Falling in love with #BuildInPublic
This was originally posted on Jason Leow's writing platform LifeLog. I write there every day, and you totally should too. Not a sponsorship, just love the site.
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I've recently started looking more into the #buildinpublic movement/philosophy/whatever it is, and the more I look into it the more I like it. First off, it's brilliant from a marketing perspective, especially if you're looking to build solutions for developers who like to see the secret sauce of what they are using. You're consistently updating your current or future stakeholders about the things you're building, which means your product continues to sit in front of people's faces, and they get to see how far your product/app has come over time. There's kind of that elitist feeling of "oh I've been following that unicorn moonshot startup since the founder first ran 'create-react-app.'"
Second, it's a small-ish step toward getting rid of the toxic idea of intellectual property. Especially as an anarchist, I believe in the wholesale destruction of the current approach to intellectual property, and I believe we would all benefit as a society if we took a more collaborative, less market-driven approach to building. #buildinpublic is a great approach to that, in that it shares the building process across a wide community of people. It's inherently more collaborative than the nonsense "stealth mode" approach that a lot of startups have, especially when it's combined with open source software development.
Finally, it encourages accountability and transparency. Being open about your financials can show other founders more realistic expectations for their startups than the constant focus on this or that unicorn, that there's a lot of gray area in between the binary "fail or moonshot" that you often hear about on IndieHackers and elsewhere.
I think I've always accidentally leaned toward the #buildinpublic approach. I've developed things on my YouTube and blogged about my research as just a hobby, something similar to just nerdy ranting, without even realizing that it was a thing. It will be a philosophy I follow for a long, long time.
Thanks for sharing the insight. I have given decent thought to the "building in public" thing but couldn't convince myself to do this
There are mostly 2 reasons
Well, these are just my opinions. Feel free to disagree. Would love to hear your thoughts too.
Agreed. I'll admit it doesn't come naturally to me at times, I've always been a private person. But in this new socio-technical landscape, I feel that it's almost an imperative to make one's self public. The opportunity costs are too great not to.
Jip, I've also only recently found out about the #BuildInPublic movement and I must say it's an entirely different approach to what I'm used to and have observed over the last few years. I like your statement on its advantages from a marketing perspective. To me, it also creates that sense of "community" because future stakeholders can feel that they're a part of a product's story & development.