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Aleks Bochkov

#buildinpublic is it a new hype trend or smart way for brand awareness???

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I noticed lately a hype around #buildinpublic hashtag. What are your thoughts on it? Does it help to build a community of users? Does it help to spike brand awareness? Whats your experience and do you think its worth it?

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Arvid Kahl
Honestly, I think it's an incredibly powerful method to build awareness and excitement. Right now, today, my book is #1 on PH. I involved my future readers in the process of writing the book from day one. Every step of the way, people could see what I was doing, and more importantly, impact the product. Those feedback cycles are incredibly powerful, and they instil a sense of product ownership with your audience and future customers. People love to witness a journey. If you can make them part of it, even better.
Aleks Bochkov
@arvidkahl Love your book! 🚀🚀🚀 Thanks for sharing your insights! We also considering starting this journey! Just trying to figure out the right way to do it, so your books comes real handy! Kudos to you! 🤗
Gabe Perez
It’s a great way to keep yourself accountable while building hype around your product. @5harath this your type of question.
Aleks Bochkov
@5harath @gabe__perez So the main idea around #buildinpublic is to show the progress, right?
Sharath Kuruganty
I have been building in public my whole maker career and the results are phenomenal. I shipped 12+ projects, built a community around me, took an idea from $0 to $1.2K MRR in 10 weeks, and got to work for Product Hunt. There is more upside to building in public than many think. What it is: 1. A way to invite your users on to a journey with you. 2. A way to showcase what you are learning, sharing the lessons, highs, and lows with others. 3. A great way to nurture a community. What it is not: 1. A shortcut 2. A marketing hack 3. A get-results-quick scheme Happy to talk more @bochkovaleks and let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, @gabe__perez for the mention 🙌🏼
Eugene Hauptmann
@5harath Nice track record! And good example of why building in public works.
Nick Glavin
@5harath @gabe__perez @bochkovaleks , I think its also motivating especially in the early stages if you are the only person on the project. You feed of other peoples success as a motivation to keep moving forward yourself
Aleks Bochkov
@gabe__perez @5harath These are some great results you achieved via building in public! Kudos to you 🚀🚀🚀 I get your point that it ain't a marketing hack, but i think many start doing it specifically for that purpose. Would be happy to learn more from you about your experience and success story 😺
Kanika Tibrewala
My thought is that one size doesn't fit all– not all products benefit from building in public, but some sure do. Three factors coming to mind that affect this decision are: 1. Is it a highly innovative solution? Does it ride on a unique technology? Is the product worthy of a patent of any kind? If yes, you might choose NOT to build in public. 2. Is the industry/domain already saturated? Is it a red-ocean market? Are there strong competitors? If yes, you might choose to build-in-public. 3. Is your TG already aware of the problem you're trying to solve? If yes, you'll choose to build-in-public to play in the problem space a little longer. If no, you can go-to-market with a solution directly and need not build with your audience. For example, with https://getpause.com/, we are building alongside known competitors. We are also solving a problem (leave management and team planning) that all organisations are already aware of. While we are building an opinionated product with a strong focus, we aren't creating our own technology. So, we chose to #buildinpublic. --- This helped us tremendously in many ways: 1. We articulated our competitive advantage and value proposition quickly and efficiently by testing our hypotheses with real users. 2. We identified our focal target customers from a range of hypothetical and ambiguous ones after having spoken to a range of them earlier on. 3. Through 1 & 2, our product vision and feature prioritisation got stronger, saving us time and money. This also helps our product stay relevant for our target users. 4. Ideating on our marketing strategy was clearer and less ambiguous than it would've been. 5. We were able to differentiate our paying customers earlier on, so we knew where to invest our customer service investments. 6. We identified failing strategies across product, marketing and sales earlier on in the process. This gave us time to pivot whilst keeping investments to the minimum.
Aleks Bochkov
@kanikat1010 Thank you sooo much for such a profound insight! Do you continue building in public? Or was till you reached a certain milestone?
Kanika Tibrewala
@bochkovaleks We're still pre-launch. So we haven't cemented on a path forward. It does feel that we might continue to do this, especially given the benefits we've seen and the position we're in. However, depending on the traction we get, and the direction we choose to take the product, this might be subject to change.
Ope Oyekanmi
@kanikat1010 what platform do you use to keep your TG posted on your progress?
Kanika Tibrewala
@ooyekanmi We use Twitter for the most part because our team is active there and has a following. With our beta customers, we use Intercom and often jump on to research calls. Research calls aren't scalable, but they're extremely insightful for when we want to dive deep.
Jonathan Barone
Yes there are many of us building in public. From veterans sharing metrics and lessons learned to fresh joiners sharing updates and asking help for making decisions related to their products. I would go further and add that it is a community within the indie hacker community. And a very passionate one! There are many advantages of doing it: - build a brand and attract potential customers - build a support system (other founders/creators) - inspire others to build and add their contribution to this community - foster opportunities because ideas get exchanged continously and at rapid pace Many people doubt about its efficacy claiming competition can steal ideas, or it is not really viable once you are successful as you'd have to focus on much more distribution strategies than only pushing on BIP on say Twitter. To that I would argue, the most important is that it is a mindset. You genuinely do it because you want to bring value to others by sharing mistakes/wins and what you have learned. Finally, I would really encourage anyone to follow https://twitter.com/MeetKevon. He really embodies the BIP mindset.
Aleks Bochkov
@jonathan_barone Thanks for your insights. I like this one "To that I would argue, the most important is that it is a mindset. You genuinely do it because you want to bring value to others by sharing mistakes/wins and what you have learned."
Ken Moo
I think it's a good way to keep yourself accountable, and when things are tough, you know that there are followers rooting for you. This can be the strength that keep you going. And of course, get more attention to the product you are building.
Aleks Bochkov
@ken_moo Good point! Thank you for your insight! We might opt in for the challenge :)
Sudharshan
I pretty much built in public and got 63+ sales of http://getcommunitylist.com/ in 1 week. Was very transaprent about my earnings and kept posting updates. It works.
Aleks Bochkov
@cbsudu Wow! Thats great results! Would be love to get in touch and learn more from you!
Vlad Dekhanov
I believe if you have a twitter you are already in public. In my opinion it's generally hyped workable tag to get audience in a cheap way.
Aleks Bochkov
@vladdekhanov_en Thanks for the feedback. Have you tried it? Do you get audience/ users to your product that way?
Vlad Dekhanov
@bochkovaleks Well, if be honest I don't feel comfortable with the idea to tweet often about my startup and growth of it (not my nature) and I hope it doesn't affect on my business in a negative way in the future.
nilova.pande@qinaps.com
At Qi Lamp , we took the leap of faith to #buildinpublic. I personally pushed our founder to not just share our journey on Twitter and other social platforms but also put our entire roadmap on a road mapping tool. Ever since we made our roadmap public on Productstash.io we have been getting so many ideas, likes, and upvotes. I think overall the reaction from the community has been quite warm and very well accepted. We got a lot more feedback on that rather than any other initiative we have taken so far, including emails, feedback forms, survey forms, etc.
Aleks Bochkov
@nilova_pande Sounds great! So you encouraged users via social media to engage with your product roadmap and share ideas?
nilova.pande@qinaps.com
@bochkovaleks Yes social, email, linkedin etc. and within productstash itself you can invite users with just read-only rights , which means they cant work on your roadmap but they can vote/comment etc.
Aleks Bochkov
@nilova_pande Why did you choose Productstash.io btw for the roadmap? Any specific pros?
nilova.pande@qinaps.com
@bochkovaleks Well i see that people use Trello boards, while they are lovely, people need to log-in / create an account to be able to upvote/comment leave an idea etc. They don't have to with Productstash. I am sure there might be others who don't mandate a log in. i guess i was just hooked from the start as soon as i discovered the platform :)
Sreekanth PM
Build in public is not for everyone, only if your audience is truly in the places where you are publishing your journey. But it's fantastic to get motivated and be active in solo or startup journey. especially if you have a super active audience.
Aleks Bochkov
@sreekanth850 Thanks for the insight! Have you tried it yourself? Or you don't practice this approach for your products?
Sreekanth PM
@bochkovaleks I do this, primarily to get motivated but not on a daily basis. It gets lot of attention and i got some signups too.
Greg Schwartz
I'm doing it now, and have had a hard time keeping going on it. Like @nick_glavin, I'm the only founder, and don't have any full-time employees yet. Part of why I want to build in public is because I have challenges with anxiety, overwhelm, and depression. And I've heard from other men (outside startupland) how it's helped them when I talk about that. So I'm trying to both share about building my app, and about my challenges around mental health. I haven't gotten a ton of response to it, but I also didn't build up enough momentum. I did a few updates, and then fell off. Just started again with this week's update: facebook.com/superman.greg/videos/317027569981906 I managed to finally knock out a showstopper bug... and yet today I've mostly felt overwhelmed with all the things I should be doing. Was able to finish listening to an audiobook on positioning, and then post that update. So I'm reminding myself that done is better than perfect. Eventually I'll move that to a FB page, Instagram, yadda yadda... but again, done > perfect. That said, if you have suggestions for what you've found helpful, I'd love to hear tips!
Aleks Bochkov
@nick_glavin @uxgreg Wow! Thats very inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing it. We also just starting this path and thinking whats the best approach to keep posting regular updates and commit to this our whole team. Also, big question what to share and what not, perhaps some stuff is too personal. Or on contrary the more personal the better 🙂
Arko Ganguli
I think it really depends on the product.
Aleks Bochkov
@arko_ganguli1 What type of product or niches would you recommend this approach for?
Jannis Dust
Definitely a thing to consider doing. I cannot talk about experience, but having an audience to test and build products with is desirable in my opinion
Founders try #buildinpublic to get brand awareness in early days but left it as soon as they get copycats etc. Only people keep doing that who make money by #buildinpublic. This breed have paywalled content for the #buildinpublic guys. By the time, 1st batch of #buildinpublic leaves, 2nd gets there to replace them.
Aleks Bochkov
@falak_sher Thanks for the feedback. So what are you suggesting do to?
Katy Hardt
Both!
nilova.pande@qinaps.com
#buildinpublic is so rewarding and yet time-consuming at the same time. It takes all your courage, energy and creative juices to make sure you are heard and to make people really care about your journey and to see as a journey and not a tabloid of failures! So far its been awesome with our product roadmap launch. We even embedded the iframe today on our Qinaps website.