Why do we build in public?

@AaplyHQ Twitter account was created in March 2021. It was the beginning of our team assembling to create Aaply. In October 2022, we decided to be fully transparent and build in public, consistently sharing both, the ups and downs of our journey.

What does “Building In Public” mean?

When you build in public, you start to share everything that goes on behind the scene of product creation. What you share may include:

• The motivation behind the product
• Technical issues and solutions for them
• Marketing strategies
• Revenue

As you share your personal experience, you become a part of a large community of entrepreneurs working on their own products. The more you share, the more interested in your product people are. As simple as that!

You can talk about your journey anywhere, from Product Hunt discussions to Reddit communities, but the most powerful build in public platform has to be Twitter. It is extremely easy to find your audience there: adding a hashtag #BuildInPublic is usually enough.

It is much more common to build in public as a solo founder. But having a small team does not change a thing and you still get the same benefits!

Here are our TOP-5 Reasons to build Aaply in public:

1/ We adhere to the principle of transparency in everything.

A healthy startup culture requires honesty from founders, both in success and failure. From the very beginning, one of our top priorities was to be honest with each other, our partners, and our customers. And there’s nothing more genuine than just sharing the truth.

We were inspired by such people as Ryan Hoover (Product Hunt), Sahil Lavingia (Gumroad), Paul Yacoubian (Copy.ai) and wanted to contribute ourselves!

2/ When you build in public, networking flows by itself.

Building in public opens all doors. Collaborations, beta users, product coverage. You never know who’s going to read your tweet next. Who can be interested in your product to build their own? Who can feature your product in their newsletter? All these free opportunities can boost your growth.

Being public about Aaply helped us gather almost 1K Beta-users in 3 months. Impressive, huh?

3/ You’ll always get a fresh perspective.

One reply on Twitter can turn into a whole new feature for a product. Sometimes it is pretty hard to find people who are interested enough to provide you in-depth feedback but this community is a great help!

4/ Community works both ways.

Watching other builders, we get motivated to work on our product. We can try to implement some strategies that are working for similar products, or avoid some mistakes that they already made.

Just like our experience may be of help to someone else. There’s no point to compete when you can benefit more from companionship.

5/ Consistent reports help us prioritize our tasks.

Not many people like filing reports, but it actually helps to get an idea of what has been done in a week. We don’t practice weekly stand-ups with all team members, from Design, Tech, and Marketing, but they all do read our own Twitter account. Or at least we hope so 🙂

As well as that, these reports let us celebrate the smaller milestones and achievements, which always helps motivation!

If you want to start building in public, just drop a tweet with #BuildInPublic hashtag. Read other tweets, engage, and don’t be afraid to share your thoughts or stats.

If you’re interested in checking out our journey, follow Aaply on Twitter! We post new reports every Friday and will be glad to get your feedback.