The Love Trap: When Your Audience Adores You and Nobody Pays

Just now

_This is a chapter from my book__Build in Public__, where I studied forty founders and companies to understand why transparency builds trust and growth for some and backfires for others. It reads well on its own. The book's page, with the free audio edition:__khomichenko.com/build-in-public_

If the story of Everpix destroys the illusion that honesty will save you, this story destroys a deeper, even more seductive belief: that the love of the world equals a business.

That if thousands of people adore you, then money is only a matter of time. It is not a matter of time. And the proof is a database that developers loved, it seems, more than any other tool of their generation.

It was called RethinkDB.

And this time let's begin not merely with substance, but with triumph. RethinkDB was a technically superb product — an open-source database built for applications that update in real time, the kind where a change made by one person appears instantly on everyone else's screen. It was elegant, thoughtfully designed, and a pleasure to work with. But the point isn't the technical quality. The point is the scale of the love.

A community of more than a hundred thousand people gathered around RethinkDB. The product was a star on GitHub — the site where developers publish and rate code, and where stars are the closest thing the profession has to applause. Hundreds of startups, consulting firms, even Fortune 500 companies used it. Developers didn't just install it — they recommended it, they wrote about it, they built their businesses on it.

Now stop and recall the previous chapter. What killed Everpix? The absence of distribution — too few people found out about it. And now look at RethinkDB: its distribution was colossal. Everyone who needed to know about it did.

A hundred-thousand-strong devoted community — that is exactly the pillar Everpix lacked. So, you'd think, now all the pillars are in place: substance, yes; honesty, complete; open source, transparency itself; distribution, enormous.

And RethinkDB shut down.

How is that possible? The founder himself, Slava Akhmechet, gave the answer in a post-mortem that became one of the most-cited in startup history. He wrote it honestly and mercilessly: "we picked a terrible market." The same second pillar had failed — the market that pays — and with it the third, because no pricing model could capture value from people who had decided the product belonged in the free tier of their lives.

RethinkDB had landed in the worst possible place: it was selling a tool to developers. And developers adore free tools for developers — it's almost a religion, and a well-founded one. The profession was built on shared, freely given code, and for most developers reaching for a paid tool when a free one exists feels not just expensive but faintly wrong.

So despite the hundred-thousand-strong community, despite thousands of companies running it in production, almost no one was willing to pay. Akhmechet put it with almost comic precision: over a lifetime of use, the average user was willing to give them less than the price of a single coffee.

Sit with that for a moment. Not less than a salary, not less than a subscription — less than one coffee, for years of using software that ran their businesses. That is not a betrayal by the fans. It is the basic economics of a market that structurally does not pay.

Get Volodymyr Khomichenko’s stories in your inbox

Join StartsNest for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

And here a principle is born, one I want to name the Love Trap.

Its essence is this. Building in public is perhaps the most powerful instrument for generating love that exists. Openness draws people in, the community grows, the GitHub stars multiply, the followers arrive, the comments adore you. And all of it feels exactly like success. Every chart goes up.

Every signal says you're on the right path. But not one of those signals is revenue. Adoption is not money. Love is not willingness to pay. And the most insidious part is that love is so pleasant, and so much like traction, that it lulls you.

It lets a founder go months, even years, without noticing that beneath all the adoration there is no business.

So remember the distinction, because it saves companies' lives. Transparency multiplies three things beautifully: trust, reach, and love. But it does not multiply the fourth and most important one — the market's willingness to pay.

Keep two columns in your head, and never let them blur. In one: likes, stars, followers, warm words, sign-ups, downloads, people telling you they love what you're building. In the other: people who reached for their wallets, and kept doing it a second and a third time. The first column is loud and instant. The second is quiet and slow — and it is the only one that decides whether you still exist next year. RethinkDB had a first column most founders can only dream of, and a nearly empty second.

This is why the Love Trap is especially dangerous precisely for those who are good at building in public. The better you are at gathering an audience, the louder the chorus of adoration — and the easier it is to mistake that chorus for a business.

The very talent that makes you a favorite can lead you into a market that will never pay you, and keep you there, because "look how many people love us."

How do you inoculate against it? By asking yourself a separate, cold question alongside all the warm metrics. Not "how many people love me," but "how many people have paid — and how many are willing to pay again." Not "is my community growing," but "is my revenue from this community growing."

These are unromantic questions. They spoil the high of a rising audience. But they are exactly the questions RethinkDB failed to ask itself — a company loved more than almost anyone in this book, and which died all the same.

And with that, all of Part II closes. Together, Everpix and RethinkDB prove the thing hardest for an enraptured founder to believe. Everpix showed that honesty and a beloved product don't save you without distribution.

RethinkDB showed something harsher still: that even honesty, a beloved product, and enormous distribution don't save you if the market won't pay. Transparency will fix none of the pillars of the base. It will only, honestly, spotlight what's missing.

And now that we've firmly grasped which base the coefficient acts on at all, we can move to the coefficient itself. In the next part we'll open the gates — the two that decide whether transparency works for you at all, rather than against you. And the first of them is substance driven to zero.

The story of a payments startup that raised a fortune and sold almost nothing.

_This was a chapter from my book__Build in Public__. If it was useful, you can find the whole book, including the free audio edition, here:__khomichenko.com/build-in-public_