If I have to think on first principles, the reason why people are building things in public is because that's just a form of marketing and self-promotion. We're way past tech being the hard part of launching a product. The harder part is building the audience and trying to stand out. Building in public is probably the easiest way to build buzz, gain an audience, and name recognition.
I don't think there was ever a time when you could succeed in the marketplace on the merits of your tech. Once the tech reaches the relatively low bar of "good enough", the rest is sales and marketing. In the most lucrative enterprise market, the "good enough" bar is even lower than in the much less lucrative consumer market because the people who will actually have to use your tech aren't the ones buying it. Technical quality likely matters the most to "customers" who don't pay anything such as users of popular open source projects.
If you want to make money from a good product then becoming a social media influencer who talks about your product is the most straightforward way to advertise without having to pay for ads.
> In the most lucrative enterprise market, the "good enough" bar is even lower than in the much less lucrative consumer market because the people who will actually have to use your tech aren't the ones buying it.
This reminds me of the time Citi lost $900 million due to terrible software [0].
If success is financial then no. But you could build a reputation from some brilliant and easy to use/integrate tech. Which is in the hacker's spirit and the backbone of so many "successful" software.
It also set forth a very straightforward "success" path: make good software that the community praises and tech companies (who probably also use your code) will climb over each other to get you on their team. But I suppose those days are slowly ending as well now that many problems (for all but the biggest tech companies) are being solved. No need for a million dollar mastermind when a 100k mid-level can do the job.
I've got reasonable financial success in my software product mainly from the merits of the tech. Pretty much all the marketing I ever did was spamming a small mailing list once, making an anonymous website that subtly mentioned my product, got good Google ranking, and got referenced by other people, and eventually making a Wikipedia page which I'm not sure does any good. I got good ranking in Google early on without any particular effort, probably because there just aren't many competitors.
Other people have done a lot to help at their own initiative though. Resellers approach me and market it themselves, customers recommend it on forums, researchers mention it in their published papers, and one customer even wrote a chapter of a book about it - which was key to being eligible for a Wikipedia page.
I'm lucky though because it belongs to a slow moving, well-defined class of products that people in my target industry already understand so when they go looking for a cheaper alternative to the super-priced big names, they find mine. I'm not inventing a new market.
It's not free money though. It's very code-heavy and technical-understanding-heavy and I've spent nearly 20 years actively developing it by now. One man wouldn't be able to just smash one out in a year, and you'd need some reasonably deep domain knowledge.
I'm a bit shy about the details but it's used by engineers. Actually there's a lot of opportunity in software for engineers. They pay huge prices and the quality of what they have is often poor. I'm aware of some gaps in the market. For example, modeling thermal distortion due to robot welding. That's not what my product does but that's one where the existing solutions are something like $50,000/year and it's a hard problem in part because the software has to run faster than an actual welding robot making a prototype to be economical to model it in the first place. It takes some clever research to invent the secret sauce to get those speeds.
The elephant behind the elephant in our room is an inability to be honest and upfront about this kind of stuff and instead we have to dance around it. This essentially means we can’t have a decent discussion on any topic that carries actual risk and instead we focus on low-risk banalities.
Also I should add there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times - certainly saying shit I’d never think about saying when I was their age, so with that we are on a treadmill of constantly seeing, mocking, relearning etc past mistakes.
I think there are a lot of honest people out there that just wanna make and share cool stuff. I also think the well was poisoned by grifters who wanted either clout of a quick buck. That seems to be a story that encompases the last 30 years of the tech industry as we know it.
>there are a lot of young posters who are, and I won’t sugarcoat it, hopelessly naive at times
I don't mind those people. No one really wants to mentor these days, but people LOVE to correct. I'd treat that incoming flaming as an opportunity to learn from people who'd never speak up otherwise (after inevitably discarding 80% of replies that are simply non-constructive insults).
> certainly saying shit I’d never think about saying when I was their age, so with that we are on a treadmill of constantly seeing, mocking, relearning etc past mistakes.
Your post reminded me of that “ten thousand” xkcd about how mathematically not “everyone knows” something that feels like everybody should know. Not even close.
You said “treadmill of mistakes”… well there are a lot of people and eventually they all become one of the “lucky ten thousand”. I wonder if your frustration is watching yet another batch of 10,000 learn those “same mistakes”.
I dunno, it feels like a less cynical interpretation to me.
Hard part of launching _most_ products. But I agree, I'm not sure content marketing, regardless of topic, can have an actual downside in the majority of circumstances. Maybe just the opportunity cost.
Marketing a product seems easier than ever with social media, however the ocean is much larger.
Moreover the author could have easily written this post as "it's time to rethink 'thoughtleader blogging' and it would fit just as well. Most people don't write this stuff for their own pleasure, they write it for eyeballs. They write it for their readers. In that sense I suspect building in public works as well as blog posts like this for gaining a following. There's no one fits all answer to this.
