Does Build in Public Work?
Over the past 2 weeks, I've researched hundreds of Indie Hackers to get insights into what makes some of them successful.
One thing that stood out, was the effect that big Twitter followings had on the success of a project.
In particular when a founder is practicing a "build-in-public" growth strategy.
After combing through projects to determine if they were successful, and then looking through those ones to see if they practiced building-in-public, I found that only a small minority of successful projects had a founder that built in public.
Is building in public a good strategy?
It is the case that founders who have a big following have an easier time getting customers for their projects.
However, it's not the case that it's the only way to succeed or even the best way to succeed.
Over and over again I found successful projects (that have $15K+ of MRR) with founders that have 50 to 100 followers on Twitter.
Yet they've found plenty of success, and frankly, probably had an easier time.
What did they do instead?
The projects I found focused on 2 areas of marketing, and in this order:
- Cold Traffic - Getting in front of people who don't know you.
- Referral Traffic - Getting people who know you to share your project.
For the cold traffic, there's a very heavy emphasis on earned media and PR. That means they have a lot of niche blogs that have posts about their product.
They also get on every directory they can. Everywhere across the internet, there are comparison posts that compare their product to their competitors.
Often, they've done a few press releases to get extra exposure.
That does a lot for them. But upon closer inspection, I saw that often, it was part of a broader SEO strategy.
The side benefit of doing all this PR-style marketing creates backlinks for their projects.
One project I found had over 1 Million backlinks on their homepage.
In conclusion for the cold traffic, they focus on getting referral traffic from relevant websites and then leverage those links for their own SEO.
Then comes the referral traffic. This seems to be where the compounding growth comes from.
This takes a couple of forms. Mainly a strong referral campaign that offers users something like a $50 credit to share the website with a friend.
If there's a natural fit for a product, then the free version will include a "made with..." bubble. (Like when you use the free version of a website builder)
The last form of referral marketing seems to be through affiliates. All of the successful projects had affiliate programs. Now, that doesn't mean they played a huge role in their success, but it does imply a focus on getting new customers from your current customers.
Would I focus on building in public?
After doing this research I'm not so sure I would focus my time on building in public.
Instead, I would focus on getting my message where traffic already exists, instead of building a following of my own.
Then I would leverage that traffic to build a following for my project over time, without sacrificing getting customers in the present.
What do you think? Is building in public a good strategy?
Affiliate programs definitely help out a lot. They get your marketing done without having to hire anyone or needing much marketing knowledge yourself.
Personally, I feel SEO + Build in Public is easy to do for someone who doesn't already have a good fan following. But once they get one product out which is loved by decent amount of people they might have an easy time having Cold traffic through earned media.
Can't help but agree. My only additional note would be the situation most Indie Hackers find themselves in. Given it takes a good amount of time to build the actual product before you start marketing, they can spend a good amount of time before generating any revenue. Something like SEO and build in public produces results over the long-term. I think there needs to be something that gets customers in the short term. For that reason I think Earned media and may outbound are good strategies in the beginning.
it's good but shouldn't be your only traffic source in my opinion as it often takes a lot of time and doesn't guarantee results.
Yeah definitely agree. It's important, especially at the beginning, to have something that's more effective in the short term.
I would say it depends. We chose not to build in public, mainly because we didn't see any real benefits. Our customers are SMEs and have little exposure and probably interest on the details on how we build our company. So we didn't expect any real return on building public. For a different audience it might be very useful or to get feedback on your ideas when you don't work in a team.
This is very sound reasoning and exactly my thought process too. Build in public draws a very particular kind of audience. Mainly other people who are building as well. If that's your audience, then it's probably a good path. But you have to start with the fundamental question of who your customer is.
Thanks for the post, glad to hear a somewhat different opinion! I 100% agree with you that building in public is not required to grow a product as an individual.
As you said, for people who already have a large audience, building in public makes sense, and talking about the success of building in public is simply a logical consequence which brings even more followers looking for role models.
I feel like this is especially true for people who in addition to building in public, offer a product targeted to people building in public.
This is not to imply that successful build-in-public-people only do it to get more followers. It's probably a great way to get to know like minded people. But again, as you said, I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to focus on building in public if you there's no audience at all.
The way I handle it for myself: I'll build in public "as a side effect". If there's cool stuff I built, or interesting problems I solved, I'll share them. But I don't force it. (which you can see from my Twitter profile with a single post from last week 🤣)
Yeah I think this is the right approach. If your audience is there then great! otherwise, it might just be a good way to chat with other people you can learn from. But you have to be very sober about where your audience for your product actually is and how you can best reach them.