00:07:45 Arvid Kahl: That's only fair. I know it's easier said than done, but I highly recommend it. And if you consider yourself an introvert, here are a few thoughts that you can ponder to convince yourself to give building a public a go. You're helping people just like yourself. For every public builder, there are dozens, if not hundreds of makers who didn't muster the courage, but would love to learn from someone who did. You can help these people. You're also showing yourself and the world that you're serious about this. A public commitment by just talking about the things you do in public means a lot to an introvert, and it will also mean a lot to your followers and followers to be. You're putting your mouth where your mind is, so to say, and people notice. You're also leaving evidence of your ambition. If you ever feel like you do not have the impact that you think you should have, you can go back and see how much just even sharing your journey has already helped people. That is useful and that evidence is right there because you shared it in public. And you can still be an introvert. It just turns out that once you get talking about something you genuinely care about, you get to be a temporary extrovert. It's all about knowing your audience and adjusting the way you communicate with them. And you can always stop if it's too much for you.

00:05:51 (someone): Always consider how you can satisfy that selfish desire to grow through your content. And what is it about the thing that you're talking about that can be applied to someone else's journey? That's what you need to find out and that's what you need to share. Now to the problem of what to build. What's good to build will be absolutely unique to your business. And as long as you notice a real critical problem in your audience, it's worth thinking of a solution to it or as your product. As long as you notice a critical problem, you can consider this a potential product or feature. Use breakout conversations to determine the quality of the problem you perceive. If you can do this in public even better, just talk to people and figure out if the thing they were complaining about or the thing that they were talking about is worth following up on. And this public scrutiny of such a conversation, if you do this in public, if you're on Twitter and somebody complains about a problem and you follow up and ask them, well, what's the source of this problem? How do you currently remedy it and all that? The public scrutiny around this conversation, other people watching and figuring out that you're learning something and them learning something for themselves as well, they will quickly point out logic errors or misguided assumptions, either on your end or on the end of the person complaining. It's really nice to do this in public because you get immediately a feedback from other people surrounding the conversation. And that's the immediate feedback group that powers all building in public. There's a benevolent audience somewhere that has goals that align with yours. They want their problems solved. You want to solve their problems.

00:09:25 Arvid Kahl: You don't necessarily need to be the only product in this space. However, the closer the thing you're selling is to a commodity, something easily replicated, the less useful it will be to build in public around that business. So, while building in public has many benefits, it's not a one-size-fits-all strategy. You will need to consider your personal comfort level with public engagement, the nature of your business, and your business's competitive advantages before deciding whether to adopt this approach of building in public. It's also crucial to remember that building in public is not an all-or-nothing decision. You could choose to share certain aspects of your journey while keeping others private, depending on what best aligns with your business strategy and personal style. I've actually seen people build businesses in public without telling other people exactly what business they're building. This is pretty strong indeed. Amazon e-commerce merchant space, where people just share insights, maybe even numbers from their business, but they won't tell you what they sell, because that would be super easy to be cloned. But you can still share the journey, you can still share your graphs, you just don't tell people who you are or what you build. It's pretty interesting that building in public can be seen from this kind of level of abstraction too, right? You don't need to share everything. You need to share the things that are interesting and instructional and educational for the people around you to find meaning and value in what you share, but you don't need to give up everything.

00:04:12 Arvid Kahl: It is giving something to the market. So for that, you could just consider partnering with a more extroverted co-founder or hiring a dedicated marketing expert, a freelancer maybe. There are ways to bridge this gap. But make sure that you're not falling prey to what Michael E. Gerber calls the entrepreneurial myth. You can't run a business on technical jobs alone. There's always an operational and a business development part to any successful business. Don't skip these just because they're harder than building. They're just as important. And you kind of need to learn this as a founder. You need to be able to do these other things too. And since we're already talking about the business, let's stick with the business. The second aspect to consider here when you're pondering if building in public is for you, is the nature of the business you're building. Some kinds of businesses inherently lend themselves to building public businesses, to the public build in public process, while others may better be suited to a more private approach. Businesses that thrive on community engagement, or that are referral-based, or have a strong collaborative aspect, they're often way more conducive to building in public than others. Most businesses in the educational and healthcare sector, for example, or those involving open source technology, coding, right, software engineers, they often thrive when built in public.

00:02:53 Arvid Kahl: I thought that being an introvert, who I still think I am, meant that marketing, which includes talking about my founder journey, just wasn't for me. I would rather code. I would rather build a product. But contrary to popular belief, Being an introvert does not necessarily mean that you cannot succeed in building in public. Introversion and extroversion, they're not decisive factors here. Instead, it's your ability and willingness to interact with people who care about the same things as you. It becomes an order of magnitude easier to share your story with people who already know the vocabulary. I've found that even the most introverted founders glow up when they're talking to an audience of their peers about things that they all care about. But for some people, this is just too much. If you absolutely hate communicating with others about your work and its potential benefits, or if you prefer solely focusing on the technical aspects of your work, building in public may prove to be a distraction rather than a boon. Your inability to build in public also does not mean that you cannot be successful in business ever. You just need to consider other marketing strategies that align with your personality traits and business goals. Because building in public effectively is marketing. Maybe marketing yourself, marketing your product, marketing your idea, your vision. It is giving something to the market. So for that, you could just consider partnering with a more extroverted co-founder or hiring a dedicated marketing expert, a freelancer maybe.

00:10:42 Arvid Kahl: You don't need to share everything. You need to share the things that are interesting and instructional and educational for the people around you to find meaning and value in what you share, but you don't need to give up everything. In any case, entrepreneurs should avoid thinking of building in public as the only way to achieve success. Many successful businesses have been built privately, and there are numerous other effective marketing and branding and outreach strategies available. Building in public is a good one. It's one that I like, but it's not the only one. And if it doesn't work for you, you don't need to force yourself to do it. It's something that is one of the many tools in your tool belt. Remember that building in public is fundamentally about generosity and transparency and community. If those things align with your personality and your business model, then building in public is a powerful way to gain customers' trust and build your brand and grow your business. In the end, it's up to you to make that choice. And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to The Bootstrap Founder. You can find me on Twitter at avidkhal, A-R-V-I-D-K-H-L. You'll find my books and my Twitter course there as well. If you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and get the podcast and your podcast player of choice and leave a really nice rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com slash founder.

00:06:37 Arvid Kahl: Shareability matters and you need to figure out just how shareable your business is. If you serve competitive players in hyper-competitive markets, you're probably better off building a brand of being elite and exclusive. And while building in public could still be an option, it would require a much more selective and strategic approach in terms of what you choose to share. Now finally, there's the problem of copycats, right? We're talking about people have a competitive advantage, copycats, that could be one. The third reason to consider not building in public is when you lack a strong business moat. Emote is any business's ability to maintain its competitive advantages over its competitors over time. These advantages, they could be anything, either access to money, capital, or network, connections, industry knowledge, or having a unique product that's difficult to replicate. As long as the thing that you have is not clonable in a few hours, it is likely a moat. But if your product can easily be copied, and you lack other competitive advantages, sharing just too much information publicly will invite clones and competitors, and that potentially damages your business. This risk is particularly present for first-time founders without any prior expertise or connections or reputations in the industry that they're serving. In such cases, it's advisable to establish a solid moat before starting to build in public. And this sounds hard, but it's easier than it seems. Particularly in industry niches, really small niches, communities will reward the people who contribute in them with reputation and connections.

00:00:14 Arvid Kahl: Welcome to the Bootstrap Founder. My name is Arvid Kahl and I talk about bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, and building in public. Today, I will talk about why building in public, as great as it is, might not be for you. And before that, let me thank the sponsor of today's episode. One thing that always confuses me in my own businesses, and it still does to this day, it never really stops, is dealing with financials. I love writing, I love coding, but put me in front of a spreadsheet with a bunch of CSV files from my bank and I will start getting very confused. It just is not for me. And fortunately, it doesn't have to be for you either. Enter Pinto Financial. They streamline your bookkeeping. your forecasting and cash flow but they don't stop there. Pinto takes it to the next level by providing custom video-based monthly reports so you always know where you stand. Think of them as your financial lifeline guiding you through the choppy waters of business financial management. So if you're ready to navigate these waters with confidence, visit usepinto.com slash learn to learn more about how Pinto Financial can help you build profitably. That's usepinto.com slash learn. All right, now let's get to our main topic today. In the world of entrepreneurship, there's a growing trend towards building in public.

00:04:36 (someone): It becomes almost a voyeuristic spectacle. And no founder deserves to be at the center of that particular kind of attention. I think building in public is a very nuanced activity. And it's also a founder-driven and a founder-decided activity. With every founder being a unique human being, their approach to sharing their journey will also be uniquely colored by their preferences, choices, and perspectives. And that's important. And I don't think that not talking about certain things or talking less or being preoccupied with other things cheapens the act of building in public. Just because you're careful with what you share, it doesn't mean that building in public is just a marketing trick. I think it's an oversimplified view of how entrepreneurship works, but it's an often-brought argument by people who are purists when it comes to building public. I think, funny enough, building public itself is not a well-defined thing. At least, I don't see any really universally accepted definition. But there seems to be this understanding that there is a true building in public. And honestly, that reminds me of something. Because asking for radical transparency from the get-go is a dangerous form of purism that causes damage to a community, but it's dangerous to all sorts of communities. I believe this is the philosophical extension of the no-true-Scotsman fallacy, this appeal to a very arbitrary purity. That the fallacy, from what I remember, goes like this. Somebody says, no Scotsman puts sugar in their tea.

00:01:28 Arvid Kahl: All right, now let's get to our main topic today. In the world of entrepreneurship, there's a growing trend towards building in public. The concept of sharing the journey of creating a product or business with a public audience. And I'm a big fan of this approach to build something meaningful in front of those whom it matters to the most. It is just one way out of very many to get where you want to be. And for some, it may not always be the best approach. Building in public is about honesty and transparency. So even because I'm an advocate for this way of running a business. I want to share a few reasons why building in public might not be the right choice for you or your business. The first reason revolves around an entrepreneur's personality traits, mostly their attitudes towards public engagement. Building in public is obviously not a very private act. The entrepreneurial journey that we're all on often requires stepping out of one's comfort zone and it's important to acknowledge individual strengths and limitations of each founder. Some builders are almost exclusively technically minded. They might prefer to immerse themselves in the craft of building a product rather than talking about their work. And I certainly remember thinking and acting just like that early in my career as a software engineer. I thought that being an introvert, who I still think I am, meant that marketing, which includes talking about my founder journey, just wasn't for me. I would rather code.

00:01:41 Arvid Kahl: Many of us tend to hunker down and focus on our products or projects, often to the exclusion of building an audience or engaging with potential customers or clients. But sharing your work and your process in public has many benefits that can significantly impact the success of your business or your creative venture. It can help build credibility and trust with the audience, gather you valuable feedback and insights, and even lead to new opportunities and potential collaborations. If you struggle with sharing your work and process in public, here are a few tips that might help. I consider myself to be an introvert. I've been reclusive and inward-focused all of my life. But this might not be immediately apparent when you see me and my work on Twitter or YouTube. In fact, you might think that I'm quite outgoing and extroverted as a person, basking in public conversations and then playfully interacting with thousands of others. Well, I wasn't always like that. And it certainly does not look like this all the time. I recognize that my introversion is strongest when I'm forced into social situations and interactions that are centered on topics that I just don't care about. Send me to a party, and I'll probably be uncomfortable, but throw me into a JavaScript meetup, and I'll happily spend four hours talking to my fellow nerds. Once I realized that I figured out how to apply this to my public work as an entrepreneur, I don't need to be an extrovert at all to build in public.

00:09:25 Arvid Kahl: You don't necessarily need to be the only product in this space. However, the closer the thing you're selling is to a commodity, something easily replicated, the less useful it will be to build in public around that business. So, while building in public has many benefits, it's not a one-size-fits-all strategy. You will need to consider your personal comfort level with public engagement, the nature of your business, and your business's competitive advantages before deciding whether to adopt this approach of building in public. It's also crucial to remember that building in public is not an all-or-nothing decision. You could choose to share certain aspects of your journey while keeping others private, depending on what best aligns with your business strategy and personal style. I've actually seen people build businesses in public without telling other people exactly what business they're building. This is pretty strong indeed. Amazon e-commerce merchant space, where people just share insights, maybe even numbers from their business, but they won't tell you what they sell, because that would be super easy to be cloned. But you can still share the journey, you can still share your graphs, you just don't tell people who you are or what you build. It's pretty interesting that building in public can be seen from this kind of level of abstraction too, right? You don't need to share everything. You need to share the things that are interesting and instructional and educational for the people around you to find meaning and value in what you share, but you don't need to give up everything.

00:02:53 Arvid Kahl: I thought that being an introvert, who I still think I am, meant that marketing, which includes talking about my founder journey, just wasn't for me. I would rather code. I would rather build a product. But contrary to popular belief, Being an introvert does not necessarily mean that you cannot succeed in building in public. Introversion and extroversion, they're not decisive factors here. Instead, it's your ability and willingness to interact with people who care about the same things as you. It becomes an order of magnitude easier to share your story with people who already know the vocabulary. I've found that even the most introverted founders glow up when they're talking to an audience of their peers about things that they all care about. But for some people, this is just too much. If you absolutely hate communicating with others about your work and its potential benefits, or if you prefer solely focusing on the technical aspects of your work, building in public may prove to be a distraction rather than a boon. Your inability to build in public also does not mean that you cannot be successful in business ever. You just need to consider other marketing strategies that align with your personality traits and business goals. Because building in public effectively is marketing. Maybe marketing yourself, marketing your product, marketing your idea, your vision. It is giving something to the market. So for that, you could just consider partnering with a more extroverted co-founder or hiring a dedicated marketing expert, a freelancer maybe.

00:10:42 Arvid Kahl: You don't need to share everything. You need to share the things that are interesting and instructional and educational for the people around you to find meaning and value in what you share, but you don't need to give up everything. In any case, entrepreneurs should avoid thinking of building in public as the only way to achieve success. Many successful businesses have been built privately, and there are numerous other effective marketing and branding and outreach strategies available. Building in public is a good one. It's one that I like, but it's not the only one. And if it doesn't work for you, you don't need to force yourself to do it. It's something that is one of the many tools in your tool belt. Remember that building in public is fundamentally about generosity and transparency and community. If those things align with your personality and your business model, then building in public is a powerful way to gain customers' trust and build your brand and grow your business. In the end, it's up to you to make that choice. And that's it for today. Thank you for listening to The Bootstrap Founder. You can find me on Twitter at avidkhal, A-R-V-I-D-K-H-L. You'll find my books and my Twitter course there as well. If you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and get the podcast and your podcast player of choice and leave a really nice rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com slash founder.

00:04:12 Arvid Kahl: It is giving something to the market. So for that, you could just consider partnering with a more extroverted co-founder or hiring a dedicated marketing expert, a freelancer maybe. There are ways to bridge this gap. But make sure that you're not falling prey to what Michael E. Gerber calls the entrepreneurial myth. You can't run a business on technical jobs alone. There's always an operational and a business development part to any successful business. Don't skip these just because they're harder than building. They're just as important. And you kind of need to learn this as a founder. You need to be able to do these other things too. And since we're already talking about the business, let's stick with the business. The second aspect to consider here when you're pondering if building in public is for you, is the nature of the business you're building. Some kinds of businesses inherently lend themselves to building public businesses, to the public build in public process, while others may better be suited to a more private approach. Businesses that thrive on community engagement, or that are referral-based, or have a strong collaborative aspect, they're often way more conducive to building in public than others. Most businesses in the educational and healthcare sector, for example, or those involving open source technology, coding, right, software engineers, they often thrive when built in public.

00:07:17 Arvid Kahl: Just because you created a good product doesn't mean that people know about it. Founders learn this every day. A business isn't just a product. It also requires finding a way of making people aware of it and excited about your work. And that's where building in public shines incredibly strong. But it comes with a catch. If you're just starting out, you don't have an audience to build in front of. It's great to know that seasoned builders have huge groups of people cheering them on and supporting them with their launches and marketing and everything. But where does this leave the founders who are just getting started? And I believe that the answer to this is community and active community. Knowing that you're surrounded by people who are doing the very same thing, who are feeding the same hesitation and the same doubts as you are, that will help you find the courage you need. And surrounding yourself with others just like you is the most stabilizing thing you can do to find your footing as a builder in public. If you see people building their businesses in front of you every day, that becomes less scary for you. And if you see them struggle, sometimes fail, and sometimes succeed, it becomes less risky to share your own journey. After all, they still keep doing it, even though things can sometimes get hard. You see these founders persevere and grow in public. And that's the realization that made all of this make sense to me.

00:06:48 Arvid Kahl: But you don't need to do hour-long sessions to consult in public. Josh Spector suggests doing some micro-coaching, offering free advice about specific challenges that your followers may have and then engaging heavily in the replies. That way, it's still public consulting without the high-risk components. But we can still talk about the upsides here, because you combine the reputational risk and the risk of exposing business secrets. That just leads me to believe that extensive and podcast-worthy consulting in public is most effective between founders with a pre-existing relationship and when it's being used for built-in public purposes, when there's something to be learned. And that's a very narrow niche. But just in case you find yourself in that very situation, on either side, here are a few upsides that might convince you to give it a go. Consulting in public signals professionalism. If a consultant conducts a consulting session and gets their client to appreciate their work audibly, the listeners and the viewers will have witnessed a professional service being rendered. Not only will this net to consultant more work in the future, but it will continue to build both parties' reputations as serious entrepreneurs. Consulting in public also signals expertise because everyone wants to learn from experts and people consider those they learn from to be experts. So by putting your work out there, you're creating evidence of your expertise by teaching. And this goes for the consultant and for the client, who are both subject matter experts at their crafts. Consulting in public also allows for brand building. While both parties benefit from reputation and expertise signals, they also actively teach the people listening.

00:07:45 Arvid Kahl: That's only fair. I know it's easier said than done, but I highly recommend it. And if you consider yourself an introvert, here are a few thoughts that you can ponder to convince yourself to give building a public a go. You're helping people just like yourself. For every public builder, there are dozens, if not hundreds of makers who didn't muster the courage, but would love to learn from someone who did. You can help these people. You're also showing yourself and the world that you're serious about this. A public commitment by just talking about the things you do in public means a lot to an introvert, and it will also mean a lot to your followers and followers to be. You're putting your mouth where your mind is, so to say, and people notice. You're also leaving evidence of your ambition. If you ever feel like you do not have the impact that you think you should have, you can go back and see how much just even sharing your journey has already helped people. That is useful and that evidence is right there because you shared it in public. And you can still be an introvert. It just turns out that once you get talking about something you genuinely care about, you get to be a temporary extrovert. It's all about knowing your audience and adjusting the way you communicate with them. And you can always stop if it's too much for you.

00:05:51 (someone): Always consider how you can satisfy that selfish desire to grow through your content. And what is it about the thing that you're talking about that can be applied to someone else's journey? That's what you need to find out and that's what you need to share. Now to the problem of what to build. What's good to build will be absolutely unique to your business. And as long as you notice a real critical problem in your audience, it's worth thinking of a solution to it or as your product. As long as you notice a critical problem, you can consider this a potential product or feature. Use breakout conversations to determine the quality of the problem you perceive. If you can do this in public even better, just talk to people and figure out if the thing they were complaining about or the thing that they were talking about is worth following up on. And this public scrutiny of such a conversation, if you do this in public, if you're on Twitter and somebody complains about a problem and you follow up and ask them, well, what's the source of this problem? How do you currently remedy it and all that? The public scrutiny around this conversation, other people watching and figuring out that you're learning something and them learning something for themselves as well, they will quickly point out logic errors or misguided assumptions, either on your end or on the end of the person complaining. It's really nice to do this in public because you get immediately a feedback from other people surrounding the conversation. And that's the immediate feedback group that powers all building in public. There's a benevolent audience somewhere that has goals that align with yours. They want their problems solved. You want to solve their problems.

00:01:28 Arvid Kahl: All right, now let's get to our main topic today. In the world of entrepreneurship, there's a growing trend towards building in public. The concept of sharing the journey of creating a product or business with a public audience. And I'm a big fan of this approach to build something meaningful in front of those whom it matters to the most. It is just one way out of very many to get where you want to be. And for some, it may not always be the best approach. Building in public is about honesty and transparency. So even because I'm an advocate for this way of running a business. I want to share a few reasons why building in public might not be the right choice for you or your business. The first reason revolves around an entrepreneur's personality traits, mostly their attitudes towards public engagement. Building in public is obviously not a very private act. The entrepreneurial journey that we're all on often requires stepping out of one's comfort zone and it's important to acknowledge individual strengths and limitations of each founder. Some builders are almost exclusively technically minded. They might prefer to immerse themselves in the craft of building a product rather than talking about their work. And I certainly remember thinking and acting just like that early in my career as a software engineer. I thought that being an introvert, who I still think I am, meant that marketing, which includes talking about my founder journey, just wasn't for me. I would rather code.