CHAPTER 2
Building in Public is exactly what it sounds like. It means building a company, a product, or anything and sharing a lot of the transparent "behind the scenes" with its public audience.
Going back a decade, entrepreneurs loved working in stealth mode, treating everything from the idea to an operating procedure, to how much money they were making as trade secrets. None of us wanted to show our vulnerability and let other people judge us.
We also didn't want other people to copy our innovative ideas, and we were careful in sharing to protect ourselves. That was fair back in the days.
But the evolution of the Internet has changed the whole game. Ideas are now everywhere. Starting a business or building anything has become a lot easier. You can literally create a website in less than a day and declare you're in business.
Easier to start, however, doesn't mean easier to stay. Competition is over the roof, and it is much harder to differentiate purely by ideas. A lot more focus is now placed on execution and things that aren't easy to be copied, such as culture, brand, community, and of course, personality.
With Building in Public, entrepreneurs share their entrepreneurial journey publicly via their favorite channels. This includes learnings, struggles, anecdotes, and even key business metrics, to build authenticity and trust with their audience.
If Building in Public is Entrepreneurship 2.0, then it is definitely more than just sharing the ups and downs!
A lot of entrepreneurs misinterpret the cause and effect as "share your journey and they'll come." When I first started building in public, I was thinking the same.
Only after teaching and coaching 100+ entrepreneurs daily for 18 months that I discovered the parts that make Building in Public so powerful in cultivating a community around your work.
These are the 6 parts:
❌ It is not: Most entrepreneurs see social media as a quick and easy way to generate leads for their businesses. They show up as experts and show off.
✅ It is: Potential customers will come, but only after the right social media strategy is in place. You need to use social media for 3Cs: community, conversations, and connections.
❌ It is not: Most entrepreneurs create dry and dull content just like a lot of the blog posts we find via Google Search these days.
✅ It is: As a busy entrepreneur, the easiest way for you to create content that also builds trust is to look at your own work-in-progress and stories. They work 10x better than expert content.
❌ It is not: Most entrepreneurs create platitude content and share updates that no one cares. When they need to push for sales, they promote hard.
✅ It is: You should use social media as a micro blog to tell your stories and show your progress. People want to follow you if you're interesting.
❌ It is not: Most entrepreneurs focus only on posting their content. They forget that there are people on the other side of the screen.
✅ It is: You know that posting is only 10% of the work. The other 90% is about how you invite people into your world through conversing, lifting, and even helping you shape your products.
❌ It is not: Most entrepreneurs want to use social media for everything: attract people, engage people, and sell to people. Social media is not great for all these things.
✅ It is: You know the role of social media and email. You use intriguing work and stories to attract people, then you bring them into your email list to keep in touch.
❌ It is not: Most entrepreneurs force themselves to open up the social media to write something every day, only to find it to be extremely difficult.
✅ It is: You need to build up your content creation engine. With it, you can write a week’s worth of Build in Public content within one hour.
When you do it right, you'll find two groups of audiences. One group is supportive friends and people who share a similar journey and vision. Another group is users and customers who find your product relevant. They're both essential to your growth.
But many entrepreneurs make the mistake of being laser focused on potential customers and skip over the fact that community and network are equally important to drive a business forward.
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