me, it's just foolish.
If you still think this is a good idea, I recommend listening to this episode from the Startup Therapy Podcast
Why building in public turned MRR in public?
It’s clear now how most of the community are publicly sharing their profits, but why this is happening is even more interesting.
Builders are doing this for two reasons:
The obvious reason is status signaling, as this has recently become the way to climb the ladder of status in the community.
The second is to attract an audience who wants to do the same and sell them boilerplates, info products, courses, etc. Sometimes it's a mix of both.
For most builders, the downsides of doing this is 10x the upsides. You're better off focusing on adding value to your potential customers and creating your personal brand around them rather than catering to a community of other builders, unless they're your target audience.
This is why you see many builders creating products for other builders. Ironically, I kinda accidentally did that myself when I started.
This reminds me of my days as a designer, seeing most designers build their portfolios to impress other designers, completely forgetting that the purpose of a portfolio is to attract clients, not impress peers.
We can stop BIP from going RIP
We’ve all seen how other communities that were based on the idea of making money online, quickly dies from the same disease of having more short-term players than long term players, we’ve seen it since the dawn of the internet, CPA, making money products, drop shipping etc.
I’m sure we all don’t want the indie hacking and building in public community to have the bad stigma of being just another form of making money online community.
The build in public community has lost its "why" along the way. We need to get back to it and remind ourselves why we're doing this.
We should all be clear that building in public should be more around building, the money comes as a result of building products people find valuable and enjoy using.
Building in public is also about being on the same journey together. If one of us finds a better route, it makes our journey easier; if one discovers a trap, we all avoid it. But if everyone tries to get the community's attention all the time, we won't move forward.
There's immense power in being part of a community, and being part of a community requires you to add value, contribute positively, Share your learnings to educate, mistakes to help others from repeating them, successes to inspire, failures to help other avoiding them. This is how a community flourish.
Constantly creating drama, craving attention, spreading negativity, hating and playing 0 sum games won't help the community and certainly won't help you either.
You need the right mindset, like operating from an abundance mentality and knowing that the pie gets bigger and there's a slice for everyone. Kudos to @levelsio for being very public about this mindset.
The community needs to attract more builders, not quick money seekers. This change needs to happen from the top down, meaning that popular creators need to adopt the community values themselves first and be role models.
When this happens, more creators will adapt to these values, and it will become the standard.
In short, building in public should return to its roots of helping each other become better product builders to improve our customers' lives and the world, while living the life we want in the process.