If you build it, they won't come

The line is “if you build it, he will come”. Singular. It’s said by a disembodied voice to a man who then ploughs up his crops to build a baseball pitch for ghosts.

We have collectively misremembered that into a business plan.

I’ve built a fair number of things now: an agency site, a couple of products, a magazine, a free tool, a shop that sells nothing. Every single time, some part of my brain has quietly assumed that finishing it was the hard bit. Every single time, it wasn’t.

The clearest example I have

I built a free tool called Plugin Risk Score. You paste in a WordPress plugin and it tells you whether it’s safe to install, scored against five signals, in about three seconds. No account, no email, no upsell.

It worked. People used it. And it went precisely nowhere.

Not in a dramatic way. Nobody hated it. There was no bad review, no critical bug, no moment where it fell over. It simply sat there on its own domain being useful to whoever happened to stumble across it, which was not many people, and that was that.

I’d assumed the usefulness would do the work. It doesn’t. Useful and known are two entirely different properties, and only one of them is affected by how good the thing is.

It wasn’t a quality problem

This is the part that took me longest to accept, because “build something better” is a much more comfortable diagnosis than the real one.

The tool failed to find an audience because of where I’d put it. A brand new domain has no history, no standing, and no reason for anyone to arrive at it. I’d built something genuinely useful and then parked it in a field.

When I moved it onto the agency site, nothing about the tool changed. Same code, same five signals, same three seconds. What changed was that it now sat somewhere people already had a reason to be, next to the work it demonstrated. That’s distribution, and it isn’t a thing you bolt on afterwards. It’s a property of where the thing lives.

Arriving doesn’t stay arrived

There’s a second version of this that’s worth naming, because I’ve done that one too.

I started Lifting Times in 2015. It found readers. Actual people, actually reading it. Then client work got busy, I stopped tending it, and it drifted. The articles were all still there and still good; nobody was minding the place.

An audience is not a thing you acquire once and then own. It decays if you stop turning up. Which is obvious when written down, and completely invisible when you’re busy.

Why we fall for it

Here’s my honest theory about why developers in particular keep believing the cornfield.

Building has a finish line. There is a genuine, checkable moment where the thing is done: it compiles, it ships, the listing goes live. That moment feels enormous, and it feels like an ending.

Distribution has no such moment. It’s a slow, unglamorous, permanently unfinished activity with no satisfying checkbox at the end. So we do the part that ends, feel the relief of finishing, and quietly treat the other part as someone else’s job.

Shipping isn’t the finish line. It’s the point at which a different and much longer job starts.

What I actually do about it now

Nothing clever, and nothing that makes it quick.

I put things where there’s already a reason for someone to be, rather than giving every idea its own island. A free tool belongs next to the work it demonstrates.

I write about them, which is a large part of what this blog is for. Not announcements; the reasoning behind the decisions. The reasoning is the bit people find interesting, and it’s the bit that’s still worth reading in a year.

I tell people directly. A dozen of the right people beats a launch nobody was waiting for, and I’ve had far better results from one honest message than from any amount of posting into the void.

And I try to build things that are cheap to keep alive. Something with no server and no running costs can sit there quietly for years without that silence killing it. A thing that costs money every month has to find its audience fast or die, which is a horrible constraint to put on something you made because you wanted it to exist.

So build it

I’m not arguing for market research and validation before you’re allowed to make anything. I build things because I want them to exist, and some of them have no business case whatsoever. That’s allowed, and I’d do it again.

Just don’t mistake the moment it exists for the moment it matters to anyone else. Those are usually months apart, and only one of them is in your control.