What does it mean to work in public?

Way way back I connected to a marketer on LinkedIn called Dave Gerhardt. In the years since, his social profile has grown massively. Nothing to do with our association. A lot to do with the engaging walk-and-talk-to-camera videos he records and posts. I don’t begrudge him his meteoric ascent, but I do hold him personally responsible for spawning a wave of toe-curling copycat efforts.

Anyway, Dave’s recently moved from Drift, the B2B company where he made his name, to Privy, a B2C company that helps Shopify store owners harvest the email addresses of their visitors. He immediately started a podcast — The Ecommerce Marketing Show — where he‘s inviting ecommerce experts to educate him on the world of B2C marketing. Given my background and what I’m trying to do, it’s ideal content for my morning dog walks.

His first guest, whose name I don’t recall (sorry guest), dispensed two pieces of advice that I’ve taken to heart. On reflection, they’re kind of connected.

The first was to work in public.

Now, regular readers of this series — all three of them — may well say: “congrats Steve, you’re doing that already”. Only, I’m not really. I may have been publishing these weekly notes for a good few months, but I’ve done precious little to actually publicise them. My pitiful Medium stats attest to just how poor a job I’ve done. I have to remind my wife to login and give me 3 claps just to make it look like someone’s reading. The shame.

I could devote a whole new blog to exploring the deep-seated psychological reasons behind my reticence. But I’ll spare you — and the world — that level of introspection. Suffice to say, I have a need to be liked, respected and admired, and a corresponding morbid fear of being seen to have a need to be liked, respected and admired. I’m guessing that makes me similar in nature to roughly 95% of Gen Xers out there.

Cue the second piece of advice: build an audience first. In other words, don’t wait until the product’s built and shipping before trying to attract people who might want it.

You can probably see now how the two lessons are connected. And it’s not just prospective customers for Race.Radio that I need to do a better job of getting in front of — it’s potential angel investors and a cycling-crazy developer or two who may want to join me on this journey.

Which brings me back to working in public. A good time to publish my priorities for the next month.

1. Continue to seek angel investors. Email me at steve@race.radio if by some serendipitous chance this is you.
2. Get the product robust enough to conduct proper user testing. This is going to require some more cash to enable telemetry for troubleshooting, but I don’t see how I can ask angels or crowdfunding punters to put up their cash without knowing the product will work reliably — not to mention seeing first-hand how it actually gets used in practice.
3. Re-work the Race.Radio website to put more emphasis on how it meets the customer’s needs, rather than focusing on product design, features and technology. Then I may even install Privy to see if I can bag myself some more email addresses.
4. Begin the search for a technical lead and potential tech co-founder who’s willing to work at least in part for options/equity. This starts tomorrow at a Hire Like a Unicorn event, hosted by AWS, but I also need to get a job description written and up on the website and other sites like Angel List and LinkedIn.

Righty. Time to take a big deep breath and share this on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and also via email with the people who’ve subscribed on the site. Before you know it, I’ll be posting pouty selfies on Instagram.

Over and out.