A Daily Curation of the Web's Best Content for Startups
Building in Public, or the Open Startup Movement, is about sharing the process of building your business in public. It often includes sharing detailed financial metrics on sites like BareMetrics or IndieHackers.
Openly sharing your successes and failures is a great way to generate interest in your startup and helps tell your story in a way that is interesting and helpful to your audience.
Gary Vaynerchuk advises something similar with “document, don’t create.” It’s much easier to document what you are doing in your business than to create new content. Also, real examples of your experiences, good and bad, are much more interesting and actionable than generic advice content.
The downside of Building in Public, is that it makes it much easier for others to steal your ideas and playbook. However, this might also be a good thing. The competition will force you to keep improving to stay ahead.
Some famous businesses that are building in public are:
NomadList and Remote Jobs (Pieter Levels)
Convert Kit (Nathan Barry)
Hubstaff
9 Lessons from Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
Summary and lessons from Ausitn Kleon’s book “Show Your Work“, an early guide on building in public.
1. Find a Scenious
2. Think process, not product
4. Don’t be a hoarder, be a curator
5. Be a storyteller
6. Teach What you know
7. Learn to take a punch
8. Sell Out
9. Stick Around
Here is a good overview of what it takes to find a new business idea and get it to market by Stefan Vetter of Friendly. Many key ideas here are beneficial to review, regardless of where you are in your startup journey. 1. Start with an audience and the problem they have, not your idea and the product you want to create. 2. Launching on sites like ProductHunt. 3. Becoming an open startup and publicly sharing all your key metrics. 4. “Document, don’t create.” The idea of sharing the process of building your business.
The Hustle has a short post about the open startup movement. It links to Pieter Levels monster post where he documents, in great detail, the process of building his Hoodmaps business to more than 300,000 users. This follows Gary Vaynerchuck’s idea of Document, Don’t Create. Rather than generic advice and platitudes, it’s a lot more valuable and interesting to read exactly how you built something. The press likes this, too. Documenting the process and key business metrics can be a great way to promote your business. Checkout Baremetrics for a list of companies openly sharing financial details. Business Opportunity: When an idea, like open startups, is clear and simple and is gaining traction there will be more newsletters, podcasts, conferences, apps, consulting, etc. around it. You’ll see.
If you are active in digital nomad and online business communities like IndieHackers or ProductHunt, you will likely have heard of Pieter Levels. He is the creator of NomadList, which ranks popular digital nomad cities around the world. It was part of the 12 Startups in 12 Months project he undertook in 2014. NomadList and the accompanying job board now make $20k + per month in revenue.
There are many lessons to learn from Pieter Levels. Embracing the open startup, digital nomad, and lean startup movements when they were still in their infancy put Pieter ahead of the trends and made him a clear thought leader.
Coming up with a big challenge with a catchy name like “12 startups in 12 months”, got him a lot of press. Delivering on that promise with some business successes made it even more compelling. Being a serial entrepreneur is interesting. Doing 12 startups in 12 months is a story worth sharing. There are still new startups benefiting from the idea.
Leveraging platforms like ProductHunt, IndieHackers, and Twitter, Pieter Levels has built a large following and helped build early momentum for his launches.
Lessons to Learn: Try lots of things to see what gets traction. Building in public is a great way to generate interest. Openly sharing financials can also help promote your ideas. Bold challenges can generate publicity. Never underestimate the value of a simple and clear tagline or idea to promote your work. You need a community. Get involved in the online communities where your audience is.
Milena Rangelov expands on Elle Luna’s encouragement to start 100-Day projects. This is a really powerful idea. Undertaking a lengthy project like this forces you to “focus on the process, not the outcome.” That daily habit becomes the reward itself. It’s a great way to build momentum and a portfolio.
Opportunity: Just like the buzz worthiness of “12 Startups in 12 Months” I introduced before, challenges like this can be a great promotion for your work. Here are some ideas for an everyday challenge:
A simple idea like this with focused effort can be the start of a good business. How much would your skills improve and how many people could you reach if you did something like this for 100 consecutive days? This is also a great story to market your services after the fact. “What I learned designing a logo every day for 100 days.”
If you think 100 days is hard, remember that Seth Godin has blogged every day for more than two decades.
“What happened when one entrepreneur decided to share all of his crazy, rejected product ideas with the world.” Matty Benedetto has invented hundreds of largely useless inventions. His notoriety has earned him 555k Instagram followers and another 55k on YouTube. His typical invention costs less than $20 in 3D printer filament and 2 or 3 days to design.
Business Lessons:
1. Prototyping new products is probably easier and faster than you might think, particularly if you do a lot of them.
2. Do interesting things if you want people to be interested in you. Taking it to the extreme like creating hundreds of pointless inventions can generate publicity and fans. The fact that sites like The Hustle are promoting Matty Benedetto proves that it works.
3. I’ve recently written about doing 100 projects in 100 days, or 12 Startups in 12 Months. Those are stories that people want to share. What can you do that will be of interest to others?
Sharing the metrics of your business and explaining exactly what you are doing at each stage and why can be a great way to promote your company.
Sharing your successes and struggles makes you more relatable. Also, people will be more willing to share your story if they have the details behind your success.
Some companies famous for sharing financials are:
ConvertKit
NomadList
eBizFacts
Entrepreneur on Fire
via IndieLetters.com
