Why are you building in public?
I love following along with people building in public, so I get it from the angle of "make content people like." But is that the only reason, as a way to get attention? Do you get more or earlier or better feedback? Maybe it makes solo founders feel like part of a team?
If you're currently building in public...why?
As @mattmoris wrote, there are many great reasons.
My primary motivation is validation though. I'm trying to validate:
Ideally, I want some validation of every part of the Product-Market Fit while I'm still building the product. Building in public speeds up that process.
To quantify the validation, I look for:
Haters are great for anti-validation. Normally if someone dislikes what I'm doing, it validates a pain point of some kind. Maybe they dislike the solution, but still feel the pain or feel it in a different area. It can be a valuable comment, even if it's negative.
Great question! I think it's all those things and more, Tony.
Getting attention, getting feedback, and feeling a sense of community are all powerful reasons to build in public.
Three other reasons for me:
I'm sure there's more, but those all seem like good reasons to me.
I'm actually planning to double down on my build-in-public journey starting later today, so I may have more thoughts soon.
That's the big one for me. Writing forces me to coalesce and concentrate my ideas and I think that creates a virtuous cycle with the work I'm doing.
Do you not share your metrics? Mine are all to see https://skilledup.life/metrics
This is a great point!
It's a bloody good marketing technique
It forces you to be accountable to the world.
It add a fun element to life
I got plenty of critics who want to see me fail, sadly which includes a few friends as well.
Here are my metrics https://skilledup.life/metrics
I build in public for many reasons:
I recently interviewed Kevon, who is the master of building in public and actually teaches other people to do so. In case you are interested here is the episode: https://wannabe-entrepreneur.com/episodes/192/
A big part honestly is vanity. Used to want to be part of the academic ivory tower in medicine. It's pretty cool having having an audience of 20+k followers on both Instagram and Twitter to interact with. Before social media outreach was so poor unless you were a big name publisher. It's pretty neat seeing some big names in academic medicine follow you, but also helps us get the word out slowly about our project to medical schools and training programs across the country.
Like most here, I think it's pretty great marketing!
But I also like the idea that people can tune into my journey, including the hard times, and feel like they're apart of they're a part of it. That means the haters will be happy I'm struggling, but the fans/customers will also be supportive!
It also paints an accurate picture of what SaaS entrepreneurship takes. I hope that the journeys of founders who are building in public inform potential founders' decisions on whether they should start a company.