Building In Public: How Constraints Foster Creativity and Innovation

Matt Paige:

Today. 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 their eyes unless you’re driving. Let’s, 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. And you have to start right here, right now on the spot.  Now, imagine that’s amplified to the entire digital world. And PS 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 gonna go deep into today with Rui Nunes to explore and deconstruct this approach to product development and discovery, and understand how you can start using it today. Rui, welcome to the show. Welcome to Built Right.

Rui Nunes:

Thanks for having me.

Matt:

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. But 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, 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, uh, which just makes for the perfect story. Uh, but all these things in such a short period of time. But that’s, that’s the beauty of building in public, is the shortened duration of feedback, right?

Rui:

Yeah. It’s, uh, like, I, I guess I should preface this by saying that whatever I say today should be taken with a big grain of salt, uh, just like anything else that you hear online, uh, and their individual experiences, right? So a lot of the stuff that I learned and how I learned it is likely gonna be very different than folks listen to this and how they learn, and, um, and then what they take away from it too. But yeah, it’s, it’s been a wild ride over the last, you know, I think 90 days of just building in public. Um, and, uh, but it’s not new, like building something for me isn’t new. I’ve, I’ve tinkered around with stuff, uh, a lot and, uh, saw what some other folks, uh, we’re doing online and how they were sharing their journey. I was like, I, why not try this out? Put my ego aside for a little bit and see, uh, see where this takes me.

Matt:

And that’s the biggest piece. I think it’s that humility element. You gotta have this element of humility if you want to even start on this approach because it’s hard. Like I, I, I have trouble with this today, like putting myself out there, uh, in, you know, just putting something out there that’s, that, you know, like the saying goes, it’s a shitty first draft, but you gotta start somewhere, right? 

Rui:

Yeah. There’s, there’s a lot of stuff that, um, 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, is understanding that you’re sharing stuff that isn’t done and you’re gonna have other people see how you think and what you think at any point in time before it’s polished. Um, 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, and, you know, this, this like portfolio of businesses, nobody really cares what you’re building. Nobody really cares what what you’re saying. And, and I mean, I use that loosely, right? Cause obviously there are some people that support, you’ve been a great supporter of the stuff that I’ve been doing and working on with Nick too, and, uh, appreciate that. But it’s, you know, you’re not gonna get this like tribe that’s gonna come after you and tell you to stop doing what you’re doing.

Matt:

Yes. Yes. And that, that’s such a great point. Cause that’s one of the blockers, I think, to people actually starting, just starting in general, take throw building in public out the window is that fear of rejection of, you know, everybody on name your platform is gonna just, you know, viewing it under a microscope, everybody’s so focused on themselves half the time. Um, but maybe take a step back, like how, how do you define what building in public even is? Like how would you define, uh, you know, kind of a base level, what, what is building in public? 

Rui:

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, and, and the, something can be, you know, interchanged with any other word you want, whether it’s a course a, a, a book, um mm-hmm. you know, a product, a software product. It could be literally anything. But the premise is that you are 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. And I think that’s, uh, where a lot of people go wrong is they get the project to, you know, 90% done and then the, 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, know, I guess the TLDR is, um, just sharing, sharing your progress to building the thing that you want to build.

Matt:

Yeah. And you know, so many folks view this as like a, a marketing growth hack type of thing. Uh, but at the end of the day, and it’s truest form, it’s a mechanism of continuous discovery and early discovery. I know 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. It provides for such quicker iterations on what you’re building, uh, before you go and, you know, sync a ton of money into something or go too far down a path of an idea. Uh, but, you know, 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, it’s all about the discovery element.

Rui:

Yeah. If you, if you go down this path and you expect that your building public, um, approach is going to yield thousands of users, then you’re setting yourself up for failure. Um, yeah. Because building the, the, 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 gonna go on a couple tangents here just to provide contact. Um, so one of the big blockers of people building a region and audience online is generally writer’s block or some form of it. I don’t know what to write about mm-hmm. 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 wanna write about because I know the things that I wanna talk about. So if you go down the path of saying, Hey, I wanna reach out to tens of thousands of people, you’re gonna see, and even me to this day, I, I have posts on LinkedIn that have five people that like it. But now if you reframe your objective of why you’re building in public from, I want this massive reach of distribution to, I want to draft and write about my progress, right? Almost think about posting on LinkedIn or posting on Twitter or whatever 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, uh, 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, uh, uh, that, that you ultimately have.

Matt:

Yeah. And you, you, you mentioned the word memos. I think that’s an interesting way of putting it, cuz the way I see it’s like this, the beauty of, it’s, it’s this story that you’re watching unfold before your eyes, but in the truest sense of the word, you don’t know what the outcome’s gonna be, right? I, I see you putting these things out here, building in public, um, and it is like that, it’s kinda like little memos, little like diary entries along the way, but it’s a story like, we, we don’t know where this is gonna end up. You even the person building don’t know where you’re gonna end up. No idea. Which is the, the coolest part about it. Like, um, and it’s, we’ll get into this in a minute. There’s several folks I’m kind of following that are doing this right now, and it’s, it’s just like, you know, I get my popcorn and gotta watch, watch what’s going on as, as they go. But, uh, I’d love to get deeper into like, you’ve been building this tool called Social Digest as a, let’s, let’s tell this story. Like, take me through kind of the starting point. You know, you’ve had ups, downs, uh, learnings along the way. Start to like tell this, this story for us. Um, and it’s been a short period of time, what you mentioned, I think like 90 days of Yeah. Starting building this, right?

Rui:

Yeah. So I guess, um, maybe we can decouple two parts of sort of how this story, how the story started mm-hmm. between people that know what they’re doing and people that don’t. So 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?

Matt:

Like I Don’t, which I love have, Yeah.

Rui:

I don’t have a background in product management. I’ve never managed a product at a larger organization. I figure this stuff out based on learning. Fortunately, I have a great group of people around me that, uh, influence how I think, uh, and develop, uh, better habits and learnings in the process. So what happened was had an idea just like everybody does, right? Mm-hmm. And they say, Hey, cool, like, I wanna do this thing. It wasn’t the first product that I built. I’d already built stuff before. Uh, and I decided that I wanted to put something together and I wanted to mess around with bubble a little bit more. So the NOCO tool mm-hmm. And I wanted to explore that cuz I enjoy building stuff. Yeah. 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, um, the, uh, we all understand that the, 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 gonna be willing to sign up and pay for access to this, so on and so forth, um, in advance. Understood. There were risks with this process, as you should always understand before you go down a path. Um, but thought that I’d be able to solve those risks along the way and find solutions for it. Mm-hmm. didn’t want to, you know, hurt, um, uh, or didn’t want to negatively impact momentum, um, just because there might be some risks, uh, 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.

Matt:

And, and just to like pause there real quick, this is a big point here. Uh, and we, we see it with customers a lot. Like there, there’s no way to solve for all risk before you get started. There’s this concept of you have no knowns the things, you know, no 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 how you said you have a hypothesis, you have a desired outcome. And yes, there is, you know, ideas around what you’re building, um, but, but you can’t be, you know, handcuffed by the fear of the unknowns. And that’s powerful. I think just starting from, it’s such a good example of you’ve gotta start to start to uncover some of those risks.

Rui:

Yeah. And, and there’s also fears of the unknowns. So that’s a great point. But in this case specifically, there were definitely, uh, you know, unknown unknowns mm-hmm. but there were definitely no known risks, right. For example, yeah. 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. Uh, which is why tried to essentially find ways to get API access and stuff like that to LinkedIn, uh, in order to do that. But 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, a liability, but because when you’re starting out, there’s, there are tons of businesses out there that started out with scotch tape and glue and scraps of paper mm-hmm. until they validated and then they scaled up from there. That was essentially the same, using the same principles of just full M v mvp didn’t really know what was gonna happen and found ways around getting it done.

Matt:

Yeah. And when you think of the built right mindset, the way we think about it is you gotta build the right thing is one side of the equation, and then you gotta 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, it’s hitting on these core elements of is the thing valuable? Like, do users actually find value in it? Is it gonna be viable for your business? Meaning, can’t I make money off this thing? Uh, and is it feasible to build? And this is like, you know, Marty Kagan’s one of those big, uh, um, 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, yeah. Yep. And, and that’s a perfect, uh, 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 gonna be viable? So maybe like, take, take me down that path and however you want to go into it, but these different components of those core elements.

Rui:

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, uh, a best practice, the answer is no. Right? There’s no api, direct API access to get the information, 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. Mm-hmm. 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. Yeah. Was 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 Yeah. Um, and figuring that part out and what was the next piece Valuable?

Matt: 

Like, is it actually valuable for the users? Do they desire the product? Do they find it useful? Right.

Rui:

Right. So yeah. So, and, and the second one is, or the third one is, is is arguable because mm-hmm. It, was it valuable? Well, apparently from user I abuse it was valuable. People said that they enjoyed it. Um, and I guess for context, which might help, uh, 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. So if mm-hmm. 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 it, go back to the posts. Mm-hmm. that’s essentially how it worked. So people said they loved it because they lost a lot of posts. Yeah. Because the algorithms don’t see it. So was it valuable? Yes. How valuable then is really the, the metric that you kind of have to look at, which gets into the viability factor.

Matt:

Yeah, no, that’s, that’s exactly right. It’s like, it’s that sliding scale in essence, like valuable to what extent, I think I even had that specific post saved, but, and maybe this gets into it, um, take me through that. It’s, it’s almost this willingness to pay type of component. Now, I know you, when it’s some interesting learnings through this building and public process around willingness to pay. Some people will say one thing versus another, and take, take me down that path.

Rui:

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 learn, learned, uh, learned my lessons a different way. Um, but the, obviously you can’t run a business and, and this goes into sort of the post the note that I released, uh, I think a couple 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 mm-hmm. a bunch of capital that’s been injected into your business. Yeah. Personally, I had no intentions ever of, uh, receiving capital, uh, or getting investments or anything. I wanted to boots bootstrap this thing, which I did. I wanted to explore it on my own, uh, and then build, um, you know, I wouldn’t, I, I wasn’t expecting to build a massive business, but expecting to hopefully achieve something with it. Mm-hmm. And what happened over time is you, you start to talk to users and you get a sense of, okay, how valuable is this to users? Uh, what do you think? How are you using it? Right. Tell me, tell me how you’re doing this before. Right. Rachel’s typical discovery questions to get a sense of where this product can go and, and how it can evolve and what features are missing, and maybe we build too many features or not enough, et cetera. Mm-hmm. and a lot of the feedback was positive. It was great feedback. It was just like, yeah, like loving this. I missed if we missed the social digest post. We get emails saying, Hey, I didn’t get the Pope. Like I didn’t get the digest this morning. Yeah. So all the indicators pointed towards success until we put a Stripe integration and asked people to pay for the subscription. And that’s really where rubber rubber hits the road, right? Like, you need to make sure that your product is good enough, that people have enough of a need and a want for it. They, if they’re willing to pay for it mm-hmm. And in this case, even though people enjoyed using it, they didn’t need it enough in their day-to-day to, um, to end up paying for it.

Matt:

No, that’s, that’s super interesting. And, uh, maybe, maybe talk to me about through this process, what, what’s been the hardest part about it, uh, to you, this building in public motion?

Rui:

Well, I think that, um, I think the first time around is probably the toughest mm-hmm. Um, and I think that there are multiple reasons why it’s a difficult, the first time you go through it, one is you’re still figuring out what you’re doing. Mm-hmm. you’ve never done, done it before. So you don’t even know what kind of posts you should, you should post or how you should post them or what things you should talk about, right? Mm-hmm. So you’re still really figuring out what to write about publicly first. Sure. Just in the built in public part of the business. And 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. That’s right. 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, this stuff themselves, which is great. I built the no-code element all myself mm-hmm. but I also had to hire a JavaScript developer to help build the Chrome extension and components that added more features to, to to social digest. 

Matt: 

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So what’s crazy about that, I don’t know you picked up on this, but there’s a meta element to this cuz you literally are building in public of building in public, if that makes sense. Yes. Like you, by building in public, you’re learning how to build in public. Yes. You’re doing that motion to learn how to do that motion. So it’s, it’s kinda like a meta, uh, thing right there. But that that’s, that’s really, really cool. Um, the, tell me this though, uh, what’s one thing you wish you could go back in time, not very ba far back in time, you know, three months ago, and tell yourself, uh, when you started, 

Rui:

Um, ask people, ask people for money faster, get paid faster. I think that peop how should I say this? I love building products just as much as the next person who love building products. Mm-hmm. 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 mm-hmm. um, 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. Yeah. And 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. Yeah. Um, 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 mm-hmm. um, 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 in a sustainable business over Time.

Matt:

Yeah. It’s interesting. It’s, you know, when, 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, they can, uh, take a long time to, to launch something ultimately to, 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 a 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, 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 cuz you spend exponentially more money, more time, more resources, and you get the same result, uh, or, or, uh, not superior result because you’ve, you’ve learned less along the way. Right.

Rui:

Right. 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. Mm-hmm. I’ve seen it firsthand. The companies that have worked at, um, or you go down development cycles that are way too long, building things that you don’t know if people want mm-hmm. 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, man. And I think that’s the Manage Building in public, is people get to see what you’re doing and you can quickly pivot. And even though I mentioned like 90 days before, from the point in which we launched and accepted wait list 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. Yeah. And we just, I just essentially let it run. I think it actually technically turns off in two days, um, but let it run for a total of 90 days. But yeah. And if you can run it even shorter, even better if I, 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. Yeah. And if you can’t then move on to the next thing.

Matt:

No, that’s great. I think that’s such a big learning. And what’s interesting, you’re kind of pivoting this other idea, but it’s even more kind of a, um, you know, uh, MVP of an MVP type of thing. Like you’re just lever leveraging kind of a plug-in as the initial concept, which is a lot lighter weight, a lot easier to get out there. So even within the short period of time, the thing that’s you’re pivoting to is, um, you know, something you can get to those answers quicker that are so critical.

Rui:

Yeah. Yeah. And I guess to to touch on that is, yeah, when, when I was doing user research, uh, and talking to users of Social Digest, I was getting an understanding of, um, what their current process was, uh, how they use LinkedIn and some of the challenges they faced. And, um, one of the things that came up often was folks were interested in knowing who was influencing the influencers that they were following. Mm-hmm. Um, and they wanted to get a sense of who those people were so that they can also follow them and learn from them. And there was another use case in which people were using it for prospecting reasons, right. I want to go and I wanna reach out to more people. Obviously we all know that there’s a bazillion prospecting tools in the market and they cost, you know, infinite amounts of dollars and, you know mm-hmm. it’s, it’s, it’s not really cost effective for many folks and in other cases there’s a monthly subscription, so on and so forth. So, um, after Social Dive just decided, hey, why don’t I just create this quick spinoff of a Chrome extension that essentially allows people to go to anybody’s profile or engagement, uh, or on their posts and get the list of all the people who have engaged on it and allows you to essentially increase the number, number of people that you follow. Uh, or if you’re prospecting, it allows you to find people that are influencing your prospects so you can engage on their posts as well. Mm-hmm. and like you said, super mvp. Right? The way the tool works is literally open up a profile, this little slide out pops out as a scroll, the page, it populates all the people that essentially show up on the page on LinkedIn. And the features could have been infinite, right? It could have built a crm. Mm-hmm. I could have integrated chat G P T, it could have done all of these other things, but that wasn’t the problem. People didn’t come back and say, Hey, I want to, uh, automate outreach. It’s like, well, there’s plenty of tools taught I me outreach. Right. There’s plenty of tools told to do all what they’re saying is that I want to see who else is around, uh, in, on LinkedIn that I could follow, uh, or I can put on on my radar. And that’s what we did. And the difference between one and the other obviously is still early days for Influencer Circle and now starting to talk to more people. But, you know, social Digest in the lifespan of the product generated $10 and um, obviously still a small amount, but an influenced circle of 24, 24 hours generated 60. Right. So you see a big discrepancy between the amount of effort, money, and time put into one project mm-hmm. versus the other. And there’s no correlation between the revenue you generate, right? Like it’s really comes down to how big of a problem are you trying to solve because you can create something that’s super simple, very cost effective, and in some cases, in many cases don’t even require software. As long as it solves the problem and people find value in it and there’s benefit, then they’re gonna be willing to pay for em.

Matt:

Yeah. And it’s, it’s so awesome that comparison, that learning there, these kind of micro durations of how quickly you got with the second thing, you know, a week or two just getting that, that going. Uh, it talks about the, the beauty of constraints. Like constraints can be a good thing. They kind of force you to be scrappy and, and work with what you got. Tell me though, uh, besides yourself, who, who do you think’s doing building in public well or anybody in mind for you that, you know, you look at and say, Hey, that’s a good example of somebody doing building in public the right way?

Rui:

Yeah, I think you go on Twitter and you can find probably tons of those folks, right? I think Twitter’s pretty common in terms of finding people, building in public, whether it’s on the bubble side and people doing no code, but you can essentially look up mm-hmm. build, you know, building public on Twitter and find a ton of people. Like Peter Levels is the one that obviously comes up a lot because he’s built, you know, quite a big success for the products he’s been building and, and building in public for a long time now. So I guess he’s seen as probably the being on the press, you know, on the, on the, on the upper echelon of, uh, of building in public. And then you have mm-hmm. and then you have, you know, I was fortunate enough to work at OnDeck, uh, who I worked with, uh, KP who ran the No code, um, program there at OnDeck. And he, he even wrote a book around Build in Public too, which is awesome. Uh, and he’s a good follow. And I believe now he’s also getting active on LinkedIn and not just Twitter, uh, which is I think good for the LinkedIn community, but seeing more of this come out, uh, because I think originally it, it had just been, um, restricted primarily to Twitter and that’s kind of where the building public stuff, um, entered. But yeah, and Jay, uh, Jay decides also on, on LinkedIn and we were just chatting recently too, and he is building some stuff. So there’s, there’s lots of great people right now. Maybe it’s worth creating a list of who’s building in public. I don’t know, but there’s lots of great people out there, uh, to find.

Matt:

No, that’s a good idea. Maybe that’s, uh, something we’ll get in the show notes before we launch this episode. Um, but it was, even seeing the other day, darash who created HubSpot, he’s got this new tool called Chat spott related to chat G P T. It’s kind of, you know, adding that chat G P T element with your crm like a, a HubSpot. And he’s, he’s kind of doing the same thing. He’s got a very, you know, kind of rudimentary alpha out there, very similar to you. He’s talking about like cool little use cases of how to use it. I saw today he, he just bought the domain chat.com for like eight figures or something like that, but it’s this crazy like, transformation going on, which is a whole other topic around generative ai. But, you know, this is not reserved to, you know, the bootstrap, like there, there’s big name people doing this thing.

Rui:

Yeah. I think that unless you are, um, constrained by a p and there’s something there mm-hmm. that you don’t wanna obviously share. Yeah. Um, I, I honestly, I don’t see any negative effect of sharing what you’re building in public. Like, if anything it’s the, the opposite of that and mm-hmm. And I think when you, when you consider like, you know, folks like Nick Bennett and, and, and everybody else that has essentially built a, a decent size following on LinkedIn who have, um, earned this significant amount of distribution and often talk about what is the cost of paid media nowadays, right? The paid media cost is significant and how do you compare that to building an audience and having reach on a social platform? Well, obviously you’re not gonna pay virtually anything other than maybe your time to write stuff as long as mm-hmm. you’re writing reasonable content to continue to increase in that. Well, imagine if you do increase a workforce or build a workforce of folks who share what they’re building, uh, on online and on social media, well, there are a lot of great co uh, side effects that come out of that, right? Like, you share more about your product and more about your business. So it’s great from a career perspective and, and hire better people cause they’re gonna wanna work there and you’re building a better product cuz you had an open feedback loop, uh, which you talk about often, right? Like how do you get more people in and tell you exactly what you’re doing? Um, and obviously you’re gonna take that with the greatness all too social media, you get trolls, you know, that is what it is and we all know that. Um, but you do get that feedback and that input, which ultimately also, um, gets boosted to increase a broader reach of individuals, uh, online. And as we all know, if we wanna learn better, we should write about it cuz this, you know, to teach, to learn as to teach. Um, and as we write posts on social media, we are further cementing our learnings, uh, of what we’re building, why we’re building it, and our vocation itself as well as we post this stuff online.

Matt:

Yeah. Last topic here, we see a lot of startups, early stage, you know, type of companies, boots, trap companies doing this building in public motion. Why do you think we don’t see more of this in larger, more established companies? Uh, which, what’s your thoughts there?

Rui:

I don’t know, man. It’s, uh, it’s a, it’s a tricky one. I think that’s, I think it’s the same issue that you get around, um, why people don’t know how to use social media, um, and why bigger companies don’t know how to use social media. And we’ve all seen it, right? We got all these companies that all they do post social media, compos, all they post on social media is, uh, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, uh, yeah. White papers, webinars, like the, the templates are all the same, right? Hey, pay attention to me and kind of double, double clicking back on what I mentioned before. We have folks that are doing this well and building a business or supporting business where they work. Mm-hmm. on the back of that, you, you, you start to ex increase your reach. Now if executives or whoever or whoever’s making the decision doesn’t support this, that is really up to them to figure out why that is the case. They’re, they’re leaving money on the table, they’re leaving opportunities on the table. And in some cases, you know, if we don’t know how to do something we tr try or at least tend not to go down that path. Maybe that’s a reason. But I think there’s probably unique reasons for different businesses. Like I mentioned, IP might be one of them, but that’s probably pretty rare to be honest. I think that’s a terrible excuse. Like, unless you’re working in some sort of generative AI with like this super complex algorithms that you don’t wanna share and all this other stuff like I get, or if you’re, you know, if you’re doing something on the defense side and you don’t wanna share that, like there’s, there’s, I think there are certain parts of, um, and even in those cases, to be honest, I’m sure there’s tons of stuff you could talk openly and publicly about You just like at open ai I mean’s secret stuff. 

Matt:

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, open AI to a certain extent is doing this, you know, a lot of development went into it, but it’s, they’re quickly iterating through it. Um, it’s back to that, that discussion on constraints, they don’t have as many constraints and I think it is part of where the power lies. But, you know, I think it’s such a missed opportunity. Um, I think what would be interesting, these like companies with like incubator innovation type labs, like test it there that could, we work with several companies that have these kind of innovation labs and areas there where they could, uh, they could, you know, value by doing this building, building in public motion. So, you know, could you activate it there? I think that’s an opportunity, but, um, we just don’t, I don’t think we see enough of it in some of the larger companies. They, they default to the, the big splashy launch, you know, with the, the, the big marketing spin behind it and everything. And God forbid they do that and they didn’t even solve the right problem. 

Rui:

Yeah. I think that that actually, uh, surfaced another thought, which is also the optics behind mm-hmm. um, building in public, right? You the, when you think about building in public, it is a very informal, a very messy process. 

Matt:

Yes. Yeah. 

Rui:

Right? It’s, there’s no editing, right? I’ve, yeah, if it wasn’t for Grammarly, like the majority of my posts would probably be incomprehensible, right? Like yeah. Like it just helps to kind of figure stuff out along the way. So shit, they’re not a sponsor, I’m sure, but shit out’s a grammarly on that. Um, yeah. So there is a lot of messiness in building in public, and if businesses are set and, and, and their ways of really caring about optics in a certain way, then I can see why they’re, they have a, they’ll have a bit of an aversion towards this sort of messy publication. Yeah. And here’s the thing though, if you think about this, what’s, what’s the, the, uh, partner with Messi? It’s authentic, it’s authenticity. What do most big brands lack? It’s authenticity, right? So it’s it’s like right in front of their, their faces in a lot of ways. This is an opportunity to put humans in the process, to be authentic and oh, by the way, actually build something that customers want and learn as you go versus after you’ve sunk millions of dollars into it. Uh, yep. But no, that’s, that’s great. So, Rui, this has been an awesome conversation, love chatting on building in public. Where can folks, uh, find you? What’s the best way to find Rui out there? Uh, well LinkedIn is where I spend most of my time now, um, and posting and commenting as much as possible. So you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m sure you’ll probably include a link there somewhere, but I’m news. But, uh, yeah, I think that’s the, the biggest, uh, the biggest area we’ll have links to, like, everything that I’m doing and stuff.

Matt:

Yeah. No, and a, a worthy follow. Um, hopefully this gets more attention. Cause like I said, this is like a story unfolding. It’s, it’s something I look forward to every day, uh, the stuff, the knowledge you’re putting out there and kind of sharing as you go. So really appreciate having you on Built Right.

Rui:

Yep. Thanks man. Appreciate it.