First 30-days Building in Public complete!

For the past 30 days, I have been building in public on Twitter as @firetrack10

Why I decided to give building in public a shot

I have been seeing a lot of posts and praise about building in public and how important it is to build an audience while you are creating your product. As someone who has never used twitter before, the following benefits finally pushed me into taking the leap:

• Being able to engage with the community that will use my product
• Build In public as a good way to get the word out as people can follow your journey
• Connect with other like-minded founders

Goals and Strategy for the next 30-days

I knew that this was going to be challenging. With any established platform it is difficult to gain traction and attention when your following is non-existent. Therefore, I decided to outline some goals that I had for building in public.

One of the first goals that came to mind was to gain a lot of followers. I wanted to gain a mass following in a short-time with the least amount of effort. So I took to google (and twitter!) to research how others have accomplished this.

There was a lot of common advice that kept on popping up. The top theme I saw to help grow fast was creating threads with attention grabbing hooks that would compel the reader to engage. However, a lot of the threads that I encountered on Twitter were full of spammy click-bait lines that made me not want to click. It was honestly exhausting to read the same lines starting with “it should be illegal to know this” again and again.

I started to rethink my goal of gaining massive amounts of followers for the sake of gaining followers. I decided that given my main goals was to engage with my community, build in public and take to founders, I should not be focused on pushing out as much content as possible and rather engage on a more personal level.

I revised my goals and strategy for the next 30-days on twitter to the following:

• Over anything else, be consistent! Work on engaging with the twitter community each day
• Build relationships with other founders by responding to their tweets. I can achieve this by helping founders with challenges, answering questions and adding insights onto their tweets
• Share building my SaaS journey on twitter with feature updates, screenshots, sharing what I have learned from research on what I am building and replying to users.

I think that this strategy will prove to be much more sustainable for me in the long-term which will allow me to be continue to be consistent.

Results -- the numbers you all want to know

So how did it go?

• I did show up every day. It was very challenging in the beginning. A lot of time was spent thinking about how to add value to people’s tweets that would benefit them. It did get easier with time!
• I was able to find some really interesting founders to follow and engage with – this lead to many DM conversations and I was able to develop friendships with some great people (I view this as my ultimate win for the 30-day period)
• I have been able to share my products journey and share what I have learned. I think I can still greatly improve on this aspect of my twitter strategy. Moving forward I would like to make a more conscious effort to share the following:

1. Show the product in action with screenshots and video
2. Share my small wins with my community more often
3. Share stories that have helped pick me up when motivation is low
4. Share the experiences and stories of my users
5. Share my teachings in more detail (yes, this means threads 😊)

Total Impressions: 15.8K over the 30-day period (average of 512 each day – that is very consistent)

Total Likes: 342 (average of 11 each day – this is also very consistent)

Followers: 51 (hey!!! At least it is growing 😊)

Highlight: @arvidkahl followed me!