What I learned in 1 month of building in public

Consistency is key

Let’s start with this, consistency is key. If your goal is to grow an audience, you need to get out there. People need to read your Tweets, so consistency is key. I’ve tried to tweet at least 3 tweets a day. Don’t get discouraged if some of your tweets aren’t getting that much attention, put your voice out there. I like to think of it as a great journal to read back later and see how much I’ve progressed. Therefore, if a tweet of mine doesn’t get a lot of attention, I don’t mind it. I believe the people that are reading your tweets read them for a reason.

Doing this as side project is hard

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Being a father of 1 with a fairly active social life and a full-time job takes a lot of time away from working on your side project. I am able to work about 15 hours per week on it, which isn’t a lot. With this limited amount of time it is hard to build everything you have in mind, but it also makes you more specific on the key features you want to build.

Focus on the bare minimum, the MVP

Building my own website I have spent too much time building features and fine tuning styling. Although I left some features out, comments on blog posts for instance, I had to ask myself more often “Do I really need this?”. I spent time adding the next and previous blog post navigation to the blog post page. I spent a lot of time fine tuning styling of elements because things didn’t align properly. I hope I learned my lessons or at least improved my thinking on this subject as for the future projects I will be building actual products in 1 month, so I don’t have time to focus too long on non-important features.

There are a lot of like-minded out there

It is great to see so many like-minded people on Twitter. I love reading tweets from other creators that are building in public. I have connected with some of them through DMs and the value I got out of those conversations is great! If you are in the same situation, you have got to know that this is a very helpful community, just reach out with your questions and I’m sure I and others will do our best to help you in any way possible.

Read my full blog post here: https://www.terryverduijn.nl/blog/here-is-what-i-learned-in-1-month-of-building-in-public_6/
It also includes a reflection on the goals I've set for myself.