Building In Public: How Constraints Foster Creativity and Innovation

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0:58Welcome to Built Right, a podcast by Hatchworks where we help you learn to build the right digital product the right way. In each episode, we'll deconstruct the layers of successful product development, break down popular trends, and offer real advice to help make sure your product is built right. We may not have all the answers, but we've built a lot of digital products across a lot of industries, and we've seen a thing or two. Let's get into it.

1:33Today, we're going to get into a topic that takes true courage, guts, and above all else, humility. It's an approach used by some of the most successful product builders, and it provides the promise of quick iteration, validation, and getting closer to the almighty product market fit. To make it real, I want everyone listening to close your eyes, unless you're driving, let's just pretend in that case, but take yourself back to high school. Imagine you're being asked to perform in front of the entire school, but you have no time to prep, no time to practice, no time to study, no time to perfect your performance and work out all the kinks.

2:15And you have to start right here, right now on the spot. Now imagine that's amplified to the entire digital world. And P.S. everyone's got an opinion and they're able to comment with their thoughts, good, bad, or ugly. I'm talking about building in public. And that's exactly what we're going to go deep into today with Rui Nunez to explore and deconstruct this approach to product development and discovery and understand how you can start using it today. But Rui, welcome to the show. Welcome to Bill Wright. Thanks for having me. Awesome. And Rui, just for context, is a growth and product marketing expert, 15 years of experience, recently led growth marketing at OnDeck and product marketing and growth at FlyBits before that.

3:04But what I'm most interested, Rui, is you've been building it public lately. You've been building a tool called Social Digest, and it's kind of having some pivots and interesting stories. But that's what I'm most interested to get into is the story behind this. You know, you've experienced learnings, failures, successes, pivots, iterations, which just makes for the perfect story. But all these things in such a short period of time. But that's the beauty of building in public is the shortened duration of feedback, right? Yeah, I guess I should preface this by saying that whatever I say today should be taken with a big grain of salt, just like anything else that you hear online.

3:49And they're individual experiences, right? So a lot of the stuff that I learned and how I learned it is likely going to be very different than folks listen to this and how they learn and then what they take away from it, too. But yeah, it's been a wild ride over the last, you know, I think 90 days of just building in public. And but it's not new. Like building something for me isn't new. I've tinkered around with stuff a lot and saw what some other folks were doing online and how they were sharing their journey. I was like, I want to try this out, put my ego aside for a little bit and see where this takes me.

4:25And that's the biggest piece. I think it's that humility element. You got to have this element of humility if you want to even start on this approach, because it's hard. Like, I have trouble with this today, like putting myself out there and, you know, just putting something out there that's that, you know, like the saying goes, it's a shitty first draft. But you got to start somewhere. Right. Yeah, there's there's a lot of stuff that. But so I guess, you know, when you build in public, one of the hardest things, like you said, is being able to have a little bit of humility, at least is understanding that you're sharing stuff that isn't done.

5:00And you're going to have other people see how you think and what you think at any point in time before it's polished. Just like your intro, right? You don't have much time to prepare for any of it. You just essentially share what you think, you know, at any given point in time. And that can either be a good thing, it could be a bad thing and things can backfire. But to be completely honest, unless from what I've seen firsthand, unless you have, you know, hundreds of thousands of followers and have built this portfolio of businesses, nobody really cares what you're building. Nobody really cares what you're saying.

5:38And I mean, I use that loosely, right? Because obviously there are some people that support. You've been a great supporter of the stuff that I've been doing and working out with Nick too. And I appreciate that. But it's, you know, you're not going to get this like tribe that's going to come after you and tell you to stop doing what you're doing. Yes, yes. And that's such a great point because that's one of the blockers, I think, to people actually starting, just starting in general. Throw building in public out the window is that fear of rejection of, you know, everybody on name your platform is going to just, you know, viewing it under a microscope.

6:12Everybody's so focused on themselves at the time. But maybe take a step back. How do you define what building in public even is? How would you define at kind of a base level what is building in public? Yeah, I don't know if I can come up with any sort of Webster's level definition of what it is. But the way that I interpret it at least is sharing your progress as you're building something. And the something can be, you know, interchanged with any other word you want, whether it's a course, a book. You know, a product, a software product, it can be literally anything. But the premise is that you're sharing your progress before you get it to a point where, you know, you believe that it's the best or it's perfect, which obviously that's never attainable.

6:59And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong is they get the project to, you know, 90 % done and then they don't share it because they're worried that it's just not perfect. So that's the way that I see it. Obviously, a little bit of a rambled definition of building public. But, you know, I guess the TLDR is just sharing your progress to building the thing that you want to build. Quick break in the pod. If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you've been thinking about how to actually use AI inside your business. And that's exactly why we built the AI Opportunity Finder. It's a free tool that helps you uncover high impact, tailored AI use cases based on your business, your goals, your pain points, and your industry.

7:41No fluff, no generic use cases, just real ideas that fit your business and the ranked by ROI potential. It takes about three minutes to run and it's like having your own personal AI strategist for free. If you want to try it for free, check out the link in the show notes or go to hatchworks.com backslash AI-opportunity-finder. Yeah, so many folks view this as like a marketing growth hack type of thing. But at the end of the day, in its truest form, it's a mechanism of continuous discovery and early discovery. We were chatting about this the other day. being able to get what you're building out in front of people and having them either using it, providing feedback, that's it provides for such quicker iterations on what you're building before you go and sink a ton of money into something or go too far down a path of an idea.

8:38But I think that's the interesting piece to it. It's not it's not just some like marketing ploy type of thing. It's all about the discovery element. Yeah. If you go down this path and you expect that your build in public approach is going to yield thousands of users, then you're setting yourself up for failure. Because the desired outcome of building in public or one of the desired outcomes of building in public is definitely the reach and distribution you can achieve as a result of sharing this stuff on social media, right? And I'm going to go on a couple of tangents here just to provide context.

9:16So one of the big blockers of people building a reach in an audience online is generally writer's block or some form of it. I don't know what to write about. I don't know what I'm doing. People don't care about what I have to say, right? You get that part of it. And then what you do is you essentially take that away and you say, hey, look, I got a bunch of stuff that I do want to write about because I know the things that I want to talk about. So if you go down the path of saying, hey, I want to reach out to tens of thousands of people, you're going to see, and even me to this day, I have posts on LinkedIn that have five people that like it.

9:49But now if you reframe your objective of why you're building in public from, I want this massive reach and distribution to, I want to draft and write about my progress, right? Almost think about posting on LinkedIn or posting on Twitter or wherever else or a newsletter as a way to write your memos that explain the progress you're taking and being able to go back to it over time to reflect on the things you've done. And the byproduct of that is ultimately sharing progress with other people that have similar interests as you with a similar path that you ultimately have. Yeah. And you mentioned the word memos.

10:30I think that's an interesting way at putting it because the way I see it, it's like this, the beauty of it, it's a story that you're watching unfold before your eyes. But in the truest sense of the word, you don't know what the outcome is going to be. Right. I see you putting these things out here, building in public. And it is like, it's kind of like little memos, little like diary entries along the way, but it's a story. Like we don't know where this is going to end up. You, even the person building don't know where you're going to end up, which is the coolest part about it. Like and we'll get into this in a minute.

11:03There's several folks I'm kind of following that are doing this right now and it's just like, you know, I get my popcorn and kind of watch what's going on as they go. But I'd love to get deeper into, like you've been building this tool called Social Digest as a, let's tell this story. Like take me through kind of the starting point. You know, you've had ups, downs, learnings along the way. start to like tell this, this story for us. And it's been a short period of time. What you mentioned, I think like 90 days of starting building this, right? Yeah. So I guess maybe we can decouple two parts of sort of how the story started between people that know what they're doing and people that don't.

11:49So I'd put myself in the bucket of people that have no clue what they're doing, which probably the vast majority of people out there, right? Like I don't have, yeah, I don't have a background in product management. I've never managed a product at a large organization. I figured this stuff out based on learning. Fortunately, I have a great group of people around me that influence how I think and develop better habits and learnings in the process. So what happened was I had an idea just like everybody does, right? And they say, hey, cool, Like I want to do this thing. It wasn't the first product that I built.

12:23I'd already built stuff before. And I decided that I want to put something together and I wanted to mess around with Bubble a little bit more. So the no-go tool. And I wanted to explore that because I enjoy building stuff. And I reached out to some folks and then I chatted with Nick Bennett. And I said, hey, dude, like this is what I'm thinking about doing. And he's like, I love it. And the hypothesis was that we all understand the limitations of LinkedIn's algorithm and the fact that we miss LinkedIn posts regularly. And if we can find a way to make sure that people don't miss this post, they're going to be willing to sign up and pay for access to this, so on and so forth.

13:06In advance, understood there were risks with this process, as you should always understand before you go down a path. but thought that I'd be able to solve those risks along the way and find solutions for it. Didn't want to hurt or didn't want to negatively impact momentum just because there might be some risks to be seen. Obviously nothing that was detrimental to anybody's wellbeing or anything like that but there are business risks that come as a result of building something that's on another platform. And just to like pause there real quick, this is a big point here and we see it with customers a lot.

13:41Like there's no way to solve for all risks before you get started. There's this concept of you have known knowns, the things you know, known unknowns. Like I know there's some stuff I don't know. And then there's unknown unknowns. You don't even know that you don't know yet. And that's a big hurdle a lot of times with our, even our clients is you can't draft a perfect requirements document before you start a project. How you start is exactly like you said. You have a hypothesis. You have a desired outcome. And yes, there is ideas around what you're building, but you can't be handcuffed by the fear of the unknowns.

14:18That's powerful. I think just starting from it's such a good example of you've got to start to start to uncover some of those risks. Yeah. And there's also fears of the known. So that's a great point. But in this case specifically, there were definitely unknown unknowns, but there were definitely no known risks. Right. For example, pulling posts from LinkedIn and being able to share that in an email. That was a known risk. We understood that that's something that LinkedIn probably looked at and say, hey, we don't you know, we prefer that you don't do that, which is why I tried to essentially find ways to get API access and stuff like that to LinkedIn in order to do that.

14:53But because we're small, we're still figuring it out. There was no reason why we couldn't get the ball moving, start to bring users into the platform and figure that problem out later. Obviously, if you're a larger organization, that becomes a bit of a liability. But because when you're starting out, there are tons of businesses out there that started out with scotch tape and glue and scraps of paper until they validated and then they scaled up from there. That was essentially the same, using the same principles of just full MVP, didn't really know what was going to happen and found ways around getting it done.

15:29Yeah. And when you think of the built right mindset, the way we think about it is you got to build the right thing is one side of the equation. And then you got to build it right. I'd say to your point, you know, don't get hamstrung on the built, building it the right way concept in terms of like maintainable, scalable, secure, you know, all these components. that building the right thing is so important if it's Greenfield, new idea type of thing. And it's hitting on these core elements of, is the thing valuable? Like, do users actually find value in it? Is it going to be viable for your business?

16:04Meaning, can I make money off this thing? And is it feasible to build? And this is like, you know, Marty Kagan's one of those big, what's the word? Not disciple, but just somebody we look up to in terms of how we think about product development. There you go. Right there. Right next to it. Yep. And that's a perfect segue there. But I've loved how like, you know, I even like copied some of your LinkedIn posts going along the way, but I can see where you're intentionally going about this in terms of checking off the boxes of, you know, is it valuable? Are people finding value in it? Is it going to be viable?

16:40So maybe like take, take me down that path and however you want to go into it, but these different components of those core elements. Sure. Yeah. So let's talk about feasibility, right? Feasibility we touched on, right? Can we do the thing that we want to do? Well, I think if you look at it from a best practice, the answer is no, right? There's no API, direct API access to get the information that we had, but we had a way to make it feasible. That's kind of thinking outside the box, I guess, as they say, is like, are there other ways of doing the same thing? And there were other ways of doing the same thing, which allowed us to validate.

17:14was it viable? Well, now we know it wasn't, but before we didn't know if it was viable because we still had the hypothesis, which we can get into after in terms of viability and figuring that part out. And what was the next piece? Is it actually valuable for the users? Do they desire the product? Do they find it useful? Got it. Right. So yeah. So the second one is, or the third one is, is, is arguable because it, Was it valuable? Well, apparently from user abuse, it was valuable. People said that they enjoyed it. And I guess for context, which might help add some colors, that Social Digest essentially sends you an email every morning for the posts of people that you follow from the day before.

17:59So if you were posting the day before and I was following you, I would get a recap in my inbox with your LinkedIn posts where I can click on and go back to the posts. That's essentially how it worked. So people said they loved it because they lost a lot of posts because the algorithm didn't allow them to see it. So was it valuable? Yes. How valuable then is really the metric that you kind of have to look at, which gets into the viability factor. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. It's that sliding scale, in essence, like valuable to what extent? I think I even had that specific post saved, but maybe this gets into it.

18:40take me through that. It's almost this willingness to pay type of component. I know you've went into some interesting learnings through this building in public process around willingness to pay. Some people will say one thing versus another and take me down that path. Yeah. So as a product marketer, I guess willingness to pay comes second nature. And I skipped that step somewhat building in public, which in hindsight was probably not a good idea, but still learned my lessons a different way. But obviously you can't run a business. And this goes into sort of the post, the note that I released, I think a couple of weeks ago now, that sort of explained the outcome of Social Digest, but you can't run a business with zero revenue unless you have a bunch of capital that's been injected into your business.

19:31Personally, I had no intentions ever of receiving capital or getting investments or anything. I wanted to bootstrap this thing, which I did. I wanted to export on my own and then build. I wasn't expecting to build a massive business, but expecting to hopefully achieve something with it. And what happened over time is you start to talk to users and you get a sense of, okay, how valuable is this to users? What do you think? How are you using it? Tell me how you were doing this before. Just typical discovery questions to get a sense of where this product can go and how it can evolve and what features are missing.

20:11And maybe we built too many features or not enough, et cetera. And a lot of the feedback was positive. It was great feedback. It was just like, yeah, loving this. If we missed the Social Digest post, we'd get emails saying, hey, I didn't get the digest this morning. So all indicators pointed towards success. until we put a Stripe integration and ask people to pay for the subscription. And that's really where rubber hits the road, right? You need to make sure that your product is good enough, that people have enough of a need and a want for it, that they're willing to pay for it. And in this case, even though people enjoyed using it, they didn't need it enough in their day-to-day to end up paying for it.

20:56No, that's super interesting. And maybe talk to me about, through this process, what's been the hardest part about it to you, this building in public motion? Well, I think that the first time around is probably the toughest. And I think that there are multiple reasons why it's difficult the first time you go through it. One is you're still figuring out what you're doing. Never done it before. so you don't even know what kind of posts you should post or how you should post them or what things you should talk about, right? So you're still really figuring out what to write about publicly first, just in the built in public part of the business.

21:41And then you gotta know what you're building. And if you've never built anything before, you are gonna make an infinite number of mistakes. And I think even if you have built stuff before, you will still make a ton of mistakes. And there's that lesson too. And then there's like a functional lesson of like running the business part of it. It's like, how long can I sustain building this thing out? In some instances, folks will build this stuff themselves, which is great. I've built the no-code element all myself, but I also had to hire a JavaScript developer to help build the Chrome extension and components that added more features to Social Digest.

22:19Yeah, so what's crazy about that, I don't know if you picked up on this, but there's a meta element to this because you literally are building in public, of building in public, if that makes sense. Like you, by building in public, you're learning how to build in public. You're doing that motion to learn how to do that motion. So it's kind of like a meta thing right there, but that's really cool. Tell me this though. What's one thing you wish you could go back in time, not very far back in time, three months ago, and tell yourself when you started? ask people for money faster. Get paid faster. I think that people, how should I say this?

23:02I love building products just as much as the next person who loved building products. And if you're doing it as a hobby and you have no expectation that it becomes something and you're investing relatively close to zero as possible in terms of cost, then you can do this as much as you want. You can go build a bunch of tools, launch a bunch of stuff. A ton of these things will fail. Maybe one will make you some money. And I think that that's fine. If you do have an expectation for this thing to make money and you are investing capital or you're investing a significant amount of your time, then you have to understand how you can generate revenue as quickly as possible.

23:46And that, if that means you have to scrap your idea super, super early, because you couldn't find a way for people to pay for it, then that means you scrap the idea super, super early. That's probably the thing that I learned the most is that discovery is important, understanding the problem, what the problem is, what the, you know, the customer need is, but also being able to identify that willingness to pay element and merging those two as fast as possible so that you know that you can scale out a viable business over time and a sustainable business over time. And it's interesting. It's, you know, when you're bootstrapped, it's almost like the luxury of being bootstrapped to where you're, you are forced almost to iterate quickly, learn quickly versus like something that's well-funded or a large company, you know, they can take these pauses.

24:45They can take a long time to launch something, ultimately to learn the same result in a lot of ways. I think this is the beauty in what you've done. We're talking 90 days. You started building in public, you've learned a ton, you've kind of, you know, pivoted from the original thing and kind of get into where you're pivoting next, but in 90 days, in minimal investment, relatively speaking, from what I've seen from a lot of companies that will spend months, years putting something out there without answering some of these critical questions. And it's painful because you spend exponentially more money, more time, more resources, and you get the same result or not superior result because you've learned less along the way, right?

25:36Right. Yeah. There's, there's a lot of wasted capital and a lot of wasted resources that go into building products. And that happens everywhere. I've seen it firsthand in companies that I've worked at, um, where you go down development cycles that are way too long building things that you don't know people want. And then at the end, you've released a bunch of features that people never use and, or never see the light of day because you've pivoted before you even launched them. And I think that's the advantage of building in public is people get to see what you're doing and you can quickly pivot.

26:06And even though I mentioned like 90 days before, from the point in which we launched and accepted waitlist registrants to the point in which we published that we're going to essentially phase out Social Digest, it was probably just over 60 days at most. And I just essentially let it run. I think it actually technically turns off in two days, but let it run for a total of 90 days. But yeah. And if you can run it even shorter, even better. If I ideally in the future want to be able to do enough discovery, validate, financially validate the product or service or whatever it ends up being within the first 30 days, at most the first 30 days.