Build in Public Mastery: Program Release Notes

We're very committed to listening to students' feedback and making our program better.

On this page, you can find the major changes we've made to Build in Public Mastery.

Dec 2023

📖 Curriculum

  • I'm building new masterclasses for the members. The next one is Build a Challenge Masterclass. All members will be able to get future masterclasses at no charge.

🙌 Community

  • We run Build in Public Sprint at least 3 times a year within Build in Public Mastery. For the one in Nov 2023, we opened up for the public to join and it was a blast (check out #BuildinPublicSprint)! Members got to meet a lot of Sprinters to level up their craft.
  • We are now adding event summary and timestamps to our recording so that members can quickly find relevant parts. We want them to spend less time but getting more.

⭐ Experience

  • We used to do mini onboarding cohorts. Now we're upgrading it again, but we won't go back to our old intense setups of 10 live sessions in 4 weeks. We'll do Accelerator Cohorts with 3 live sessions across 3 weeks to onboard new students. We miss the cohort, peer-group learning environment. This is a great way to kick off picking up a new skill before diving into the remaining self-guided curriculum.

Self-Guided x Action Community (Aug 2023)

📖 Curriculum

  • We want to cater to different kinds of learners. This is why we're not relying on live workshops to deliver the main content. Going forward, our curriculum will be self-guided and interactive with many touch points for students to interact with the community
  • To encourage students to take action, we encourage 4 different types of actions: self-reflection, comment on Loom, post in our community, and post in public.

🙌 Community

  • Live cohorts still have its magic, and it is in the connections made. For each batch that starts the program, we will have mini onboarding cohort to do just that. This allows students to support one another.
  • We will have more live sessions throughout the year, including Office Hours, Coworking Hours, Social Hours, etc.

⭐ Experience

  • I'm super excited about this new Build in Public Mastery experience! We're making the program more flexible for all sorts of students.
  • I'm also proud that with our new pricing tiers and parity pricing, we are bringing together students from all across the world. More diversity!

Cohort 7 (May 2023)

📖 Curriculum

  • Workshops refined: I (Kevon) love teaching and a big part of it is the live interaction with students. This is why we once again looked at the 6 live workshops to improve the flow, exercises, and interaction points
  • Easy-to-reference resources: students want to have materials they can easily go back to. We developed a BIPM handbook (PDF) that covers the important points of all 6 modules

🙌 Community

  • Community on Circle: we have been using Slack for our in-cohort communication, but recently we decided to invest more effort in running our ongoing community for all students. We moved to Circle and now enjoy an async, calm, and supportive environment
  • Events for BIPM community: we now have Coworking Hours, Sprints, and $10K Fast Track (a paid program) within the community for all alumni to join.

⭐ Experience

  • 30-day challenge for advanced students: we're making the 30-day Build in Public challenge an optional component of the cohort because we want to focus on the fundamentals (learning to walk before learning to run). Students who feel ready can still challenge themselves
  • APAC-friendly office hours: like last cohort, if there are students joining from APAC, we will create 2 more office hours (APAC morning, US evening) to accommodate
  • Priority enrollment: since we always keep our cohorts small, we want to give serious prospective students a better chance to secure their seats. We added a button in our early emails for them to indicate their interest, and we will share enrollment link 1 day earlier than everyone else

Cohort 6 (Jan 2023)

📖 Curriculum

  • Cohort length: we expanded the cohort from 3-week to 4-week. Actually, it is 6-week because of we do orientation & graduation outside of the 4-week. We're now doing a max 2 live sessions per week. We want to give students more room to learn, engage, and take action
  • Further coaching: The Black Belt program is a 4-month extension to enable students to implement the Build in Public framework with Kevon's 1:1 help

🙌 Community

  • Mentors in residence: we identified a group of brilliant public builders with domain expertise to be go-to resources for students
  • Peer-to-peer learning: we added more peer review assignments to encourage collaborations and connections among one another
  • Join future cohorts: we expanded the Blue Belt program to allow students to come back to any future cohorts, giving them more opportunities to interact with the community and implement their Building in Public strategies

⭐ Experience

  • Longer build-in-public challenge: to line up with the 4-week cohort, we expanded the 21-day challenge to 30-day. We are also encouraging students to use week 1 as exploration before deciding on their projects
  • Office hours: they are no longer add-on sessions but part of the curriculum. We recognize the importance of feedback loop and want to give students a dedicated platform to ask their questions

Cohort 5 (Oct 2022)

📖 Curriculum

  • Momentum Marketing: we added new modules covering how to build up momentum and launch. This include 9 videos (47 mins) and 1 live workshop
  • Blueprint for Momentum Marketing: we also added a Google Sheet laying down the entire tasks & schedule from building in public to generating momentum, to creating a buzzing launch. This is available to Blue Belt & Black Belt students
  • Build-in-public experts: we're excited to add more guest interviews (Arvid Kahl and "KP" Karthik Puvvada)

🙌 Community

  • Mentorships: we brought in mentors (Jannis, Christine, Shruthi) with their expertise in different topics to help students progress
  • Guest speaker: we continued to invite amazing guest speaker with Build in Public expertise to share with us
  • Team exercise: we added a team exercise for week 3 (yes, want to leave it vague because it is a surprise!)

⭐ Experience

  • New platform: we moved to a new Learning Management System on ThriveCart, smoothening the process from signing up to accessing course materials

Cohort 4 (Jun 2022)

📖 Curriculum

  • More small group exercises: we updated most live sessions to prioritize breakout exercises because collaboration yields learnings
  • Build-in-public challenge: we Improved the instructions for the challenge with clearer objective & process
  • New case study: we added a 42-day case study on how to build a course in public from ideation to sales

🙌 Community

  • Orientation: we added a casual session to welcome students before the cohort officially starts. It helps us build rapport and connections before diving in

⭐ Experience

  • Onboarding: we openied up our curriculum a week before the cohort start date so that students can prepare ahead
  • Students' review: we asked students to recap their course experience on social media to show how much they've progressed

If you want to be part of the next cohort of Build in Public Mastery, check out our program!