Here is what I learned in 1 month of building in public

Today is the last day of January. That means that I’ve been building in public for a full month now. I started the 1st of January with the goal to complete 12 projects in 12 months, with my own personal website being the first project I would work on. If you haven’t read my blog posts yet, I can advise you to read the first blog post and work your way up towards the last one.

Goals

In my 1st post I wrote about my goals for this year and after a month it is time to reflect on how things have progressed.

Start and finish 12 projects in 12 months

My first goal is to start and finish 12 projects in 12 months. With my personal website being done I can say my first project is finished. Although it’s actually never finished, it is finished in a way that I can do everything I want with it at this moment. I can write blog posts and I can showcase my projects. That’s it for now.

Improve my English writing

I never thought I would say this, but writing the last couple of blogs almost went naturally. I believe it took me 8 hours to write the first blog post, maybe even more. I’m already noticing how easy it becomes to write in English. My last blog post was my longest post so far, but it took me the least amount of time. It took me around 2,5 - 3 hours to write over 2200 words. I don’t want to pad myself on the back, but I’m very happy with this. It allows me to spend more time on building things than on taking hours to write 1 blog post.

Overcome my fear of putting myself out there

I still find it scary to put myself out there. Every time I post a new blog post I’m nervous about how it will be received. Are people going to read it? Are they going to like it? I’m doubting a lot while writing tweets or blog posts. I think I might have “imposter syndrome”, but the only way to get rid of it is by doing. So I force myself to write tweets and blog posts, I force myself to answer DMs and to reach out through DMs. I already see some progression, but I don’t have the feeling I’m quite there yet. Only time will tell if I overcome this fear.

Increase my online presence

Well, I can say I’m blown away by the results I’m seeing. I gained over 100 followers on Twitter in the first month of doing this, got 37 subscribers on IndieHackers and gained 11 followers on Medium. I accumulated over 4000 views on my posts on IndieHackers and over 900 views on Medium. My Twitter stats have really exploded, I got over 32000 impressions, over 15000 profile visits (although hovering over a person is probably also counted as profile visit) and 208 mentions. At the beginning of the year I didn’t know what to expect so I can honestly say these numbers exceed my expectations.

I even got a really nice comment on one of my IndieHackers posts that I gave the final push to someone to decide to get out of their comfort zone, overcome fear and finally start building and shipping products in public, too.

Make money out of it

I didn’t expect to make any money the first month, because I was building my own website. The next projects are focused on building an actual SaaS, so I might make some money. I haven’t set myself any goals (yet), because I think it is too early to think about making money, while I need to focus on providing value first. Of course, everyone who creates a SaaS has the dream to make enough money so they can focus completely on their own company and I’m no exception to that rule. Let’s see what next month will bring and then see if I will adjust my expectations for the months that follow.

Learnings

After building a full month in public, here are some key things I’ve learned the past month.

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.

I probably am forgetting a lot more things to share, but I don’t want this post to be a very long read. I also want to spend time putting together my newsletter that I will be sending out to my first 3 newsletter subscribers. This will be the first time I ever write a newsletter, so I’ll probably make some mistakes but I will learn along the way.

Thank you for reading this post and if you have anything to contribute, comment or share with me, feel free to reach out on Twitter.