10 principles of building in public from Noah Bragg, Potion.so
Noah is an experienced founder. He’s been using Build In public framework to build his startup Potion.so (a website builder that allows users to create a website on top of Notion in a few clicks) since the beginning of 2021.
No grew Potion.so to $4K MRR in 10 months, and credits that growth to his success building in public on Twitter.
10 principles of Build In public from Noah Bragg:
- Build in Public is basically a sneak peek behind the scenes. Try to share as much of your internal processes as you can.
- The best way to do it is to create short videos — Twitter allows you to upload 2 min videos, and that’s exactly what you should do. Film your demos, how you code, how you solve your problems — every single snippet of your daily routine can be turned into several 2 min video clips. Do that and upload on Twitter.
- Be transparent. Show not only your ups but also your downs, the mistakes you’ve made, the opportunities you’ve lost.
- You will be constantly learning on the way — share these things with your audience. How you came across the problem, what you decided to learn, where you learned it, what exactly you’ve learned and how you are implementing your gained knowledge.
- Definitely share what you’ve tried — what worked and what did not. And the details of your decision making process.
- Don’t get deep into vanity metrics, measuring engagement of every tweet etc. You never know why specifically this tweet became viral: perhaps, a big account shared it or liked. You can’t make any conclusions about things that resonate with your audience based on the level of engagement. Go with your gut: put out stuff that you feel is reasonable and might have helped you years ago when you were just starting.
- Enjoy the process — if you don’t like building in public you will not last long.
- You can start building in public even with a very small audience — 1-2 followers. But if you have a unique take on things, being unique with what you’re doing will build a credibility for you and your product eventually.
- Start doing interesting things: build an interesting product or have an interesting events in your life, come up with interesting ideas on how to attract attention (Noah himself ran a contest where he offered to work for 40 hours for free for a winner and help them build an MVP). Being interesting is the most natural way to get attention and build credibility.
- Build in public gives a personality to you and your product. People follow along your back story they want to have your back. They support you even without you asking.
Watch the full interview with Noah:
Or listen to it on the Indie Worldwide podcast:
