A guide by Kevon Cheung, an author of BuildInPublic Mastery course
Kevon has created Build In Public Mastery Course in 2021.
He’s grown his newsletter on Build In public to 1K subscribers in several months.
Kevon has run several cohorts of the course and has trained hundreds of founders to build in public.
Kevon shares his personal journey on Twitter and in his newsletter.
10 How-tos for Build in Public from Kevon Cheung:
- Build in public is essentially, a content creation framework. Meaning, you have to learn how to write captivating and interesting stories to be good at it.
- What to start with when you don’t know how to write good stories? Build a system on how to capture those stories. For example, every day record: — one learning of the day (a lesson you learned) — one discovery of the day — one mistake you made and what it lead to — one little win
- Capture as much as you can in pictures and small videos. For instance, if you’re working with a white board, snap a picture of it and store in your content database. Share on Twitter or in your blog post later this week.
- Use scheduling tools to schedule your content on social media. Don’t tweet life. It’s overwhelming and takes too much of your time. Plan and schedule your content in advance. Interact and engage in real time.
- What to do if you have only 2-3 followers? Does it make sense to start crying into the void? No, it doesn’t. First, build meaningful relationships with 10-20 people. Find someone who’s doing what you’re doing (in terms of product, tech, hobby, or just live not so far). Reach out and just be friendly. Support this person, provide valuable advice and feedback. In return, they will start supporting you. It will allow you to — overcome a fear of public speaking as you will have several loyal people in your audience already — amplify your message and draw in more followers — make the process of sharing less painful and definitely less lonely.
- Build In public is very good for solopreneurs or creators who are building their own personal brand. Therefore, you can’t hire someone to do this work for you. This is something that a founder has to do on their own because no one knows their personal story better than they do.
- A lot of people seem to think that building public is something that you have to keep talking about every single day. Like today, I'm working on this, tomorrow, I'm working on that. Today, I made this much progress. Some people do it that way. I don't believe it’s a plausible framework because it doesn’t create a great story. Who would read this stuff? That’s on one hand. On the other hand, founders don’t even have time for these daily updates. I suggest focussing more on the retrospective: after something happened, recap what happened. And take out the key lessons. It will considerably decrease the time you spend on social media truing to engage with the audience but will provide a better outcome in terms of followers and eventually, customers.
- Build in Public is not only for Twitter. Look at Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber — they were making movies about the behind the scenes of their journey. That's build in public, but in a movie perspective. And then YouTubers, they're amazing at building public, because they're always showing what they're working on. If your audience is on these platforms — definitely go for it.
- The first step of being great in Build In Public is to ask yourself: Why do I need it? Be honest: is it something you want to do to stroke your ego? Is it your marketing channel? Or do you need someone to bounce your ideas off? Your every story should be written with this perspective in mind. And knowing why exactly you are doing it will help you stay consistent. For example, when I share the behind the scenes of my course, I also want to attract students to sign up for my course. So then what content would I share? I would be sharing facts about my course design, how I created it, the concept, I wouldn't be sharing my mistakes and how I iterated the course many times to make it better. This is the information that will inspire interest and make people think “Oh, it sounds curious, I should check it out”.
- Telling your Build In Public stories always think about your readers — what’s in that for them? How they would use your content? This will shift the focus from you and your story to them and their value. And make your content much more interesting, sharable and inspiring.
