7
2 Comments

I'm building a tool to build in public based on 13 years of running a startup studio.

Hi! 👋

I'm a CTO in a startup studio Paralect. We partner with non-technical early-stage teams as their technical cofounders. Also we build our own in-house products.

We ask our clients and partners to build in public but it's hard. There's no tool that guides founders through content creation and distribution.

So that's why I'm building a build-in-public tool..

Momentum — a build in public system
I've created a Notion space and onboarded 8 leaders from our company to edit spaces for their initiatives/products. All in public, so it's not a report to some 'boss', it's a public update visible to anyone.

First I called this page Wiki, but later rebranded to Momentum.

notion template

All Momentum pages are managed in Notion. Every editor keeps their startup data updated:
~updated less often~
• Name of startup
• Title (1-sentence long, like website header)
• Subtitle (2-sentences long, like website subheader)
• Useful Links (eg. landing page, documentation, requests, analytics etc.)
• Elevator Pitch (short description of the big vision of your startup)
• Editor (who owns the space presented their way)

~updated regularly~
• Goals (long-term goals bringing closer to your vision)
• Journal (regular updates rather weekly or daily)
• Newsletters (regular wrap-ups of what happened) [WIP]

Every editor updates their pages in Notion with no additional publishing challenges.

From an internal company task to startup
Our goal is to give every initiative a face, the brand and the path to become a startup.

For example, our head of partnerships, Victoria, used to sign deals with tech partners (like GitHub, Notion, Retool) and put them to the her private Notion page. Then, only once we start a project with a new client we reveal the document with discounts to them.

That was a background task that kept Victoria isolated inside the company.

I've onboarded Victoria to Momentum and questioned the big vision behind her work and what are her goals. How to present her work to public?

That's how Kickstart was born:

Kickstart

We created a public page that sells $30k worth of tech partnerships discounts for $50 one-time payment. (we mostly use it now to share promo-codes to potential clients)

Victoria is also working on VCs network, so she'll be adding features later to convert Kickstart to an early-stage startup community.

That's the example of building brand from 'boring' tasks.

We used a bunch of no-code tools to launch this small project: Notion, Super, Tally, Splitbee, Stripe, Airtable, Make, MailerLite.

See Kickstart Momentum Page

Turning Momentum into a product
As Momentum promotes building in public to create a brand and launch a product, than Momentum itself is a perfect use-case for the product.

You must eat your own dog food, right?

So, now we're basically validating idea with no-code and few pilot users (Notion).

For the product we need to create a big vision and solve problems that other founders experience (lack of content, teams misalignment etc.).

Design brainstorming led us to this audience-focused vision:
Momentum vision

Based on the vision we've come up with these initial mockups:
designs

Users (startup founders) will send updates daily and can sync selected updates to their Twitter account.

Once a week they send a weekly recap as a newsletter based on updates they've submitted during the last week:

designs2

Next goals
I'm going to launch a landing page with value proposition based on the vision from above and see how it goes.

Also we'll add some cadence elements to the mockups, to emphasise that you need to send updates daily or better more often. (like github consistency charts)

Asks
I'd like to get some feedback on the designs and concepts from experienced build-in-public pros and other random guys 🙏

PS

I document every step daily here (subscribe!):
https://momentum.paralect.com/build-in-public-playbook

Follow me on twitter:
https://twitter.com/that_igor_

Thank you!

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments