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

Typedream's journey:

Through sharing our product in public, we built a community of people who loved our product as the product was built based on their feedback
When we launched Typedream to the public, our community helped us build the hype around our launch