@benvspak As promised, Imma start blogging here.

Build it and they will come

A promise turned fallacy

Build it and they will come emerged as a motto, a rallying cry really, one for makers and enthusiasts alike, so where did it all go wrong?

Back in the era at the dawn of the smartphone. Remember those iPhone apps? You know, the one that looked like a pint glass with a beer? You would tilt your phone and it looked like you were drinking the beer.

I remember someone making this "I am rich" app, they put it on the Play Store but well that was the Android market back then. Sold it for like $500 until it got taken down, just a picture of a diamond and the words on the screen. It was a meme, sure, but it also spoke to how we viewed technology back then.

Build it and they will come. It used to be true. Not because building was easy. The truth is anyone with enough time and effort could do it.

The way it was

I remember back in the day, Tripod, Angelfire, these hosting platforms. Even before that, GeoCities, Google Sites. You could put up a website, you could do your own blog with just a little time. It wasn't impossible.

Sure, it's easier nowadays, but building software products as a solo developer has never been impossible (at least in the last 18 years). Yes, it was harder, very much so. But things moved slower back then too.

There was this air of optimism around the smartphone, around technology in general, the Internet. And this has been carrying on since the 90s. The Internet had this moniker, the information superhighway. It was an occasion, an event.

And then little by little, it became commonplace. But it was still this eclectic, wonderful, almost mythical place, a source of tales and wonder. You would go online and you would go to sites. I've written about this. You would treat them as destinations, not just content farms.

It's in this period that the sentiment for building something cool solidified. Not just because it was doable, albeit hard, but because the players of the industry were doing it. Google was famous for this. Google culture, at least back in the 2000s, in the early 2010s, revolved around this mentality of just building things, building things and sharing them. They were so. We were all so innocent. We thought it would be like that forever.

Uber was barely starting. Google Maps was amazing. Everyone nowadays, how often do you open Google Maps and just look at it and wonder? I'd wager you never do that. You look at it as a fact of life, as something that's been there forever, since you remember. You use it in your car, you use it on your phone, you use it to search reviews for local places. It's no longer, oh, there's Maps on the Internet. Oh, oh, this is so much better than MapQuest or oh look, there's live traffic information.

Death of amazement

There's no wow moments with most tech products anymore. The technology, the platforms for it, computers, smartphones, tablets have become so mundane, so entrenched in our lives, there is no sense of warmth left.

And even with the advent of artificial intelligence, generative AI systems, sure people were surprised. Some people were embracing the emergent technology, some people were criticizing it. But when it arrived, as technically impressive as it could be, the truth is we were already jaded before it got here.

These tech companies have long stopped being bastions of hope and cool. Facebook became Meta. Google became Alphabet. The mythos was slain before our eyes.

With the beasts wearing the skin of heroes revealed to us all, it is no wonder we became collectively disillusioned with technology as an industry, as a field.

Gradually, it was revealed to us more and more the cost in suffering, in human lives, that this tech of ours has. From Intel's rare-earth mining scandals, to Facebook's content moderation workers being offered no protections and barely any wages, to the people whose work and plight powered the AI boom, from artists to data labeling workers, RLHF workers.

With every scandal, every tech executive going far right or alt-right, every moment of disappointment. The optimism fell, and with it went the public's hunger for tech products. Sure demand exists, but it is no longer a joyful community of enthusiasts.

It's jaded people with real world problems and a lifetime of bottled up rage. It's businesses facing the financial crisis we are all quietly aware of and fighting for their existence. Few tech purchases nowadays are done with curiosity.

And amidst all of this, the Grand Slam Offer falls apart.

Allergic to ads

Ads are everywhere, in the beginning we accepted them, a small concession for free websites, we gave them an inch and the suits took a whole ass mile. Pop-ups were all the rage back then, they were ubiquitous. YouTube is the prime example, the Adpocalypse, the move to watch time, then its tolerance of slop and stolen channels. Truth is, we hate ads. We loathe them and when you grow up surrounded by them, you learn to tune them out, or beyond that, you learn to despise them, to ignore them so well.

And therein lies the murder weapon. We are allergic to sales, to the pitch, the Grand Slam Offer is dead because we recognize the formula, as a side effect we became wary of anyone introducing us to a product.

Long gone are the days of check out this app, everything that is even potentially a product or even a content source like a blog or YouTube channel now has to come with a justification, with a disclaimer. We all feel beholden to vouch for something, no product stands on its own anymore. We don't let them.

In this aversion we built, indie makers are left behind, because no one is happy about just an app anymore. It sounds grim, but my words cannot overstate how jaded and anti-consumerist the tide is becoming, and swept up in that is every indie app or product that is trying to market itself like any of the big players. Put simply, if you act like the establishment you will be hated, perhaps even more than the establishment itself. Any indie project that plays under those rules reeks. It reeks of entrapment as a marketing strategy.

OK Doomer, now what?

What am I, one of those LinkedIn gurus? Fuck if I know.

All I can say is this.

The traditional path to distribution is not for the indie maker, for VC-funded startups maybe, they can burn cash on ads, ride the high Customer Acquisition Cost all they want. But you and I, the ones looking to bootstrap or just being reasonable... we can't play their stupid game.

So what's left?

Twitter is snorting buzzwords right into their brain. If your audience is people who are on there, yeah, play the game. LinkedIn if you're building B2B. Bluesky is a trove of depression.

The new way is community-built distribution and word of mouth. But we cannot linger on the past and pitch products. We do not build products, a product is a mere format, a presentation of a solution to a problem.

The future is earnest and anti-commodity. We are no longer selling, we are sharing and that is infinitely harder.

Saw a post on Reddit a bit ago, high-ranking decision maker at a company. They were rejecting or ignoring all cold emails that had a pitch. The emails they were replying to: Anti-sales. Someone being human and going, the solution does X, it might not fit you if you are Y, but if you do Z it may be useful.

No pitch, just a description, and that got through. Unoptimized is the way. And you can't game that in any meaningful way.

Above all else, I'm not saying give up, I'm saying be the change, and think like a human.