Any Makers Building in the open?
Would love to see who else is building products in the open on twitter, facebook, medium, etc. It's amazing to see makers dump their negative mindsets of building 'proprietary products in secret' and choosing to build collaboratively. Share your journeys/links below so that others can reach out and connect 👇
I'm building in the open, a tool to help others build in the open :)
Will be ready to use for beta users this week!
Site: http://makerstories.io/
My Story: http://makerstories.io/stories/1/
sooo glad there is someone doind this ! I had this idea in the early 2017 but didn't pursue it due to other commitments.. my motivation was 'just use it' and not 'build it'.. so again, glad you're making it and looks beautiful. signed up to be beta user :D
Thanks for the support!!
Love the concept, Elijah! Can't wait to see this launch and support it. Good luck and keep shipping!
This is exactly what I was looking for this morning! The second link returns an error though.
Fixed, try again! I just pushed out user roles today, so had a little down time :)
just one comment: For some reason I think you should limit posts size. I don't think this should compete with Medium and normal blogs.. just a nice timeline with progress you know.. maybe 360 characters... this sonded insane when Twitter came out but it worked pretty well..
Hm, I thought about it, but I want it to be open to what people want to make it for now, and see how people use it. I agree, I think short updates are more interesting, but don't want to limit creative expression ;)
I am building failory.com in the open. We publish monthly reports on our blog and I am about to launch an /open page with a chart of revenue and another for traffic.
This is amazing. This is going to help a lot more future makers. Followed you on twitter to track the progress!
Thanks a lot! We tweet a lot and share great content, as well as our interviews ;)
hey, you're here. I love failory.com :P
Thanks a lot Victor! I am glad to hear you enjoy Failory :)
I’m being very transparent through a notification feed on my site www.launchfactory.io where you can see what is built and what is to come.
The goal is to build product use cases by real companies and founders.
I recommend barelog to anyone who wants to be public about their process
Going to try out LaunchFactory now. Keep up the hustle. Followed yo on twitter to see the growth :)
I am playing with idea to make complete development of mkdev.me an open source. So that complete code behind website is available on Github. Given what we sell, that seems to be quite cool thing to do... but not brave enough yet!
Go ahead with it! I know a few people who'd love to use this. Amazing work so far. Thanks for sharing, Kirill!
I'm tweeting my progress on @yoeriboven and have a few blog posts lined up for the next few weeks.
Going to launch my app this week, so exciting weeks :)
Exciting! Followed you to keep up with it. Keep updating us please. Let us know if you need any support. Good luck!
I am building a Subscription Revenue dashboard (like Baremetrics) in the open. Just started building it today, completely open source - https://github.com/indusbit/subsdash
Will take the WordPress, Discourse kind of a business model.
I'm building a job board for makers in the open: http://makenext.io.
I have a little website that shows the progress I'm making with it: http://progress.makenext.io. If there's stuff that I'm not talking about, but you'd like to see somewhere, just drop me a message or tweet at me (keeping discussions in the open is also what I think should be done more often).
Any feedback is greatly appreciated! ❤️
that looks like an awesome project, what stack are you using so far?
Thanks a lot Arne!
I'm using plain HTML/CSS so far. When I'm starting to build the platform I'm thinking Elixir/Phoenix, just because I'd like to learn something new and functional programming is fun.
Learning is great, and a worthy goal for any project. Though FYI, a wordpress theme and a jobsite plugin, and this site would be ready to launch in a few days!
That's good advice David. Sometimes I get a little off-track because I want to do something fun and don't take the shortest path to the goal that's right in front of me. I'll look into WordPress, thanks!
P.S. A jobsite plugin? There's really something like that? 😆
Google WPJB - The plugin is called Wordpress job board. I've used it on a project, and I'm happy with it. Needed a little CSS to get exactly what I wanted out of it, though in a single weekend I built a python scraper that scraped jobs from popular job sites, populated a WordPress database with the data and built the front end. I didn't launch it in the end - after reflection, it wasn't a space that I wanted to be in, though the product was spot on.
Thank you David! I'll definitely play around with it and see how easily I can have it fit my needs.
Tbh i think after learning the stack you can get then site ready within OK amount of time with elixir too. And i have to say using wp is just not much fun.. Maybe im the only one feeling like that... "it's not about the destination but the journey" :D
I see where you're coming from Arne and I think there's merit to it. Long term I can see myself getting fed up with WordPress but as David said it's great for a quick validation run. Potentially starting the MVP with WordPress and then transitioning to a stack that's more interesting from a dev perspective could be an option.
How long does it take to learn enough elixir to build a project like this would you say?
I am building my version control system for data in the open at github. Right now the README doesn't really say that. I've setup ifttt linking the repository feed to my twitter account.
From day 1 - https://weardulo.com/blogs/origins
Hi @Dinuka,
I'm near to release the mvp of my new project and will build in the open from there. I also started to be transparent about my previous side projects, especially about revenues. I've been blogging about technical stacks used by my projects. Social networks like Twitter an d Mastodon are great to keep people updated about your projects.
I recently added lots of IH people on Twitter and I was surprised that not so many talk about their projects on Twitter though.
Hey Carl! Already following you on twitter :) Super glad that you are in to building in the open. I think more makers should do this as it destroys all the false concepts indie makers base their products on. I hate the following:
Let's get more indie makers to be more open ⚡️
yes, that's pretty common mistakes from entrepreneurs.
About sharing revenues, that's funny how many people think they won't be taken seriously if they don't announce gigantic revenues.
Sometimes revenues they give just don't make any sense and it's sad to BS about it because it's obvious this side project can not generate such revenues.
I do have a lot of respect for people announcing really small revenues (sometimes $0), explaining why and what will be their path to increase revenues. That's the way to go in my opinion.
I think that's also smart. It forces you to really reflect why you're only at $0 in revenue and what steps will get you towards your set goal.
If you keep all that in private it's easy to just pass it off as something that's just the way it is as nobody is challenging you on it. Having it in the open will just keep it in the back of your head more often than not and your brain will probably chew on it subconsciously.
Agreed 100%. It's the 'next silicon valley billionaire' mindset that drives people to bump the numbers by 10x and share false reports. Just a rat race. Hopefully more and more makers will be transparent about their growth and reach out for support from communities such as this. Thanks for sharing, @chaica and @pheuberger
I'm in the middle of putting together a bunch of stuff on this now. Looking to document the whole journey from basically the first lines of code onwards through a series of weekly updates. I'm coming off the back of a relatively successful freelance / consulting business for the last 4-5 years but was very much over that approach and looking to move into the SaaS space this year. I figured documenting it would be able to serve a whole bunch of needs both for myself and others. I'm looking forward to sharing it when it's actually live but I really appreciate the other links in the meantime.
I've enjoyed the journey written by Jonnie from Cushion for a while: https://cushionapp.com/journal nice mix of transparency, tools and background info.
For my new business, I plan to be more transparent and write more about ideas, techniques, fails, successes(!) and more. Starting this week with a blog “I asked questions before I build my startup (and got customers in return)” @ https://www.munahq.com/blog
If one is interested, the first step I took before building: https://medium.com/p/i-asked-questions-before-i-build-my-startup-and-got-customers-in-return-4e1ecf0ca74e
or via the blog: https://www.munahq.com/blog/ask-questions-before-you-build
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I'm creating a course so creative people like you don't need to learn how to code to launch an idea like that. Believe me when I say it's 100% possible with 0% code..
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Awesome