Just because many established companies have stopped doing it, doesn't mean it's the end of some kind of golden age. The reason these companies built in the open is in the first place is for selfish reasons - free promotion for their business while they ship. Once they have figured out the business, why should they keep putting in the extra work to tell others about it?
He started some websites, wrote about Open Startups, and in this article he mentions he had his own 'revenue bar' on Twitter which went from $0 to $1 but he took it down because the age of Open Startups is over.
I look at all this and wonder where the actual dudes going to work at jobs are (no disrespect to those Open Startups who have made bank).
I am an entrepreneur so here is what the job looks like to me. I get up every day and I grind. Mostly that means working on new deals. I close as many of those as I can. When I have time I will call someone on my product team and ask them to walk me through what we're working on delivering next. I have a lot of feedback on that stuff because I come from a product background, but if I indulge that too much, I won't spend enough time on sales.
Sometimes I will look at what the couple of Ops contractors I have on payroll are doing (accounting HR etc.), and spot check their work for issues.
I don't know how any entrepreneur has the time to be off working on "movements." Some of the businesses in his post have higher ARR than me so maybe there's something for me to learn here. But in my reality being an entrepreneur basically means you're closing sales, making deals to increase your distribution, and trying to keep your product or service on track. I just don't get it. Maybe I'm getting old.
It’s silly to label “open startups” as a movement when it’s more a technique which may or may not be useful to you.
By being open ,people can follow your story, which can translate to marketing/sales/feedback.
There’s also an aspect of idea exchange and psychological motivation by being part of an entrepreneurial community.
I think it’s silly to consider it a movement rather than a tactic. Whether it’s applicable depends a lot on whether it will help you reach potential customers. If you’re trying to sell fintech to big banks, probably not, if you’re selling no-code landing page builders, it probably will.
It’s also a bit of a pendulum where the business default is secrecy, new school thought says build in public, now people are realizing it’s just trade offs .
This has been a key part of many successful products such as Stack Overflow (Jeff Atwood’s blog), Basecamp (Signal V Noise blog). Convertkit is another one and has a really good interview on Indie Hackers about it.
My key takeaway from startups vs entrepreneurship is they are very different games, and I wouldn't want to conflate the two even in this discussion about transparency. Many businesses stand to gain nothing, and lose a lot, by exposing their business particulars. Startups on the otherhand can gain a lot from the self-promotion.
It only works well if you’re selling something useful to the bootstrapper crowd: bootstrapping courses, Twitter tools etc
That is hard because there is what folks say, and there is what they really think, and in the startup business the gap between those two realities can be really big. Also, the most successful startup CEOs seem to be really good at crafting a narrative out of very cherry picked "facts" in order to achieve their objectives (funding, growth, recruitment, whatever). As a result the "information space" around startups is usually way more complex than it appears on the surface.
That won't stop people from looking at that information space and drawing conclusions of course, people do that naturally. I agree with the above comment that the author is not (at least in the article) asking themselves if their belief of the motivations for being open are well supported by all the facts or not. Doesn't mean the author is wrong of course, things can be just as they seem, it just seems like some additional care should be taken prior to acting on a belief in why they are doing what they are doing.
Of course a certain level of disclosure is required by the SEC if you want to be traded publicly, and practicing those disclosures prior to an IPO can help set IPO expectations more accurately. And for that reason, understanding GAAP and what disclosures are required are good things for the startup leadership.
This is what I find confusing, there isn’t some magic switch that gets pulled when you are required to disclose financials which protects you from the downsides to being open.
If your product can be trivially copied, like an AI email writer, I’m going to guess the problem wasn’t how open you were during the development process. Everyone has come out with their own “Do X with AI” at this point with zero hope to monetize beyond charging for compute time as the market is fully saturated.
So if being open makes sense for PR, do it, but learn from people who have done it successfully.
I certainly don't think it was some sort of golden age. Best I can say about it is that it had benefits.
From the blog post:
> Why are some of the main evangelists and pioneers of this trend leaving now?
> Because bad examples and negative stories are now becoming so common, everyone thinks twice before disclosing things openly.
> From envy and toxic feelings dividing teams and friends to businesses copying other businesses completely, the scene is getting spotted by more and more cases.
...
> Unfortunately, the build-in-public culture couldn’t stand things like competition and bad business practices.
Maybe I'm dumb and not connecting the dots, but why would sharing things like your costs allow others to steal your business? I genuinely don't understand this, so I think I'm misreading the article.
> From envy and toxic feelings dividing teams and friends to businesses copying other businesses completely, the scene is getting spotted by more and more cases.
The first part of this reads like the traditional reason that "don't talk about your salary with other employees" was a commonly accepted thing. Is the author (/community at large) deciding that going the other direction is a bad idea?
Maybe someone can TL;DR in a better way to save my Friday fried brain?
And if that one core sentence is what he believes, I think the whole post could have been more clear and concise instead of making a grand claim that is based on his anecdotal experience.
What matters much more is that you’re open with your own employees.
The “open startup” idea always seemed superficial to me, founders seeking external validation.
Over the long-term, what really matters is keeping your people (employees) happy, and one very easy way to do that is to show that you appreciate and respect them by sharing your company’s key metrics with them.
Not every month will be great, but that’s ok. If you’re running your business responsibly, you’ll be able to say “we didn’t have a great month, but we have 5 years of runway”.
If you hide metrics because your business is unsustainable, then yea, don’t show your metrics to anyone… and if you work for a private tech company with very guarded metrics, it’s safe to assume they are not doing well financially.
<cough>customers<cough>
We've all been to those places where the employees don't give a fuck about customers, and basically tell you with their body language and tone of voice to fuck off.
Here's an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7lGqmZprx0
You have to 1) break the egg first, then 2) put it in the pan and cook it, then 3) put it on a plate, then 4) eat it.
You can't do all those things simultaneously, you have to do them in sequential order.
1) Keep employee happy ==> then 2) you have a happy customer ==> then 3) the customer buys more shit from you
Employees come before the customer.
Of the two places I've worked, the one who was hiding the metrics ended up having great financials and selling.
The other said they had to do layoffs but would be fine until X years later. A few months later they laid off another round of employees.
So if those metrics arent painting a great picture, does the company assume that such trust and respect turn into loyalty?
In other words, the ultimate goal is to buy loyalty?
Similarly to me is the "democratizing X" startup. Those were never not about the same thing as every other startup: VC money and getting a return. But it was trendy to was "we're democratizing <thing>".
OpenAI is a capped profit company. https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/. If they become as big as everyone today thinks they will become, they can be democratizing AI.
Also note that, lot of progress in AI has happened because big companies are willing to share their research publicly, which helps them in attracting talent.
The hard thing about Indie businesses is proving product-market fit. Rest of what they do can easily be copied even if they don't share info. Not sharing revenue numbers will just help them with others not going for similar ideas.
But sharing info leads to social media following, which is key to marketing for many of these companies.
And Robinhood still keeps saying this as a tagline!
I also argue that there is no net advantage to Apple's secrecy. If they had openly talked about the M1 (Apple Silicon) when they were working on it they would have just had more mindshare and the whole Apple ecosystem could have been preparing for it. By staying silent until they released it, it bought them nothing other than the element of surprise, which is like when little children don't want you to see what they're working on, in case you would take over their creative process, and instead want to surprise you with their brilliance.
I very much doubt that secrecy in the absence of insecurity has any value.
They recently nixed their AR products that had been hinted at for forever, and the 'Apple Car' was 'right around the corner' sitting as a boogey-man juxtaposed to Tesla's efforts for years before being cancelled.
They're more reliable than most groups, but post-Jobs Apple loves to mention fantasy stuff that consumers will never see, it's part of their hype cycle.
0. https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/5/22611234/apple-airpower-wi...
If what you are doing is a real business, then given the choice to protect your business or aspiring to be "open" (but with no benefit, just risk") - you focus on the business.
It's really no different than releasing too much of your secret sauce as open source - can only hurt you and is a sign you aren't that mature about what running a business through various problems is like.
In the startup world, a lot of trendy ideas get repeated with little/no thought put into their actual risks and benefits for a particular situation. Remember when everyone was certain that feeding their team lunch in the office was the secret to winning? Today the hype is that you don't even want to have an office.
YMMV.
But the truth is that people balance interests all the time, including businesses. Every decision balances many interests, some involving profit, some involving doing good. That is just as real, just as common a trait in humans.
And I think the connection to "liberalism" is a good point.
The difference is "doing something virtuous rather than maximizing revenue" vs "doing things that will clearly make your business/country unsustainable"
I'm just a guy quitting 9-5 and hope to make some money online to support my family :)
I mentioned apps I built before in this tweet. Testimonial.to is the only one that took off. https://twitter.com/damengchen/status/1344525420813697024
More than enough credibility if you ask me.
This may be true but without evidence is sounds like exactly what the OP is complaining about.
His LinkedIn doesn't even claim any business building before 2.5 years ago. https://www.linkedin.com/in/damengchen It only claims he built 2 things.
Interesting how when revenue was likely equating to profit, they are open to sharing. When they have to pay someone else to help out, they want it to be a secret. I don't think the motivating factor here is very complex at all.
...which seems to be for the reason the parent mentions?
"We're open until we're not." isn't "open".
They were proud to keep the banner photo of the whole team for years, though, even after more than 50% of the people in said banner photo were gone.
We are using Plausible.io (kudos to them!), a privacy-first analytics platform that provides just enough data without abusing our users' data. This way, we don't even have to show a cookie notice.
I'm planning to open up our financial details as well as soon as we have enough transactions so that our clients can't be identified based on our data.
*edit: grammar
Transparency is a tricky thing. Much information came from tribal knowledge. As rules have changed for private companies in the US, we saw some of the information being provided "as open" became the norm or required so there is less of a need to share it and there is not that "goodwill" factor. Most of what was being shared was available to some extent if you knew/know where to look.
It’s exactly once people start saying this that it becomes the least true.
FTFY What if general demise of startups (due to funding drought, covid, market saturation, bad timing aka world wasn’t ready for our idea, or leave your favorite excuse in comments) also impacted open startups? And what if they weren’t successful because open but because market was easier?
Thank you for writing this and sharing this, I was oblivious to all the startups that were doing this and there were quite a lot going by this article.
I think it is unfortunate that companies are deciding not to be open anymore. In a perfect world, do we want organisations to be open? It would mean investment would be easier and less risky, due to transparency.
In the interests of transparency and openness, I share all my ideas and startup ideas in the open with the hope that someone can extend the idea and society can benefit from the ideas. I am up to 700+ computer ideas and 25 startup ideas links on my profile. Society progresses one idea at a time. Somebody invented calculus with an idea.
If openness isn't safe, then we should normalise openness becoming safe and reject actions against open actors or anything that causes openness to not be safe. Reject behaviour that means openness is not safe. For a better world.
This was demonstrated lately using the AI Stable Diffusion Portraits. A thousand rivals arose right away after the original author stated their money was derived from doing nothing more than setting up a website connected to steady dissemination on the backend. It increases competition even if none of those rivals are inherently superior.
Well sure, if that's why you were posting. You could ask the same question about being a nice person "What's in it for me?"
But if the goal is to pay to forward in thanks for the help you got along the way, this argument doesn't hold water.
If you are small, being open brings alot of momentum and notice.
This blog post isn't acknowledging that being open is actually even more viable for thousands of new startups given previous successes.
He has confused popular startups closing as the end of all openness.
There be treasure in the long-tail of a fragmented market sector. lol =)
