John Builds

About

Love side projects. Claude Code enthusiast. BuildInPublic

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Tastemaker
Tastemaker
Gone streaking
Gone streaking

Maker History

Forums

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2mo ago

Do you actually run your company on the product you sell?

Honest question for anyone building: is your own company a customer of your product?

In April I made that rule for us. I build a social media scheduler, and until then our own accounts were run the way everyone's are: five composer tabs, the same caption pasted five times, LinkedIn posted "when I remembered". Since mid-April every weekday post on our LinkedIn, X, Bluesky, and Threads has gone out through the product itself, and I haven't opened a composer since.

Two things surprised me.

First, dogfooding turned out to be our best QA. When a platform changes its API, our own morning post breaks before any customer's does. We've caught real publish bugs hours before a support ticket could have existed.

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2mo ago

How much time per week do you actually spend on social for your product?

Genuine question, because I think the honest answers are either "way too much" or "basically zero," and both hurt.

When I started building my product I bounced between those poles: two weeks of daily posting, then three weeks of silence when real work took over. The silence weeks were the expensive ones. For a product nobody has heard of, visibility decays fast.

What finally worked for me was capping it: 2.5 hours a week, structured. One 90-minute block on Sunday to write everything for the week while I still have context. Fixed publishing slots (Tue/Thu/Sat) so nothing depends on my mood. Ten minutes a day replying to people in my space, which drives more profile visits than my own posts do some weeks. And once a month I re-queue my best performer, because new followers never saw it.

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2mo ago

TikTok scheduling: the native option is more gated than people think

A pattern I keep seeing with short-form video: creators batch-film on the weekend, then still post everything manually because they assume TikTok has no scheduler. It has one, but it's gated twice.

Gate 1: account type. Only Business and Creator accounts get the native Video Scheduler. Personal accounts never see it. Switching is free; most solo creators should pick Creator, because Business accounts trade the full music library for commercial-licensed sounds only.

Gate 2: surface. Scheduling lives on the desktop upload page and TikTok Studio. The mobile app has no scheduling at all. The window runs 15 minutes to 10 days ahead.

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