How I started building in public – an experiment

Hey Indie Hackers, I wanted to share something I did over the last week that got me on the "building in public" train.

Since the start of the year I've been trying to come up with a project to help creators get started with audience or community building online. Progress was slow until I realized I needed actual people to test some the ideas I was thinking of. So last week, I came on here to Indie Hackers and asked if anybody would be interested in letting me help them find an audience on Twitter.

Basically, I offered to:

1. Give a daily goal to meet
2. Recommend people to follow
3. Recommend conversations for to engage in
4. Give ideas about what to post
5. Remind them when they forget or miss a goal
6. Track their progress daily

I set up a Slack workspace to do all of this and get a little community started. I had room for only 3 "users" at first but within the first day had about 15 people express interest, most of whom joined my Slack. (I'm very thankful to the community here for being so game to try stuff out!)

Here's the original post I made: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/can-i-help-you-find-a-twitter-audience-87b9d23e7b

7 days later, I'm pretty happy with how it turned as it confirmed a few things I wanted to gauge:

1. Interest in using Twitter for audience/community building for creators (this one is a huge yes!)
2. Interest in personalized daily recommendations about what to do
3. The need for habit-building, goal-setting, and consistency

At the end of the 7 days, one of my users who was finding it hard to engage with other people on Twitter went well and above beyond the final challenge by making a post on Reddit about an app he's working on, which got nearly 100 comments in a day. He also reported a significant increase in profile views.

I'm dreaming of some kind of system (an app?) to help creators maintain a routine of engaging online to build their communities, through daily goal setting, reminders, and personalized recommendations. I have a loooong way to go from here to actually building it, but doing this experiment with actual users has given me enough to move on to the next step.

The TL;DR I want to offer here for those looking to get started building in public is to find a way to close the distance between you and your potential users as soon as possible. Even if you're not building yet, see how you can use experiments to test your ideas in real life. :-)