Founders Marketing: Build in Public
Michelle Marcelline • 2021-10-21
One way for founders to get their products out there is by sharing their journey, learnings, and failures in public.
Who to better market a product if not the founders?
One way for founders to get their products out there is by sharing their journey, learnings, and failures in public.
This is called Building in Public.
Why does Founders Marketing make sense?
In order to increase your product awareness, you need to build an audience surrounding your product. However, as Kevon Cheung said below:
You can't build an audience surrounding your product without a personal brand.
Therefore, you, as the founder, need to grow your personal brand.
To grow your personal brand, you need to have a personal voice.
Choose a few topics you talk about so your audience know what to expect by following you. No one likes to hear from a person who says this and that randomly.
Example:
My journey building Product X (building Product X in public)
My journey as an IndieHacker who left a 6-figure salary job
To have a personal voice, you have to know yourself.
Who are you? what are you good at? what have you experienced in life?
Why build in public?
Idea Validation & Product Feedback
Idea Validation
Find a few people in the space and share your idea. Interview them:
What's missing from the current solution
What they did to hack the current solution to achieve what they want
If your tool exists, would they pay for it
Build an MVP
Ask people to beta test your MVP and gather their feedback
Keep Iterating
Iterate your product based on your beta testers' feedback if it aligns with your goal. Ask them to test your product iteration again
Keep doing it until they love your product and are willing to pay
Typedream's journey:
Once we formulated our idea, we immediately tweeted about transforming Notion pages to websites. Since it was a popular topic at the time, hundreds of people wanted to be interviewed to help us validate our solution
Once our solution was validated, our team quickly built an MVP and we shared the MVP in public again. People then gave us real feedback about the product (onboarding flow, missing features, and most importantly what we needed to do to make them willing to pay)
Community
Share your journey in public
What you're building
Lessons learned
Successes & failures
Build a following
of people who are interested in your product
Get 10 people who LOVE your product
by iterating your product based on their feedback
Get ambassadors
Your power users will market your product to their friends and families
How to get started
Show up every day, try to tweet about something
Treat Twitter as a daily standup:
What are you going to do today?
Anything you learned yesterday?
Any success/failure story to share?
Follow influential people in your space and read what they tweet about
If you find a tweet you can relate to, engage in that tweet
If you'd like to re-tell the story from your own POV, do that, tweet about it
To maintain deeper relationships, utilize DM
