John Joubert

Building in public doesn't make sense. For most companies. Most of the time. Even indie ones. I guess it does if you're building for builders. But I don't think you should. Overcrowded. Winner-take-most. Incentive to grift (a bit). But if you're building for the other 99.9% of the market: costs eclipse benefits. - You attract copycats - Jealous losers attack your site & your reputation - Incentive to over-focus on vanity metrics instead of long-term growth - You give aspiring founders like @dagorenouf the false impression it's easier than it is We're days away from inviting beta users to our new AI platform. It's B2B. I hope it gets huge and makes us filthy rich and makes the world a better place and introduces features & interfaces that seem "obvious" to AI enthusiasts in retrospect. But we probably won't "build it in public." We won't share revenue. We won't talk about the tech stack. We kinda don't even want to publicize that we (the founders of Indie Hackers) are behind it. Instead we want our users to spread the word for us. Share it with their friends and companies. Share videos of it on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X. And we ourselves want to focus on selling. On talking to customers. And on executing some of the same marketing strategies we've honed over the past decade to build the biggest (arguably) free startup community in the world. I say all this because I feel kinda bad for teasing the app on X for the past couple months, only to now realize we won't be building in public. But I also say it because it doesn't get said enough in the indie hacking community: It's okay to not build in public. The majority of big indie tech companies are run by dudes (yes, mostly male) you've never heard of. And that's not a coincidence.

@FarzaTV The problem with your ideas isn't that they're nonsense, the problem is they're so NOT-nonsense that you're getting copycatted to hell by all the big players. Distribution is the moat in the AI era but it's hard to outdistribute Google etc and still reach venture scale 🤷‍♂️

🚀 I'm launching Robotomail on @ProductHunt today! This is my 5th startup since my first launch in 2021 (which I sold 18 months later), and my 4th this year! Every AI agent should be able to handle email, but all the existing options sucked. So I built Robotomail. One API call. Real mailbox. Full send and receive. I'd really appreciate your support today! Check it out 👇 producthunt.com/products/robot… P.S. A comment or repost would mean the world to me ♻️