The Build in Public Challenge Starts Now

0:00When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Before we get in the show, I have a quick recommendation for you because I have been, I was just spending so much time jumping between different content editing platforms.

0:37We had something for clipping, something else for making carousels, something else for editing videos and vlogs and behind the scenes video content, then something else for like scheduling it. It was just honestly becoming incredibly convoluted and fragmented and all of the people my team needed a seat in these platforms and it was just a lot. And so we've managed to find one tool that does all of it and is also incredibly, incredibly easy to use. You can make all of those types of content, then you can schedule it as well. And it is called Adobe Express. It's also free to use. They do have a paid version, which has some plus ups that are really great, but you can get started completely, completely for free.

1:19If you want to try the platform, we've got the link and all the details for you in the show notes, or you can just head to adobeexpress.com. All right, Let's get into the show. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the show. This week is kicking off something completely new that we're doing in female founder world, and it's called the Build in Public Challenge. It's presented by Adobe Express. And if you have listened to literally any episode of the pod, if you've come to any of our events, you know that building in public and building a founder-led brand is something that we talk about a lot, and it is a strategy that is working for so many brands in the community.

1:55The reason why I wanted to do this challenge now is because I've seen some commentators and creators start to say that the build in public era is over or, you know, building a founder led brand, that strategy is dead. And I just completely disagree. I think that this is a strategy that is still working. And the reason why it might not be working for some folks is because that they're not following a strategy that kind of ladders up into their broader social media strategy or is helping to build their brand world. And this is just kind of one of the pillars of that. So for some housekeeping, this challenge is running for a full 12 weeks.

2:34You're going to see content and prompts every single week. And we're going to talk you through from right at the beginning where maybe you have never created this kind of content before. Maybe you've done a couple of sporadic posts and it just hasn't hit, or maybe you're just kind of getting started and you want to help build up some momentum in this strategy and in this tactic. And we're going to take you from that stage all the way through to building one of those founder-led brands that you are seeing dominating your feeds and being one of those success stories. This entire program is sponsored by Adobe Express, so it's completely free.

3:07You guys know that I'm always trying to bring in the right partners to connect you with tools that can help you do the things that you need to do in your businesses and your lives and connect you to the right resources and also to find folks who can help make the stuff that we create and help make it free rather than being one of those, you know, millions of course creators on the internet that are trying to sell things for crazy prices and aren't delivering. We're trying to make sure that everything we do is accessible and is helpful. Today, what I'm going to be walking you through is kind of the really starting point, but it's probably the most important piece of building in public.

3:43And that is figuring out what your point of view and your point of difference is. And then also figuring out your content pillars. And you've probably heard this kind of language thrown around before, but there's a reason why you haven't acted on the information and taken it to the next level. And I think, you know, I've worked as an editor and a journalist for 10 years before I started Female Founder World, and I'm so embedded in this space. And I think that together we can help you translate some of this knowledge about what's working across different founder-led brands and actually implement it and make it useful information for you rather than just being some of those buzzwords that you're seeing on your feeds from coaches online.

4:21After this week, once we've worked through your point of view, kind of talk through some of the barriers that might be holding you back. And I'm going to bust some myths around this that I think are really stopping people from getting started and working out your content pillars. The next 11 weeks of the program are going to be about us gathering what is working right now for founder-led brands and helping you adapt that content for your unique point of view, your unique point of difference and your content pillars, and turning it into actual things that you're posting on your feed and helping you technically create that content as well.

4:56So like I said, if you've listened to the show before, if you follow Female Founder World, you've probably heard of some of the folks that are doing this and doing it really well. People like Chelsea Park-Kramer from Park or Lindsay from Set Active, Amy from Odd Muse. Some of the Australian brands that have been on the show as well. Ash Raso is a new one from Capsule Wardrobe. She is doing the building and public strategy really, really well. I think that we can look at some of those folks and think that maybe they have, I don't know, some kind of like magical it factor or something that's special about them that you can watch it and think, oh, I don't have that.

5:32That's not me. And I actually really challenge you to push back against that. I think I've met so many people who have done this and all kind of found their own unique way to do it and to do it really well that I've seen that it's not necessarily one type of person, that there are so many ways that you can adapt these blueprints and make it work for your personality and the way that you want to show up and also your brand. So I really don't want that to be something that holds you back. I promise this is something that can be taught and it is something that you can learn over the next 12 weeks.

6:07You'll be able to follow the challenge in the podcast feed, but we're also going to pop everything in the Female Founder World app. I'll put a link in the notes here so that you can sign up and it'll just appear in the app for you. If you don't have the app, you can just get it in the Apple, what's it called? Apple store, iOS store, whatever it is, you can download Female Founder World for free. Sign up to the challenge and you'll be able to see all of the content every single week and you'll be prompted every single Friday to follow through. And like I said, we have partnered with Adobe Express, which is why this program is free.

6:36So I need to stop the program for a second and just say a big thank you to Adobe. We've worked with them on one of our Launch Lab series in the past, which helped literally thousands of people with their organic marketing strategies. And we're now able to do it again with this new challenge. So I know most of you kind of have an understanding now that like we should be posting and we should be showing up as forward-facing founders for our brands. We should be building in public that there are so many reasons why this is good for our businesses. And you kind of look at all of the advantages that different entrepreneurs across history have had.

7:11And right now, one of the advantages that we have is the ability to build community and take people along the process as we're building our businesses and really humanize our brands and the problems that they're solving. And I just think it's a huge miss if you're not taking advantage of that opportunity right now. And I think in 10 years, we'll look back at this time and think, wow, what a magical opportunity we had. And what a shame if you missed it because you were too afraid to get in front of the camera and actually get started. So my ask of you throughout this process is just to follow the steps that I'm giving you and just try and be brave about it and share.

7:49You can jump into the group chat at any time to ask questions, to maybe share a post that you're feeling a bit vulnerable about. The community will rally around you and we will engage with each other to make this feel just like a little bit less scary. But one of the big barriers that I think people are coming up against is they hear the names of some of the founders that I've mentioned before. They kind of think, oh, you need to be an influencer to be able to do this. And I would really push back on that. I think actually some of the most successful founder-led brands I've seen, the founders turned their account from private to public when they started building the business.

8:23And so they've really intentionally built these audiences that are primed to shop from their brands and they've built credibility and relatability in a very specific category with a very specific point of view that kind of feeds into that bigger brand world that they're trying to build. I look at, for example, Eliza O 'Connor from Real Fine. I'll put the link to my interview with her in the notes. She has this beautiful jewelry brand. She's very much showing up as a forward-facing founder. She was not an influencer before she started her brand. This year, I think they're three or maybe four years old at the absolute most.

8:56And they'll post 10 million in revenue this year. And that is purely organic. And one of her big content strategies is being that forward-facing founder and building in public. I could name so many people who have done this. Even Chelsea from Park. She had, I think, 20 ,000 followers when she started her brand. And now she is a mega influencer on TikTok and Instagram. You do not need an audience to start. You build the audience by actually starting. The next thing that I hear again, people just don't know what to say. We are very much going to address that every week in this challenge. That is one of the big points of this challenge.

9:31And I spent a decade working in journalism before I started Female Founder World. And one of the things that one of my early bosses and mentors said to me, and this is something that is, you know, pretty common advice, a pretty common saying in the space. And it was, I can teach you what to write, but I can't teach you what to say. Or I can, I can, yeah, I can teach you what to write, but I can't teach you what to say. And the idea behind that is I can teach you the mechanics of like creating the piece of content, but I cannot hand you a point of view that you can stand behind. And that is true for writers and it is true for anyone who is creating content online.

10:06But what I can help you do is answer some questions to help you figure out what your point of view and your point of difference actually is. I would hope that you have kind of got a bit of an idea about your point of view or your point of difference. It's kind of the thing that probably propelled you to start your business in the first place. I look at Ash from Capture Wardrobe as an example. She started a business after working in property. She was in property development for years and she wanted to start a fashion brand. And so she knew, okay, I probably need to build some credibility. I'm going to be bootstrapped and putting my savings into this.

10:38I want to be able to launch to an audience. And so she launched to an audience of about 7 ,000 email subscribers on her wait list, thousands of followers across social. And she did that by sharing this very intentional point of view that she was able to embody as the founder. And it wasn't just, I'm going to build a fashion brand for millennial working women, whatever, minimalist millennial working women. That is not pointy enough to cut through. If you have a look at your competitor landscape and you looked at fashion, you would see that there are a lot of people doing that. Instead, her very specific point of view is that she had a wardrobe full of clothes and nothing to wear.

11:21And out of that problem came this idea of building a capsule wardrobe as the solution to that. And that is this overarching kind of point of view and point of difference that really feeds down to everything that she posts and everything that she does in the brand. So I would challenge you to think about what that point of view and point of difference is for you and for your brand and open up your notes app now, go and write it down. For another example for Female Founder World, a point of view that we have and a point of difference is this idea that anything is possible. And that is something that is, you'll see it kind of show up in the inspiring founder case studies that we share, or you'll see it come up in the way that we are trying to break down information that is taking you from zero to revenue numbers that maybe you wouldn't have thought were possible for your brand and connecting you with the people who can help you do that.

12:14Another really strong point of view that we have at Female Founder World is that there are a lot of, how am I going to put this? A lot of coaches and course creators on the internet with very low integrity and that if you're building a business, you should learn how to build a business from other people who are building businesses or who have done the thing, who are operators and actual experts in the space. And that, again, feeds into all of the decisions that we make around our content. We also have a very clear point of view around in real life being incredibly important. There being this massive resurgence about analog, everything, connecting IRL.

12:51And you can see that manifest in our content and the way that we show up as well. So take a second, take a beat, go and figure out what your point of view is. Making clean skincare for women is not a point of view that is not going to be pointed enough. I really urge you to kind of dig a little bit deeper and think about what is the view that you hold that maybe not everyone in your category has and that has really driven you to create this product or create this brand. The next barrier that I bet is one of the reasons why you haven't actually done this yet is some kind of perfectionism, fear of judgment, looking at your content and thinking, okay, this just doesn't look the way that I want it to yet.

13:29It's not good enough yet. And there are a few things that I have to say about this. The first is a little bit of a, you just got to get over yourself and kind of move past that. Stop comparing yourself, your day zero to somebody else's, you know, been doing it for 10 years. Stop thinking that your content is going to look like Grace Beverly or Amy from Odd News or someone like that on day one. They have content teams. You don't. So it's just not possible. But there's also some like very tactical stuff that we will really get into throughout the program. But a few things that I want you to think about today.

14:00The first is like you need to be filming in natural light. You can have great studio lighting, amazing, but I'm betting that you actually don't have studio resources and you're probably using studio lights from Amazon that are just not cutting it. You are going to just look so much better and feel so much more confident if you're filming in front of a window with natural light on a sunny day. So please start with that. Try filming on 0.5. If it's still looking a little bit wonky, maybe your framing is off and you can fix that. A mic can be really great. You don't need one, but if you can get a microphone, that could also really help make you sound just like a little bit more authoritative and confident.

14:36And that could be the difference between what you're seeing other people doing and why your content isn't feeling quite right. That could be the difference. And then go ahead and block some people. I don't care. Like block your parents for a little bit. That's fine. You can unblock them later. Block like your coworkers, just anyone who is in the back of your head that's stopping you from doing this, just block them. You're still friends. You can, you know, reconnect with them later, but we just don't need them in your head and in your phone while you're doing this challenge. Literally do that today.

15:06And then the final thing is just get some reps in, like open your phone, turn on the camera, start talking, start filming your day. I'm not expecting you to post this anywhere yet this week, but next week when we actually start creating content and filming, I just don't want you to feel super awks when you're making content. So just get familiar with it. You don't have to show anyone, but you do need to just get a little bit more comfortable seeing yourself on camera and talking to a camera as well. A very easy barrier to fix that we're going to be talking through in the challenge is just the technical side of things, how to actually do a vlog that looks like the, you know, the way that you want it to, that feels on brand for you.

15:42Green screen, we can teach you how to do that. Carousels, all of it. Like we'll go through the technical stuff. That is the easy bit, but that is something that I hear is stopping people all the time. You will leave this challenge with a full toolkit and know how to implement this well beyond the 12 weeks. I also constantly hear from people that you don't have time, which I completely understand. I now have two kids. I work across time zones and my life also is a mess as well. I know that yours is quite likely as well. And I also objectively don't have time, but do you know what has completely reframed this for me is a conversation that I had probably, I want to say three years ago now, it was with Alison Ellsworth.

16:18She started the brand Poppy and she was speaking at a female founder world event in Austin. And she was someone who was very forward facing in her brand. She ended up selling it for a casual 2 million, 2 billion to PepsiCo. And that, that brand was built off the back of Alison showing up on TikTok all day, every day. And I said to her, like, how do you justify the time spent making silly little TikToks when you're leading this fast growing company? And she said, Jasmine, I can outsell JLo. Why would I not prioritize making video content about my brand? And what she was saying there is that founders always outsell any UGC creator that you're going to be able to hire, anyone else that you're going to be trying to outsource this stuff to, maybe you can do that down the track, but particularly in the beginning, as you're really trying to be an archetype and embody your customer and walk them through the pain points that forced you to create this brand and create this product that solved a very specific problem in your life and hopefully their life.

17:24You are the person that needs to do that. And also the volume of content that you need to be creating in the beginning, just like, I don't know about you, but I just don't have the cash to be spending all that money to have somebody else creating 50 videos a day for me. In the beginning, you need to be doing the content so you can be getting the volume and so you can be getting the right messaging across. So I don't know. If Alison Ellsworth telling you to post won't make you post, I probably can't help you. So now you have a point of view. You have a point of difference. I hope that it's written in your notes app.

17:54If not, pause, go and do it now. Really challenge yourself to get specific here and get more pointed with what those opinions are. And next, we're going to be building out content pillars. This is something that you've probably heard people talk about before. I hope that my years of experience working as an editor can give you a different way to kind of frame this and maybe make it land in a way that'll make you take action. So content pillars are a fancy way of saying these are the topics that we're going to be talking about. But these are things that shouldn't change all the time. Like your content pillars are things that are pretty static.

18:30And then within it, we're trying all of these different types of content within your pillars. So for example, a content pillar for me might be a behind the scenes building out summit. That's something that we do every year. It's our big thousand person event that's in New York. That's a content pillar that we are doing constantly every single year. Another content pillar is founder stories, inspiring founder case studies. That's something else that I speak to all the time as well. So they're two pretty cool content pillars for me. I could also talk about motherhood and business, but I don't like posting my kids on the internet that much.

19:07So that's just a line that I don't cross, but like you do whatever works for you. As you're thinking about your content pillars, they should ladder up to that point of view and that point of difference and really be topics that help you explain that point of view and help you show people what your point of view and your point of difference is. And they also need to like tick off some objectives. Everything that you're posting really needs to do one of four things. So you really need to either be just building credibility and trust and you can do that by just sharing your lived experience. You can build trust and credibility by sharing your expertise.

19:42You also might be showing the process behind how you actually created your product and created your brand that shows, you know, the effort and the care that went into creating something exceptional. That's something else that can really help build credibility and trust. You also want to rally buy-in. You want to, you know, build community support. You want to have like a group of people that are ride or die for you and by extension for your brand. And a lot of people will play like the underdog card to do this. They'll show, you know, a David and Goliath kind of story about maybe some like legacy industry player that they're up against.

20:15And that kind of framing can work really well to rally that community support and that buy-in. Another way that you can do this is also just like very strongly speaking to whatever the problem is that your brand and your product is solving and how you personally experience that. I think like that vulnerability a lot of the time can help a community see themselves in you and then by extension see their problem solved in whatever the product is that you created. Another third objective that you might want to tick off is really showing your product utility and what it does. Stuff like demos, behind the scenes, product integrated in your day-to-day life, that kind of thing.

20:51So if it's a piece of content that shows utility, shows the purpose of your product, that's something that's super helpful you should be doing as well. And then the final one is like, this could just be a piece of content that is some kind of cue that fits within your brand world. And this feels like something that's a little bit more like, I don't know, nebulous and like hard to explain, but you can look at brands like Real Fine Studio, Heaven Mayhem. So these are folks that are building attainable luxury and the visual cues in the founder's content speaks a lot to building their brand world, what they wear, what they position their brand alongside the people that they hang out with.

21:30Like all of it helps to build this brand world and the founder is kind of a really key character in that. So I want you to look at those four objectives every time you're thinking about what your pillars should be. Now I want you to map out those pillars. You want at least two, maybe four. You don't want to have too many, but think about what they are, how they map back to that point of view and that point of difference. And then I also want you to kind of map out and tick off which of those four content objectives you can be ticking off with those content pillars. As a reminder, and as an example for Female Founder World, our point of view, our point of difference is anything's possible.

22:07That's a really big thing that we believe in. And that is our point of view as we're creating content and creating experiences. The next thing is that founders should be taught by other founders, experts and operators, not by spamming internet coaches. And the final is that we are having a resurgence of in real life and analog everything. And so when you talk about the content pillars that I just mentioned that we would be using, founder case studies, behind the scenes at Summit, they kind of speak to all of those points of view and those points of differences. And they also tick off a large number of the content objectives that I spoke to as well.

22:42Next week, we're going to get into posting. These videos are going to get shorter and more tactical. And what we're going to be bringing to you is really just what we see after looking at thousands of brands on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, even folks that are building in public on like Substack and Podcast. we're going to be bringing you the best pieces of content, how to recreate that and recreate it with your brand point of view, point of difference and adapt it to your content pillars and then how to technically create it with free tools. So I want you to look at the things that we spoke about this week before we get into the more tactical part of the challenge next week and so that is going to be what is your point of view and point of difference?

23:22Go and write that down in your notes app and then I want you to come up with those content pillars again write it down in your notes app. So next week when we start thinking about specific pieces of content, you are ready to dive in and get going. I also recommend that you go and download or sign up to Adobe Express. You don't have to use Adobe Express. It's just free and does all of the things that we need it to do in the challenge. So I do recommend it. And they are obviously our sponsors as well for the program. So we'll be talking to them a little bit when we get into the technical pieces of this as well.

23:54I cannot wait to see what you guys come up with as you're building out those point of view and point of difference notes and your pillars, drop them in the Female Founder World group chat. Again, that's a free app that you can download from the Apple store and we're all in there. We're all doing this challenge. So jump in, let us know if you want to workshop anything. I'll be in there as well, workshopping it with you. All right. I'll see you next week.