Reflection #1 - Building in Public - 400 subscribers in 2 months

Hey everyone,I am a data scientist and ex-wall street trader who has bitten the maker bullet after listening to many of the Indie Hacker podcasts. I will premise that this is the first time I have tried to build something online and I have no software development experience.

My intent is to build things of value that solves my own problems, while learning to be a better developer, maker, and entrepreneur. Please feel free to give me advice that I can reflect on.This is the first of many reflection posts to come.

What I wanted to share today, is my thoughts on the notion of building in public.

Backstory

I have been testing and building a content application to prepare for the Australian postgraduate medical entrance exam - commonly known as the GAMSAT (I partnered with a friend who is a medical student). We have been live for 2 months, have 400 members across Facebook/Discord groups, and generated $5K by tutoring (which is lame but hear me out).

My original goal is to build either an online course or question bank type of SaaS product, but I quickly realised that (1) I had no idea what was of value to customers, and (2) the process of building and writing content would take an ungodly amount of time. A mistake in the content we made would be punishing, and I still had absolute no clue how to whip out such a product.

To be frank with you all, I still don't how to build such a product but I am getting closer to figuring it out than I was 2 months ago. I also pretty much accidentally stumbled on 'content marketing' or 'building in public' by posting daily GAMSAT or interview questions on reddit and getting 100+ inbox DMs.
Did not know how to build an email newsletter and manage my content (figuring this out right now!), so I did the best next thing in shipping them to a Facebook/Discord group.

Benefits of building in public

There have been two things that I have so far realised are good benefits to building in public.

1. It has allowed us to iterate and test different potential content we wanted to sell as part of the premium course. A profound, but also obvious insight is that there was a lack of high quality questions in the market that mimicked the actual examination in difficulty. This has saved us time in having to write theory, and just simply solely focus on the art of writing questions.

2. Feedback. I don't have too great of an engagement in my groups (please help me!), but there are a select loyal fans. They have been incredibly supportive in cheering us on by giving us some timely dopamine. Furthermore, there has been on many occasions that the question standards was too sloppy, had mistakes, or people simply misinterpreted the prompt I had written. I see this as getting customer feedback by giving them your alpha product, then later selling the refined version of it.

Challenges and next steps

1. We have pretty much exhausted reddit as a source of traffic, but yet we still post there everyday. Currently the content between our groups and reddit are the same, so there is a need to differentiate the content.We have now started doing community events, today we are running our 5th interview event over zoom. One thing I picked up from Gary V is the notion of microcontent, and so we have been chopping the zoom recording to post on youtube. Currently have like 100 views which is huge, but also need to test out other social media platforms (anyone experienced in social media content marketing, give me some advice!).

2. We are quite happy with a scrappy 'MVP' for our premium resources, which will continue to improve over time. The next step is to build a website that houses both videos and a question bank. There needs to be log-in functionality and a feature where premium content can be unlocked via a subscription. My coding knowledge only extends to the realm of machine learning, so any no-coders or coders, please give me advice on how I can hack this thing together quickly.

3. We have realised discord and facebook groups is getting unruly, so I need a email newsletter list. What is the cheapest and most effective provider? What would be a way that I can manage my content.A specific functionality is I have say 100 free questions. Anyone that subscribes will get a question a day down this list of questions. I want the solutions to be housed behind a pay wall. Can anyone please help direct me into building this?

4. Currently my website is whipped together on squarespace. I am not entirely too sure if the above functionalities can be married up onto it - if anyone has any expertise, please let me know. I have been learning basic web development and am ambivalent to using code or no-code tools.

Closing remarks

Being a maker is fun, but involves an incredible steep learning curve in things I have zero clue about (which makes it interesting). I will be posting these updates every month or two.

For those that wish to give me advice, my website is gamsatedge.com so that you can have a visual reference point.

Feel free to follow me on https://twitter.com/christopherjgan I will posting there regularly soon and my next experiment is to grow a twitter (or any social media) presence.