On build in public and indie hacking communities
After failing my first business idea (some context in available in this blog post), I stumbled upon two communities: the #buildinpublic and the indie hackers community. In this post, I want to share my experience about these two communities.
I tried to understand what failed with my first business idea, and what I can improve. Moreover, being a digital nomad back then, I wanted to connect with some other solopreneurs and learn together. This is how I came across two different, but very similar, communities online: #buildinpublic and the indie hackers community.
What are they?
Hashtag build-in-public is not a community per se, but rather a movement. You share your entrepreneurship story and tag it with #buildinpublic tag in various social networks. This allows fellow community members learn from your experience and mistakes, as well as share theirs. The hashtag itself more or less dead on Twitter, since Twitter killed hashtags all together, but a community named #buildinpublic still exists.
Indie-hackers is yet another community of builders who are independent. It’s not limited to entrepreneurship and there are indies in every industry: indie game developers, indie artists, indie musicians etc. Indie hackers, on the other hand, is a community focused more on building side-projects / businesses, and a website named Indie hackers serves as yet another platform for indie hackers to connect. Many people who build solo, without any external funding or raising money, would often refer to themselves as “indie hackers”.
My experience
I don’t remember how I was exposed to the indie hackers / build in public communities, but I guess after doing some reading online, I came across a community of people, mainly on Twitter, that share their knowledge and experience there (at least that’s what I thought they do). So I revived my Twitter account, and started to post my journey. I had about 40 followers, and today I have a bit more than 500. I’ve been posting for more than a year now, almost daily. The amount on knowledge I got from Twitter is close to zero.
Sure, I was able to harvest gems of information here and there, but overall I had to navigate a bunch of attention seeking, repetitive, and irrelevant posts. It’s equivalent to garbage diving — you can, rarely, find a thousand-dollar in garbage bins, but you have to go through a lot of garbage. Most people on Twitter want to sell you their stuff, or post very basic stuff like “what framework do I chose for my Instagram killer”. I had a conversation with my friend, who also tries to build a business, and interestingly enough, he came to the same conclusion. None of these so-called communities, are actually communities — they are more like support groups for people who don’t really want to do the job.
You see, entrepreneurship requires many skills. One of these skills is being able to do proper research. This includes actually searching for information, as well as asking proper questions when you fail to find the required information. But most of the posts in these “entrepreneurship” communities are low effort posts the answer to which could be found in Google/ChatGPT in 2 minutes. “What business do I start”, “how do I collect payments”, “what framework to chose”, etc. You can’t expect to be spoon-fed and be an entrepreneur. The internet is full of information, both free and paid, where you can learn many aspects of starting, and running a business. And in the end, you need to make some moves, even if these moves result in failures.
I recently quit all social media, cold-turkey. There are many reasons, some of them are related to the nature of social media (I posted about it in my other blog link here), but as it relates to entrepreneurship, I just got sick of this “community”. I was afraid to do it, because I was thinking that I would be missing on great ideas, but after weeks of seeing the same content over and over again, I decided that I need to stop wasting time there.
It reached absurd levels where people would post how they bought an air fryer, because another well known indie-hackers bought an air fryer, and how that made them “indie hackers”. People would spend money buying courses and books on marketing, rather than experimenting with ads or SEO. Of course there are people who use their audience to promote their products, and if that works for you, then go ahead. But in my case, my audience is not indie-hackers on Twitter, and from my experience, indie-hackers would rather build their own clone of your tool than pay for an existing solution.
The term “community” was ruined by social networks. And for me, I didn’t see any benefits after being active a year on Twitter, from being in such “community”. Jaen posted this a while ago, and I think it summarizes the indie-hacking community very well:
Starting to identify less and less as an "Indie Hacker" over time.
— Jáen ff/sr (@speedrunjaen) July 26, 2024
Feels like these days a lot of Indie hackers:
- complain about "copycats"
- build SaaS starter kits or other useless products for other indies
- spend more time on x talking about building than actually building… pic.twitter.com/rIbLntkHvt
I can’t speak about the B2B part, but the “virgin indie hacker” is pretty much accurate. Very few people in the indie-hacking community actually build one product and stick with it. Many people jump from product to product, trying to reach the pedestal of “I built 459 projects that failed before finding the one that succeeded”. They don’t share any insights or knowledge, because they are too afraid to experiment and would rather rewrite their “business” from Ruby to Node, to Laravel, to Next.js, etc.
Some people do benefit from social network presence, mainly people who sell information or shortcuts. But I’m not in the market of selling information or code boilerplate, so I can’t seem to justify being present there anymore.
Few weeks ago, I spend a weekend in Belgium with the co-founders of the startup I work at. I spoke for about 3 hours with one of them. A very interesting conversation on society, community, and life in general. When we discussed how strange the current society is, he said something that stuck with me. I had the same feeling for a long time, but couldn’t express it in words, but he did. He said: “I no longer participate in society. I’m there, I do what everyone else are doing, like buying groceries, but I don’t participate in this madness anymore.”
This phrase summarizes well my current position on social networks. I will continue to use them as a vessel to spread my knowledge (such as my blog posts), and maybe occasional short posts of wisdom, but I’m not going to participate in this charade any more. I think there is a reason why people like Derek Sivers, Cal Newport, and many people from Newports book “Deep Work” — don’t keep any social networks, and communicate strictly via email.
My email is available in many places, so feel free to reach out. Oh, and if you know any online communities, or in-person ones in The Netherlands, that are focused on real entrepreneurship, please let me know, I’ll be grateful.