Does building in public work if your target market isn't indie hackers?

for sure. you just need to build in front of your target market though. building in front of IH for a different market, while still enjoyable, won't reap all the potential benefits of building in public.

Yes, because building in public is more than a marketing ploy.

While I was working on Fantasy Congress, building in public helped me maintain accountability and focus. It helped me organize my thoughts and prioritize. And I received help from other founders, as well as expanded my network. All of these things have benefited me a ton.

I'm terrified to share my e-com brand on my personal channels (FB, Twitter, Insta, etc)

My gut says no. Building in public takes time. If the return on that time isn't useful feedback or potential customers, it seems like that time would be better invested elsewhere.

I've been building in public in IH and Twitter for the last 16 weeks and launched the alpha version in March 2022. at vadelabs.

Building in Public has helped us inculcate a discipline that recently helped us land our first customer. It also motivates us in our journey to maintain consistency and has helped us get feedback.

Totally.

If done well, your Build in Public story can make valuable connections, grows your brand, develops an audience, draws lessons from and engages prospective customers, and earns backlinks. It also helps you develop in your communication of the product.

Define "work". One of the main pros of building in public is that you can get feedback right away and get to "product-market fit" faster.

I'm seeing the "building in public" approach work well in the medical niche; people that have certain medical problems want to follow new and novel approaches to solving those issues.

So basically my answer is "yes". If you find a target market and they're looking for a better solution than the ones available currently then building in public can definitely get you some traction.

APK Editor is a free utility tool developed by SteelWorks for mobile devices. It is an Android Package (APK) editor that lets users open and modify various.

I'm not building SaaS but info products. My target audience is Laravel developers. So far, building in public worked amazingly well for me.

But I think it's easier to do with info products because I'm not sharing my progress, but instead, I can create valuable threads, e-mails, and blog posts from the content I'm creating.

So it's naturally very valuable, interesting, and engaging to my audience.

Publicity disregarded, it will still help to build a discipline and learn to talk about the product.

But it definitely depends on the market if you're able to attract a valuable audience.

Yes yes yes.

I've been building in public for a year now, and the people I've met and the connections I've made are well worth it.

My target isn't IH at all :)

Yeah, it works...I am building my startup Float in public. Read more about it here
https://medium.com/@navdeep_yadav/50-investors-said-no-to-us-so-now-we-are-building-our-startup-in-public-20cca7e150df

I like to think building in public is more synonymous with indie hackers but not exclusive to indie hackers. Your target market might not be so familiar with building in public and so you may not gain as much traction than you would if your product was geared towards indie hackers. Just my 2 cents.

Building in public can be a great way to share your process with the world. If you're on a mission to make something for other people and you want them to know that you're working hard on it, then building in public might be right for you.

But if you're building a product for other people and they want something that is not an open source model, then building in public may not be the best strategy.

Building in public works if your target market is indie hackers who are looking for inspiration and want to see how others do things. It doesn't work if your target market isn't indie hackers who are looking for inspiration but instead are looking for products that solve their problems.

Absolutely.

Think about it this way: you're building for a target market that isn't indie hackers, but you still have to create a product that they want. The only difference is that your target market doesn't know what they want yet—they're still figuring it out.

So here's the deal: you need to give them a product that they can use in their everyday lives and make them feel like they've discovered something new and exciting. And you do this by building in public! You show people the process of creating something from scratch, so they feel like they're part of the progress, too.

It's a question that plagues every founder who wants to build in public: should you make your product public right away, or keep it private?

It depends.

If you're building for indie hackers, the answer is simple: go public as soon as possible. Their needs are well-defined and easy to meet, and they'll give you the feedback you need to get there.

If your target market isn't indie hackers, though, it gets trickier. Your target market will be more diverse and harder to define—and that means that it's going to take longer for people in your target market to find out about your product. And if no one's using your product yet, how do you know whether it works? It might not work for anyone!

It's tempting to just go ahead and launch anyway—to just put something out there so people can start using it right away. But if this is a problem that affects most of your potential users but not all of them—if some people would love what you've built but others would feel frustrated by it—it might be better to wait until after launching until seeing what those reactions are before starting down.

Building in public is a great idea if you're targeting your product at indie hackers, but it's not the only way to go.

If you're not sure what an indie hacker is, they're folks who love to tinker with code and build things. They like making new things out of old things, and they're really into open source. They think that sharing their work is important and worth doing, even when it means that more people can use their code. They don't want to be famous or rich—they just want to make cool stuff.

If that sounds like your target market, building in public makes a lot of sense. It gives them access to your project as soon as it's ready, so they can start playing around with it immediately. You'll get feedback from people who are actually interested in what you're doing—people who have already expressed interest in learning about this kind of thing! And since open source projects are free for everyone else who might be interested in using them later on down the line (as long as they follow the license), there's no real downside there either.

Hey!

I'm glad to hear you're thinking about building in public. I think it's a great way to share your work with other developers, and it can also help you spot bugs in your code before they get out into the wild.

However, if your target market is not indie hackers (if you're selling to larger companies, for example), I wouldn't recommend building in public.

Building in public is all about transparency—and that's great if you want to get feedback from other developers who are familiar with open source projects. But if your product is intended for the general public, transparency could end up hurting your sales because people will be able to see how much work goes into making each feature work. If consumers were able to see how much time went into creating each feature of my product, they might not be willing to pay for it!

What do you mean by building in Public?

For sure. Buffer is quite transparent about how they do things and their user base is wide: https://buffer.com/resources/transparent-product-roadmap/

And a jacket brand can also build in public involving their consumers in their production: https://buffer.com/resources/paynter-jacket-build-in-public/

It all comes down to how you define build in public in your own way and build trust with the people you're serving.

I think it helps for 2 reasons:

1. Getting initial traction
2. Learning from the community and avoiding some mistakes

I think of "building in public" as similar to Kickstarter or IndieGoGo. In those cases, those makers are building in public as we define it. But you see them able to raise money and get people interested in the products that they are creating.

I think the real key is to find your target market and build in public to them. That might mean occasionally sharing your blog post or an interesting tweet. It's really just participating in their community as one of them and demonstrating value. You can eventually demonstrate that value to them and the community by introducing your product.

For me, with getparthenon.com, I'm doing weekly blog posts (done one so far and will do another tomorrow) and honestly, it seems great just for me. I constantly have the feeling like I'm achieving nothing or getting nothing done but being able to see a list of stuff I've done really helps put things into perspective.

The sharing small tidbits on Twitter is more just to share I don't really think people are going to buy my product just because I tweeted about it. But I do think it'll help. Especially since it's more of an investment in them and those are often done with a bit of research and other stuff. Even if they aren't an indie hacker and are a business the ability for them to see I'm actively working on it I think should provide reassurance that it's not just going to disappear and that I'm fully committed to it.

No matter the audience of your product, building in public can be a good way to be held accountable to your goals, get feedback on your progress, and build a following for future projects.

I've seen it work for tons of people outside of indie hackers. They probably wouldn't call it "building in public" though, as that seems to be a term for indie hackers.

Lots of people are sharing their progress and allowing visibility into how they're building their businesses, whether it's indie hackers, wellness practitioners, youtubers, newsletter creators, course creators, etc. etc. And people always seem to love it. It brings the founder/maker down to earth and makes the reader feel like they're a part of the team.

Just my two cents.

I think it depends. If your product is built for non-Indie Hackers, then it doesn't make much sense to 'waste' your time building an audience of Indie Hackers (i.e. the people generally interested in building in public posts). But if you plan to one day build a product for Indie Hackers, then growing an audience with IHs is a good idea...not totally sure if it's worth the time investment though.

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