First (two!) sales on my platform!

Hi there, my name's Chris and I've been building a build-in-public platform by myself since August 2022 called madepublic.io and today I got my very first (and second!) purchase!

I started madepublic because I began building in public myself online and loved it, but soon found that Twitter and other products didn't have the features, organisational abilities, tools or specific community tools that I wanted to do it effectively.

So I built a platform that lets users create their own personal space for talking about their own products and sharing their new features, questions, inspirations, celebrations and tools to a community!

There were plenty of ups and downs starting with a lot of initial interest after my landing page collected emails for a week or two while I built core functionality, but few recurring users.

I persevered though and kept shipping and kept adding features to become competitive with Twitter.

Today the platform lets you upload images, share posts, share your stack and tools and projects and even cross-post to Twitter directly without leaving the app.

I actually took a break from working on the platform due to some personal life burn out but came back after a surge of inspiration from Twitter and friends. I figured I'm never going to make any money from the platform without something for users to buy - but I wanted to make sure I wanted to add value to these users.

So I thought, what do users want other than feedback and constructive criticism when they build in public? Exposure!

Madepublic was getting a couple thousands of views per day from my established audience so I developed a way for users to be able to leverage this traffic for their own products: I added the ability for users to promote their products on the homepage of madepublic for a small fee per day of promotion!

I created the feature, added some loud CTAs on their product pages and left it at that.

From there I got a sale today from a relatively new user, and once I posted on Twitter about how happy I was I got another one!

So what's the point of this story? Never stop shipping and never underestimate the value your product can bring to people, even if you lose sight of it during some hardships.

I hope this inspires or helps someone else building their own projects.