🗞 What's New: Five build in public myths, busted

Building in public can help you gain traction and grow your business:

• However, there is more than one way to use this strategy, depending on your goals. Here are 5 myths about building in public, and how to combat them!
• TikTok is set to be the next major marketing battleground for B2B and B2C brands. These 3 strategies can give your content an edge.
• Founder Andrew Pierno landed his first paying customer after 4.5 months of perfecting his marketing strategy. Below, he shares how he used cold email sequencing to his advantage, and how reframing his goals helped him stay the course.

Want to share something with over 100,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🥊 Five Building in Public Myths Busted

from the Listen Up! IH newsletter by Ayush Chaturvedi

Building in public is a popular trend these days among indie hackers to get initial traction for their products. But there are a lot of myths around how it should be done, and how to achieve maximum effectiveness.

Let's dive in!

Why build in public?

People build in public for three main reasons:

1. Marketing.
2. Finding support from a community.
3. Sharing their lessons for other founders following their journey.

Here are five myths around building in public that need to be busted!

1. You have to show income screenshots

Showing income screenshots is extremely popular with the #BuildInPublic crew on Twitter. Sure, people love to see MRR graphs, but you don’t need to share them if you're not comfortable.

Also, there are situations where sharing screenshots could actually be harmful to your business. Share your lessons, but always protect your business. If that includes not sharing information about revenue, don't feel pressured to do it!

2. You have to create a lot of content

Content is king, but the key is that it needs to be quality content. Don't create a mountain of mediocre content just to put something out there.

Just a simple tweet at the end of the day, or a blog post at the end of the week, is enough. If it's valuable, that is!

What matters is that you share a tiny lesson you learned in your journey, or something interesting that happened in your business. That's all that anyone who is following you cares about.

3. Building in public works for everyone

As with any advice on best practices, not every tip will work for every founder. There are certain business models where it makes sense to build in public; others may benefit more from a different approach.

Or, you may be doing it just to share lessons with your followers and friends. Not all of your customers are interested in your journey; some just want their problems solved, and nothing else.

4. You have to share everything about your business

Don't forget that, not only are your supporters watching, but your competitors are, too. Don't share all of your traffic sources or growth strategies, especially if your product can be easily copied.

You can share learned insights and build a personal brand without revealing crucial information about your business.

5. You can only build in public on Twitter

This is a common misconception. Although Twitter is a very effective platform for building in public, don't overlook other places where you can share your progress. You can also try:

• Indie Hackers.
• A niche subreddit.
• A YouTube channel.
• A podcast.
• A newsletter.

Do it wherever you feel most comfortable! Pick a platform that you like, and use it to share your journey.

What's your top tip for building in public? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Listen Up! IH for more.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

📱 Twitter is making images more accessible.

💻 Los Angeles' emerging tech sector is trying to solve a problem that it made worse.

🍎 Apple will increase its App Store prices in some countries.

🎥 YouTube is testing making people watch 10 unskippable ads in a row.

🧠 People under 25 are driving mental health spending.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🎶 TikTok Strategies For Your Business

from the Hustle Newsletter by Julia Janks

The Signal: The data is clear. TikTok is set to be the next major marketing battleground for B2B and B2C brands.

In approximately four months, founder Gary Vee's TikTok account grew by nearly seven times.

*Sources: LinkedIn and Internet Archive

Some killer conversations over in the Trends Facebook group show that this is already a priority:

• How a Chrome plugin got ~150K new users for $2K with TikTok.
• An easy TikTok hack to get attention on LinkedIn.
• Insights from analyzing 4K+ TikTok ad accounts.
• How to automate influencer outreach on TikTok.

So this week, we dove into an interview with Caleb Ralston, the man behind Gary Vee's TikTok strategies, to unpack even more lessons to give you an edge.

1. What to post:

Many of you already make longform content like podcasts, YouTube videos, and blog posts. Start there. Gary Vee's team shares longform videos on YouTube, then finds juicy TikTok clips by looking at:

• Engagement spikes on the YouTube videos.
• The comments, where people often call out specific timestamps that they love.

You can also look at the TikTok ad rankings or snoop on competitors in the Facebook ad library, where some people use their most successful TikTok videos as ads.

The perfect clip combines education, entertainment, and utility. And sometimes, they sneak up on you. This blueberry comment became a cult hit over the years, inspiring fan videos, comedians, and even NFT projects.

*Source: OpenSea

2. Team and process:

In the beginning, Gary had several general purpose videographers cutting clips for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. The team had two iMessage group chats, one with Gary, one without. They would submit their clips to him via the group chat, and he'd caption and post the ones he liked best.

Over time, this changed in three key ways:

• iMessage → WhatsApp: This change allowed for bigger group chats.
• General → Specific: He dedicated teams to each platform so that they could build a deeper connection with the audience and culture there. Virality took off.
• Delegated posting: Eventually, he let his team post for him. However, he still writes the captions and gives the final green light in order to maintain the authenticity.

Pro tip: If you're hiring for this, try hitting up Jason Morena, or check out the YouTubers commenting on this video.

3. Finally, a caveat:

If you want to steal ideas from Gary, by all means do. This deck on how to make 64 pieces of content per day is one of our longtime faves! Just be sure that you design systems around your unique strengths.

What are your top TikTok strategies? Share in the comments below!

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

💵 This is what $200 worth of newsletter ads gets you. Posted by Giles Butler.

📝 25 tips for a successful product launch. Posted by Jakub Piskor.

🔗 Share the link to your project! Posted by Victor.

🗓 It took me one year to earn $2. Posted by Rahul Bansal.

🛠 What's your infrastructure cost? Posted by Piotr Przybytniewski.

😕 "Better" products often fail. Posted by Carolyn.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

🎉 Andrew Pierno Landed His First Paying Customer

by Andrew Pierno

Hey, indie hackers! I'm Andrew Pierno, and for better or for worse, I like building products for startup founders. It's a blessing and a curse: It's a blessing because this is my tribe, but a curse because it's a very difficult market to sell to unless you're already on the inside, or part of a special group like YC. My latest product is a cold email agency called Super Send.

We're always hearing stories about founders that follow this path: "I launched on Product Hunt, and my product blew up!" That's never happened to me, and I wanted to offer another perspective on what it takes to get users. Maybe some of you can relate!

My metrics

• Total emails: 556.
• Total opens: 154 unique opens.
• Total replies: Seven.
• People who worked on it: One. Yours truly!
• First code commit: April 1, 2022.
• Twitter followers: 132.
• Blog posts: 11.

• Total meetings: Six.
• Total signups: 99.
• Total paying customers: One.
• Total revenue: $15.

My story

My product is in a competitive space. There are several larger, better-funded competitors who have a lot more features, but are also much more expensive. My tool is a stripped-down, cheaper version that tries to get out of your way. That's the angle that I used for marketing. I know competing on price is generally not great, but for the first 100 customers, I don't mind having a big discount that goes away over time.

I chose cold email as my primary channel for finding new customers. I also set up a Twitter account where I posted cold email wisdom and memes. This brought 10 people to my email list. Here's an example tweet:

My list of prospects came from BuiltWith, filtering for people who use Lemlist (a competitor). Once I had that list, I uploaded it to our email sending tool and set up a simple four step sequence across email and LinkedIn. I'm not a big LinkedIn person, but adding it to a sequence definitely helped increase conversion rates.

The sequencing

For every person that got on my early access list, I also had to send them a sequence of emails. Oddly, people were saying that they wanted to sign up, but then they would never actually get back to me once I gave them access. So, I started asking them to do part of the setup on their own, ping me when they finished, and then I'd give them access. I'm sure I turned away a few would-be customers, but that's okay at this stage. I'm not looking for just any customer; I need the right customer. This special group of people will help guide the product to its next evolution. If you make a mistake here, it could have second and third waves of effects down the road.

I had a lot of trouble getting people to book meetings with me even after they indicated that they wanted to sign up, so I ditched the requirement for a meeting. I just asked that they complete a series of setup steps in the app, then let me know async when they were done. This proved to be slightly more effective in getting people to respond, but the majority of people still didn't complete all the steps necessary to start getting value from the product. This is something to circle back on.

After a two week free trial from six users who I considered active, I asked one of them to pay on the last day of the free trial. They paid immediately. During their free trial, I had answered six support requests from this person myself, and built three features that they asked for.

There was absolutely no magic here. Landing this customer was a grind that took 4.5 months total. It was surprisingly slow. During this process, I had to keep marketing regularly and make the action steps the goal, not the outcomes.

The goals

With early stage companies, setting concrete goals like these are very difficult:

• I will get 100 customers by X date.
• I will be at $1K MRR by December.

I think you're much better off setting goals like:

• I will write X posts per week.
• I will distribute those posts on X channels.
• I will reach out to every prospect that signs up to my email list.
• I will offer a free one hour consulting session to every prospect this week.

For the sake of your sanity, having goals that you are 100% in control of helps tremendously. You can't control the algorithm on a social media platform, or whether your posts will land. You can only keep doing the work. I've found that these subtle shifts in how I set goals make me feel less like I'm pushing a rock uphill, and more like I can simply keep putting one foot in front of the other!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Ayush Chaturvedi, Priyanka Vazirani, Julia Janks, and Andrew Pierno for contributing posts. —Channing