Building in Public
How to build in public in 3 easy ways, and a FREE Learning Journal template to fill at the end of each day, stay on track, and witness your progress as the weeks pass.
I recently wrote an atomic essay about why I will be building my projects in public in 2021. Building a loyal congregation, finding the brightest talent, exploding your base of customers— these are just some of the reasons I highlighted, and I want to remind you that they compound over time. In this edition, I want to offer three ways in which you can easily begin to build in public:
1️⃣ Share your intention
There is something powerful about setting clear intentions because this rewires our brain to perform actions that move us forward in achieving our goals. This becomes even more powerful when you set your intention and announce it in public since you now have even more forces that push you to action until you reach your goal. Announcing your intention in public forces you to be accountable not only to your audience but also to yourself as you wish to be seen as a person who can be taken seriously by the world. So go ahead and announce your first goal for 2021 on Twitter— it doesn’t matter if you have no followers, or if no one engages with your tweet. Set your intention and put it out there for the world to see.
2️⃣ Learn publicly
I talked about the 5-hour rule in my last post. Learning to learn is the most important skill in the post-COVID world. However, it is easy to lose track of online courses and lose all the progress you made when you are learning something online. The best way to have accountability is to first announce your study goals in public, and then to actually document your progress each day. One of the best implementations of this I found is in the 100DaysofNoCode Challenge that I am part of: we are asked to Tweet our learning each day, and also to document our progress in an online Journal.
3️⃣ Launch iteratively
This is not very intuitive, especially not for perfectionists such as myself. When you decide to launch a project, you have a vision for how it will look when you are done building it. But you need to remember that this is the vision of its final version. If you wait until the final version to launch it, it is very likely that you will give up in between, whether because you get bored, or are distracted by a new project, or because you could not build all the features of the final version you first had in mind.
This is a dangerous mindset to base your launch on, primarily because what you believe as the ‘final’ version might not add any value to your customers, and more importantly, perhaps, the first few features are sufficient to provide value to your users. The best way to launch, then, is to produce your minimum viable features first, launch publicly, and then build on the next few features iteratively, based on user feedback. This solves the issue of the launch (putting it out there for the world to see pushes you to continue building on it), and also helps you visualize the ‘final’ version better based on what you now know your users want.
These have been my three highlights from the productivity and personal growth space this week. If you liked what you read, connect with me on Twitter and let me know. If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, subscribe to GrowPro Labs here to receive it in your inbox every Monday.
I'm on a mission to make Mondays great, and this newsletter is a part of my efforts in helping you achieve mindful productivity, personal growth, and living your Ikigai.