Aaron Francis
Software developer and database educator, co-founder of Try Hard Studios with Steve Tenuto, making video courses on SQLite, Postgres and MySQL for developers.
“I've realized that the game of building in public, or the game of sharing, is so unknowable, but it's so cheap to play that the only answer is to play more… The ones that I thought were winners were losers. And the ones that I thought were nothing are the big winners. That's why your job is to share things and not to pre-filter or pre-judge, because you'll miss your best stuff if you're pre-filtering.”
The Bootstrapped Founder · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · October 2023
Context
Asked how much effort building in public took for his course launch, Francis says he lowered his bar for what's worth posting after repeatedly misjudging which posts would land.
Transcript
Yeah, pretty close. I think 23 and a half right now. So steaming towards 25.
…for this particular product as well. I remember tweets of yours where you shared like your editing strategies and you just showed how much work it was. Like how much effort did you put in not just the course, but also the building and public part, the reporting about the process of that?
Yeah, it's interesting because I don't feel like that part is too effortful, honestly, which I think is a clear distinction to where I would have, what I would have said maybe three or four years ago. Now I just feel like it's a habit. So I'll be, you know, I'll be working on something and I'll think, oh, this is interesting or like, oh, there's a fun angle here or there's something clever here that I could show. And I just kind of like do the thing and put it out there, whether that's record a, you know, 30 second video being like, hey, look, I just got, you know, I just moved into a new house. Look at my, look at my setup. What do you guys think? Boom, done. Or like, I'm editing and something like I look at the timeline and it looks crazy. And so I take a screenshot of it and, you know, send that out and it's done. And so for me, I've gotten to this point where I'm really good at recognizing like the detritus or like the stuff that would normally be thrown away of the process. I'm good at recognizing that and seeing like, not everyone is doing this all day long. And maybe they would find this part interesting. And I know, I know from being a consumer, like from being very online on…
I love the parallel here between what you said earlier about the content you've been putting out and the products and now the course taking off like this. It's the exact same thing with anything, right, that you share. You're not the arbiter of choice or of taste with people. People are. And their…
Yeah, I think there is like this, there's a very defensive stance in like developer communities because they've been trained that other people are going to nitpick or criticize or like well actually them to death, right? And so it's almost as if like the dark side of developer interactions is…
Yeah, I'm glad you're doing this. And I'm glad you're doing it so publicly too, right? You had this great talk at Laricon just this year, I guess, right? Where you talked about building and public sharing, sharing the things you do to get attention, but not for attention's sake, but for the sake of…
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