Building with Public - The idea that became Cambrian

It’s time to open products up, so those who love and know them best can build.

Take a look back at the idea that started Cambrian. I have always believed in the power of communities and love the growing trend of Build in Public. This essay was written before Cambrian, about the potential of building companies and products with the public. I hope you enjoy reading and seeing how these thoughts became the start of Cambrian Games.

Building with Public

It’s time to open products up, so those who love and know them best can build.

The future of business is to Build with Public (BWP). Creating a core idea and ‘engine’, and then opening it up to allow users to build with you leads to a superior product with a wider reach, less required work in-house, and fewer risks.

Build in Public

Building in Public (BIP) is a niche but growing trend. Nicely summarised here as “the intentional practice of creating content and sharing your company’s story as it unfolds — with transparency, openness and vulnerability”. BIP is believed to help businesses by:

• Creating an authentic marketing narrative

• Demonstrating trustworthiness

• Inviting in expertise, advice, capital and other valuable goods

BIP is good but doesn’t go far enough in leveraging the power of the crowd. Building with Public (BWP) removes the barriers between user and creator.

Build with Public

Building with public takes the BIP further, allowing users to modify, edit and build the product with the company. This is most similar to how open-source projects are run.

Key Benefits of Building with Public

The product is better - A larger number of passionate people, motivated by this passion rather than money can produce a better product than a traditional org. Most people work better when motivated by non-financial goals. 

The work required is less - The core company requires less staff and less in-house development.

The risks are lower - Changes that can turn off a user base no longer sit with the core company and are no longer the default or only option. The number of options available to each user means they will choose to use the version that they find superior. 

Reach is larger - The product can have a reach and function far beyond what the original creators had in mind. 

Why now?

The power of the crowd to produce quality popular content is proven;

• Wikipedia

• Mods of Games

• Memes  

• Social media

• Open source projects

The power to easily enable more people to participate is growing;

• AI image generation

• AI text generation

• The proliferation of coding skills and no-code tools

• New ways of community organising (discord, DAOs)

• APIs

The future of products is not static. We see continuous development in SaaS, and spreading into other industries.

Passionate Users

There is a huge passion from users of products. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the video games industry, where each game can spawn tens of thousands of mods, all made for free out of a combined millions of hours of work from passionate users. These mods can be as small as an ease-of-use UI change to a massive overhaul of the game to a completely different setting. It should be no surprise that the biggest hits from the gaming industry have come from passionate players improving on a centrally created game. Including games like DOTA, Counterstrike and PUBG, and genres such as MOBA(League of Legends) and Battle Royale (Fortnite).

APIs allow users to build specialised interfaces for products. Would Reddit have been as successful if its unpaid moderators did not have access to user-built tools such as Apollo? Allowing users who experience the use cases and pain points every day to build and edit the product has been a massive win for Reddit.

Engaged and passionate users will be willing to contribute more than the money they are billed for a product. Eg One user of an expense management app bought the company after the company folded to save the product. Expansions of old games are often bought not for the features but to ‘support the game’ and keep the servers and bug fixing active. 

By welcoming users into the development and treating them all like potential creators you create engaged, passionate and trusting users and enable them to improve the product for everyone. 

Aligning incentives

A blocker to continuous development is one-off pricing. If you are selling a boxed product every year (Eg the FIFA football games) then extending its life and maintenance costs does not make sense.

Similarly, if you rely on advertising revenue, then allowing users to build an ad-free version is going to hurt.

Only by aligning the incentives, both financial and passion, of the user and company, can building with public work. 

Challenges for Building with Public

• Shared revenue models - Can you build fair shared revenue contracts between the core company and user creators (Shares? Does this make all user creators part owners?)

• Progressive Pricing - Capitalise on the willingness of some invested users to contribute lots while not losing more casual users

• Financial rewards hurt passion - people who do things through passion can lose interest when doing it for money. Intrinsic > Extrinsic motivation 

• Moderation and QA - protecting users from poor changes and versions

• Cyberattacks - protecting the company from malicious exploits of the openness. Increasingly this includes AI training on the open data.

• Version control - some tasks require users to have the same version.

• Defensibility - with less core IP protected, how do you protect the company from the competition

Let us know your thoughts on the ideas discussed here, do you think we will see an increase in users building products with companies?

After writing and sharing this essay, the idea of Cambrian emerged. Building games and the tools to make them with users and the community.

Thanks for reading,

Jonny