I am surprised to see such a cynical view of #BuildInPublic on the pretense that it's thinly veiled marketing.
What kind of marketing do you think is good marketing if not this? What's not to love? The content isn't being auctioned off to the highest bidder and injected into your eyeballs, the content has to be written well enough to leave you with a strong impression of the writer, sometimes you learn something relevant to your own work (sometimes not), and it's marketing that a solo-founder can accomplish without losing too many clock cycles to goals outside their core mission.
The only negative I see is when the writer jumps the shark and begins to see themselves as a written content producer when it was clear their original goal was to build something and tell others about it. This issue doesn't seem specific to #BuildInPublic, though. It's a tale as old as time regarding people trying to turn personal joys into monetizable careers.
What kind of marketing do you think is good marketing if not this? What's not to love? The content isn't being auctioned off to the highest bidder and injected into your eyeballs, the content has to be written well enough to leave you with a strong impression of the writer, sometimes you learn something relevant to your own work (sometimes not), and it's marketing that a solo-founder can accomplish without losing too many clock cycles to goals outside their core mission.
The only negative I see is when the writer jumps the shark and begins to see themselves as a written content producer when it was clear their original goal was to build something and tell others about it. This issue doesn't seem specific to #BuildInPublic, though. It's a tale as old as time regarding people trying to turn personal joys into monetizable careers.