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Tim Jones
@timjones
Currently building a startup in public at themvpsprint.com
I purchased a theme from creative-tim that came with the Figma designs - www.creative-tim.com/product/….
But definitely interested to hear what others suggest here.
Sharing in public! It might be sort of an overdone cliche in the indie hacking world these days, but it was still hard to get myself to do it.
A week ago I broke through that barrier and started a weekly substack where I document my process of building a startup from idea to paying users: mvpsprint.substack.com/. Not only have I picked up lots of subscribers, but I've gotten so much support from all corners of the internet - from good friends, people I know but haven't talked to in years, and even complete strangers sending me long messages about how they love my story and are inspired.
The quicker you get comfortable with it, the better IMO
Thanks, Marc!
My initial motivation was twofold: (1) Build an audience that I can funnel into the product I'm building (as you said), and (2) Build lasting equity in something that I can take with me even if this idea fails.
A third benefit has been huge for me - building in public has given me external motivation to make progress every week. It's also forced me to articulate my thoughts and justify my decisions. I had to do this as a product manager when I had a boss, but you can easily get by without it as a solo founder.
I'll probably shift eventually to a 2-week sprint schedule. I can easily justify spending 25%+ of my time writing updates and promoting my content if it turns out to be a primary marketing channel.
A month into it, I have ~45k article reads, almost 500 subscribers, and about 50-60 waitlist signups for my product.
In terms of ROI - these are really just vanity metrics until I get paying users, so we'll see. I'm going to start building in a couple weeks and timebox an MVP to a month or less.
Makers perfect sense. I also like the manager example. I've never had a manager, but since I started hiring people I've become a better planner. I need to assign them tasks, so I need to think more strategically whereas if you're working just by yourself you can go weeks or even months doing busy work without really thinking about the bigger picture.