When do you shift from stealth mode to building in public?

Stealth => Build in Public (BIP) is a big jump. One is saying I'm not even going to publicly mention my company to opening up your company to the world. It sounds like you're worried about someone "stealing" your idea. I've personally never understood why someone would build in stealth, except if there is an NDA involved. Ideas are a dime a dozen and even the best sounding ones often fail in practice.

Building in public is a great way to get people, and hopefully users, to join you on you journey. It opens up a community of sharing.

However, if you're concerned about copying, you do open yourself up IF you start being successful. For example, if you BIP and are making $100 MRR, which by the way is fantastic and an amazing accomplishment, isn't going to get a lot of copies...who's going to spend hundreds of hours and sweat to get $100 MRR. However, if you state you're at $1M ARR, well, that will get some folks thinking they can build it too.

I'm not building a SaaS but creating info products at the moment. However, I have some experience building in public, so here's my story.

I launched my latest book on the 19th of April and I posted my first tweet about it on the 25th of January. So three months before the launch. At that time, I didn't have any content, just the idea.

I also wrote a weekly e-mail course containing eight or so e-mails. On the 5th of February, I shared the link with my audience so they can subscribe to it. I think I launched this newsletter in mid-February.

As I said it was a weekly newsletter, and each e-mail had a link to a blog post where people could learn more about the topic. I also published a thread each week with a link to my landing page (not a sales page, it only collected e-mails at the time).

So in my case, I started talking about my product three months before the launch. It was just enough time to keep my audience interested, and I had enough content prepared to share with them.

I think it worked great since the launch did pretty well given my small audience.

Well, you probably want your newsletter and social media / blog before you build in public.

competitors copying the idea

While it does happen occasionally, most people are busy working on their own apps.

An an ideal world, your app and business model should be differentiated in ways that are hard or impossible for copycats to rip off. Or, keep improving and adding features; leave your competitors in the dust.

It’s impossible to receive feedback from users or fellow indiehackers if you don’t actually share what you’re working on.

But I worry about competitors copying the idea or users losing interest.

If newsletters are well-written and engaging, I look forward to them every week. Share your why, your process, your upcoming choices, your struggles, your wins, etc. Of course, it depends on your audience too—are they fellow indiehackers? What are they interested in? If you feel the schedule is too frequent, you can split content between your newsletter and other social media.