The building in public guide for startups 🚀

Road to Product Market Fit

Hey everybody!! Welcome back another week!!!!! 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

I hope you are all doing well and hustling hard. Let’s go with another article of Product Market Fit.

---

I wanted to ask you for a small favor before getting into it. If you find this NL valuable, please share it on your Linkedin Profile so that it reaches more people! I’m trying to give as much value as I can and it is a lot of hard work writing it!

Also know that there is a premium plan of Product Market Fit in which I will share some more in depth content, as well as private resources, founder interviews and soon a slack channel/ another way to network with the community (investors, founders, PMs, etc.)

If you are serious about growing your startup, I’m certain this will be worth it 👇

---

Now, as always, some music to enjoy the read 🔥

---

Building in PUBLIC 👁️👁️

So, the other day I received a very interesting email. It was the 2023 year update of Outseta.

Outseta is a SaaS company that I’ve followed for some time because it looks like something I’d like to build and so this email really blew my mind.

In it, Geoff, one of Outseta’s founders shared many of the main aspects about the company’s strategy, expenses, equity allocation, team and others, but not to investors, to its clients!!!

You can read all about it on clicking on the image below 👇

I thought it was very interesting to read and very different from what I’ve seen other startups do in the last years. I wanted to know more.

So, I decided to dive a bit deeper and ended up on Geoff’s Linkedin. On his account, he recurrently shares great insights of his business. In posts like this he gives out their great knowledge gained from many years building software companies and I started to wonder why he was doing it 👇

So, I decided to reach out and ask him all about building in Public and we ended up having a call 🤣

---

This is what I learned from our conversation:

How building in public can help you grow your startup 🔥

1st. Building in public is a marketing strategy

Yes, you heard that right, building in public is a marketing strategy to attract more customers, that’s it.

The way that it works is simple but powerful. By sharing how you are overcoming your company’s challenges you are able to connect with other entrepreneurs or professionals that face the exact same problems.

So, as you speak about your business and your entrepreneurial journey and the things that you’re struggling with and the things that you're succeeding with, you attract people that could buy your product.

It can also create a closer bond with your existing customers and allow you to get answers and help when facing challenges.

2nd. Don’t worry about your competitors

People tend to worry too much about competitors. Of course your competitors are going to look at your company and you have to know what your competitors are doing, but at the end of the day everything come down to execution. Also, what can’t be copied is the brand, culture and soul of your company.

Different companies have different challenges, so focus on solving yours and that’s it. A venture backed startup with $50 million in the bank can go out and hire great engineers, but it will also have to grow at a faster pace because it needs to generate a return for its investors.

So, keep as much focus as possible on what you are trying to do, how can you do it better, faster, and worry about yourself and your customers much more than the competition.

3rd. Use the channel you are most comfortable and where your customers are

So, when deciding about what channels to use you have to think 2 things:

• where are your customers and

• where you feel most comfortable communicating

If you are selling to Gen Z and you feel comfortable on video you should then create content on Tik Tok, if you are selling to business professionals and you are good writing you can start a NL or write on Linkedin. There are unlimited combinations, find yours.

4th. Overcommunicate when things aren’t going great

So, social media is full of people just sharing how awesome things are all the time. When building in public, you don’t have to be another one of them because it will create a lot of pressure to you and also you’ll feel like a cheat.

Share your challenges as much as your accomplishments and your audience will connect more with you and will also able to help you overcome the obstacles you share.

5th. Talk about topics your potential customers are interested in

For your potential customers to engage with you, you have to give them value when sharing your company updates. So one of the best strategies is to classify the main pains you want to solve from your clients and show how you’ve solved them yourself but also how your product is developing to become a great solution for them.

Guys, this is where the magic happens. Subscribe for the free trial to listen to my full conversation with Geoff from Outseta and to read about my favorite startups building in public 👇!