Yongfook: Public building is dead; sell quietly to non-technical buyers for a window of opportunity
Independent developer Jon Yongfook stated that "public building" has always been about marketing. The old era relied on non-overlapping projects and technological lead time to gain traffic, reputation, and direct registrations, but this approach has failed.
He mentioned that the technological lead time has disappeared, and the tacit understanding no longer exists. Anyone can create products that would have been considered revolutionary two years ago just by subscribing to the highest tier, yet today they go unnoticed. There is an oversupply of software, and sharing no longer automatically brings visits and dissemination. The benefits of public building have ended, necessitating the search for alternative strategies.
His new rule is to find gaps that developers have not yet filled, provide real value through technology, say less and do more, and sell solutions to non-technical buyers. The goal is to extend the window long enough to accumulate intergenerational wealth before general artificial intelligence turns people back into fishermen and farmers.
Yongfook started with public building and independent products, sharing experiences in growth and automation tools within the developer community for a long time. His judgment rewrites "sharing for traffic" to "silence for pricing power," shifting competitors from other independent developers to buyers who cannot write software themselves.
The old model relied on display-based growth on social platforms; the new model depends on industry location, sales capabilities, and control over non-technical budgets. Public building can still attract attention, but attention no longer equates to payment and a competitive moat.
In market mechanisms, sellers are developers of a vast array of available intelligent agents and subscription-level models, while buyers are shifting towards industry clients who cannot generate substitutes themselves. Funds are moving from the attention economy of the developer community to vertical sales that can package software into business processes. The beneficiaries are those who occupy unsaturated industries and can create sales loops, while those under pressure are public builders who continue to broadcast product details to peers.
Source: Public information
ABAB AI Insight
Yongfook's path comes from the generation of independent software: treating the production process as a customer acquisition funnel, exchanging tweets for trials, and tutorials for trust. Tools like Bannerbear benefit from the traffic bonus of "developers willing to see how others do it." When the model reduces implementation costs to subscription fees, the display process equals sending demand documents and implementation paths to potential replicators.
Capital no longer rewards visible build logs but rewards invisible distribution. Money is withdrawing from the attention market and entering vertical industry budget categories: whoever can embed technology into non-technical buyers' workflows can collect service fees for many years. The motivation is simple—peer replication speed has already surpassed the speed of word-of-mouth diffusion.
Similar turning points have occurred when blog SEO was overwhelmed by content farms, growth hackers wrote playbooks into public manuals, and open-source cores were productized by cloud vendors. Currently, independent development is in a contraction phase from community display to industry penetration; it is not a depletion of creativity but a flattening of the supply curve by models.
Structurally, it is a transfer of pricing power after technological substitution: code is no longer scarce, but industry entry points and sales relationships are scarce. The mechanism is that the tacit understanding and social dissemination both fail simultaneously, making public a negative expectation, while silence and non-technical customers become a positive expectation.
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