Building in public may be losing its shine, as indie hackers question its value

Praised as the best way for aspiring makers to gain traction, get valuable early feedback, and attract a loyal customer base, “build in public” is almost ubiquitous advice among successful indie hackers.

But despite its enduring popularity and massive success stories, there's some frustration about boiling underneath the surface. 

People are now seriously doubting whether building in public is still worth the effort. 

The “Laike case” against building in public

Laike9m, a former software engineer at Google and new indie hacker, really brought the disconnect people feel about building in public to light with their post No One Builds In Public, which went viral on Hacker News this week.

The meat of Laike’s argument is that building in public was very effective when indie hacking was still relatively unsaturated. Ten years ago, when legends like Pieter Levels got started, it was possible to really stand out and grow a following. 

But now that indie hacking has grown and become so popular, those easy days are long gone. Just check out how much "indie hacker" has exploded as a term in Google search results:

The result is that nowadays, followers of indie hackers who are building in public are drowning in a deluge of clickbaity “look at my MRR” posts, which aren't super valuable to readers, quickly get boring, and ultimately don't result in any traction. 

As Laike put it, “When everyone builds in public, no one builds in public.”

Although some in the Hacker News comments did have nice things to say about building in public, most commenters agreed with Laike, with the most upvoted comment adding saying that building in public quickly turns into an unproductive ouroboros:

“Anecdotal, but it seems like all the people who ‘build in public’ end up trapped by their chosen distribution strategy.

What I mean by this is, if you’re building in public there’s a 99% chance you’re going to end up building products for other indiehackers who are interested in following people who build in public… However, I think you’ll struggle to ever “cross the chasm” so to speak into building a company that’s bigger than whatever online personality you build (no mass markets or low churn businesses without pyramid scheme dynamics).”

How are other indie hackers feeling?

Hacker News is a notoriously pessimistic crowd, so I wanted to see how other indie hackers feel about building in public. To that end, we sent out a tweet on the Indie Hackers X account asking if (1) people were overdoing it with building in public, and (2) if building in public actually works.

The responses were... mixed.

Some people felt very good about building in public:

While others were not as sure:

And others emphasized that success depends on doing it right.

This last response seemed right to me. The biggest proponents of building in public are those who it's worked for, like Said above. While those who've struggled with building in public are its biggest detractors.

Nothing just inherently “works” all by itself. Not building in public. Not SEO. Not cold emails. Nothing.

You have to do it right, and, ideally, better than everyone else. 

Building in public done right

Regardless of whether they are right about building in public in general, Laike is definitely correct in point out that that building in public on X is oversaturated.

Everyone can name the dozen or so X indie hacking celebrities, but when’s the last time someone new broke through? 

This is why I think new indie hackers would be better off focusing on TikTok and Instagram rather than X. I first saw Levels talk about this idea back in 2023, and with the unpredictability of the X algorithm, it’s probably even more true now than it was back then.

If you’re looking for inspiration on how to get started, Edward Strum is a great person to follow. Even though he only has 4,550 followers on X and is virtually unknown among indie hackers, he has over 400 million views and almost 100,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram each. 

There’s an iconic line in the movie Margin Call where the boss says:

“There are three ways to be successful: be first, be smarter, or cheat, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to just be first.”

If you're especially smart and willing to duke it out with the thousands of other makers competing for attention, building in public on X can still work. 

But if you want to instead benefit from relatively open waters, you should probably be focusing on TikTok or Instagram instead. 

Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.