Ask HN: What do you think of open-sourcing and building in public as a startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you think of open-sourcing and building in public as a startup?

4 pointstr1ll10nb1ll3 comments

I've seen a lot of startups these days building in public, posting regular updates ( even when there's not a release ) about what they are up to on Twitter, blogs, etc.

What are your thoughts on building in public? Tried it? If so, did it change anything? Did it help you grow in terms of accountability and/or outreach?

Another thing is being open-source as a startup. Wondering how people's experience and thought-process varies on starting as an open-source startup.

P.S I'm not referring to deep tech being open-source ( comma.ai for example ), I'm referring to more innovative software-related startups/apps that started open-source.

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When building a company, all that matters is acquiring paying customers, and serving them well.

If customers are on Twitter, then tweeting can be a channel for customer acquisition, as long as it's not at the expense of more effective marketing channels.

It is the same with open-source. If open-source code is part of the product or customer acquisition then it makes sense. For example, a paid analytics service may provide an open-source self-hosted version which acts as a customer acquisition channel for the hosted, paid version.

There is a community of "makers" who spend seemingly all day every day tweeting about what they're doing. I think most of them are distracting themselves from the real work of building a business. And I think the rest are selling courses and tools to "makers" using Twitter as their customer acquisition channel (dvassallo, shl, etc.). A small minority built successful businesses, then spend their days Tweeting (levelsio, dhh, etc.).

This comment actually makes a lot of sense.

Especially the part about makers spending all their time tweeting about the work, ironic come to think of it cause all they do is tweet. Either way, it's a vicious cycle once you're in it.

I've been trying to grow my startup on Twitter as well, seems like there are a lot of developers out there on Twitter so it could get traction. So far, it's been a few days but I've managed to contact few more developers that way.

I suppose I'll just keep building the product and balance the tweets without spending a lot of time on them by scheduling them or something similar.

What I've found most useful in building Twitter followings is to always provide value with each tweet.

For ConnectDome, consider tweeting about new projects looking for devs, lessons you learned while building new features, or how you overcame certain challenges. If your tweets are providing value, people will be more likely to follow you, and more likely to share your tweets.

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