Startup Storytelling: Profit by Building Your Product in Public

Hey Hackers,

Did you know: in 2018, Buffer onboarded 1,415,697 new users — 32,991 of which are now paying customers. Their remote team of 80+ people across 6 continents attracted 1,196,413 collective fans and followers on social media, and achieved $18,346,077 in revenue — a 24% increase from 2017.

I know all of this because Buffer’s number one value is Default to Transparency, and this information (and more) is all freely available on their open.buffer subdomain, along with their public product roadmap.

The lesson here?

Building products in public is profitable.

Hackernoon and its community of tech professionals knows this: just ask superuser Arthur Tkachenko, who’s using our open software development forum to log his progress on a networking project for foodtech startups and invite ideas and input from people he wouldn’t otherwise have had access to:

@yannfeunteun

Read more Product talk.

Don’t Miss Hacker Noon AMAs:

Ask a Question Today: I’m Carlos, Co-Founder of Securitize. Ask me anything! @Noon PST 5/31/19Read Tuesday’s Recap: I’m Muneeb, Co-Founder of Blockstack. Ask me anything!

More startup and software dev storytelling from the Hacker Noon’s community:

I Spent a Year to Reinvent a Node.js Framework by I Ketut Sandiarsa [11 min read]

Why another framework? I’m not living in a cave, I know there are more than a dozen TypeScript frameworks like this out there in the wild, some of them mature and great and even have LTS version already. I spent some time to work on some projects using server side TypeScript frameworks, it feels great that we have a lot of choice that is already mature and has great community. But I still have a feeling that there are some technical needs and specifications that make it worth creating another one.

How I forced myself to code daily, using a pizza API. by sriram ananthakrishnan [4 min read]

Monday evening, traveling back home from college , a long bus ride ahead of me and I started craving for pizza. Hmm, I thought to myself, “How neat would it be if there was an API for it ?”.

Help regarding my Open Source project — Johannes@jojo.lichtenbergerBuilding Your First React Native App by Nathan Thomas [10 min read]

I can guarantee that this walkthrough will be worth your time, much like double-stuff Oreos or a happy golden retriever puppy. We’ll be building out a simple weather app in React Native using MetaWeather, a free weather API. Here’s an example of the finished product we’ll be making. I’ve even thrown in a higher order component and some light styling for some extra seasoning so you can see that React Native isn’t so crazy after all.

Work Like a Unicorn: Understanding the Real Value of Agile Sprints by Holly Hester-Reilly [6 min read]

I want to share my thoughts on a topic that has been a real pain point for teams trying to practice true Agile software development in a business that isn’t necessarily on the same page with everything which it entails. If you’ve been working with an Agile framework, or even if you haven’t, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a “sprint,” a push to deliver working software in time-boxed iterations, typically one or two weeks. But what often gets the focus about sprints is something different…

How to keep your productivity level high as a co-founder of internet startup and father of twins by Levon [14 min read]

I always had a healthy obsession with productivity. Ever since I graduated I was a serial entrepreneur starting businesses and with each new business the amount of work has been increasing. In 2001, at the age of 21, I started my first company providing IT services in Kazakhstan, in 2002 I launched an international telecommunications business in France providing cheap long distance call services around the world. In 2015 I built a meditation app and failed, the same year I’ve become a father of twins and my life turned upside down 🙃

DIY — Build Your Own Decentralized Thermostat by Islam El-Ashi [7 min read]

We’ll be exploring how to build a “decentralized” thermostat and, in the process, we’ll be exploring the concept of decentralized IoT. Decentralized IoT is, in its most basic definition, IoT that doesn’t rely on centralized cloud services or middlemen for its communication.

Tips On Landing a Software Engineering Job Post-Bootcamp by Kevin Hu [12 min read]

I finished at Fullstack Academy in December 2018 and was on a peculiar journey upon graduating. I was enrolled in the Part-time Immersive Program, which means I was working full-time and my program lasted about seven months. Three months prior to graduation, I received an opportunity to take on a three-month contract with a Fin-tech startup to be a Google G Suite Developer. Risky as it was, all I wanted was to continue learning as a developer and to get some more industry experience to make me more marketable upon graduation. So I dove right in. I worked for three months on a contract and in December 2018, I became unemployed.

We are developing an open source editor for presentations by David Dal Busco [5 min read]

I’m currently sitting in a plane between Lisbon and Zürich, back from a family trip, and I thought that I could use my travel time to write a non-technical blog post (something new to me) about our project DeckDeckGo, the open source editor for presentations. In this post I’ll try to summarize who we are, why we are developing this project and where do we stand in the development’s progress.

Stop being “innovative” and just tell us what you do by Noah Wheeler [4 min read]

I am sitting in the back of a packed room attending a talk at a local meetup. Everyone has their slice of pizza and waits eagerly to hear the speaker teach us about innovation. He starts by telling us about how technology progresses. Then, he outlines a framework for thinking about the innovation process. Finally, he puts a definition up on the power-point and tells us this is how he likes to think about innovation.

What marketers have forgotten about marketing by Shira Feuer [11 min read]

I’ve spoken to so many companies who say “we’re really good at performance marketing, now we need to figure out brand.” This is a pattern I keep seeing everywhere. And this is a problem. Again and again, I keep hearing this same thing and this has happened because we’ve forgotten the difference between marketing and sales.

Made a new notification tool and I’m looking for some beta testers — Alberto Marchetti@cmaster11The Easy Thing About Hard Things by Chris Herd [5 min read]

I’ve achieved very little during my increasing number of years on this planet so this isn’t some startup ode reflecting back and prescribing the survivorship bias that allowed me to become a world-leading entrepreneur. That is where I hope my direction of travel is headed and I thought that pausing at the point where that rests in the balance — will the startup I have built continue to rise or will it crash and burn — was as good a point as any to provide an overview of what let me get here in the first place.

9 Keys to Remote Freelancing by Scott Hoover [19 min read]

I decided to write a more thoughtful and complete guide to remote freelancing. The tips are from my own real-life experience as a freelance CFO.

The Challenges faced by the CEO of a Startup in Growth-Mode (and how to Overcome them?) by Tarun Kohli [7 min read]

I was totally comfortable swimming in the world of binary and envisioning delightful user experiences. I’ve always believed that God is in the details and would take immense satisfaction in working through the intricate details of the architecture, code, and user interface design. Those skills helped me ship successful software releases and build the initial credibility for the company, but one needs a totally different focus when the company starts growing past that stage.

What does a Senior Engineer look like? by Jeremy Wight [6 min read]

This is something that I share with folks on my team, and given the strong response it got internally I thought it might be helpful for other Engineering Managers, Directors, Startup CTO’s, Senior Engineers, aspiring Tech Leads, etc.

What are you working on right now? Go on, give the Hackernoon community a peak under the hood. You never know what you might learn, or who you might meet!

See you in there,hacker noon tech

P.S. Who wants a Hackernoon sticker?

Startup Storytelling: Profit by Building Your Product in Public was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.