If you're an entrepreneur planning to build a community around a particular subject, you'll benefit immensely from observing what's happening in the crypto space. Even with the rampant scams and rug-pulls, the web3 space demonstrates what groups of people can accomplish when there is alignment between the leaders and the members of a community. Because … Continue reading What Founders Can Learn From Web3 Community-Building (And What They Can’t)
Year: 2021
Twitter: The Gathering. How and Where to Find the Right Followers
When you're trying to build an audience, you need to understand who out there could be interested in you and your work. Before you can attract the right people, you must know where they are already gathering. Here is an approach that I have found incredibly fast and effective: you "draw a map" of the … Continue reading Twitter: The Gathering. How and Where to Find the Right Followers
Make it Easy to Cancel
It is a great retention strategy to make it easy for your customers to cancel your product. You may lose a few payments, but you gain something much more important: an ex-customer who feels respected. I see way too many founders paying way too little attention to the last interaction with their customers. They're missing … Continue reading Make it Easy to Cancel
Building in Public: How to Build a Minipoly
"Riches lie in the niches" — depending on how you pronounce "niche," this is either a great rhyme or at least a very pithy aphorism. It's not just about building businesses either: narrowing down your target audience is a great way to focus attention and create opportunities for yourself and your personal brand. Consider this: … Continue reading Building in Public: How to Build a Minipoly
Building in Public: How Radical Transparency Hurts Founders
I've been seeing a kind of "Build in Public purism" that I don't agree with. The narrative goes like this: We're fed up with being manipulated and lied to.We want the businesses we interact with to be honest.For that, we need them to be radically transparent, so they can't lie.We want that for all businesses … Continue reading Building in Public: How Radical Transparency Hurts Founders
Building in Public: Oversharing
There is an inflection point in many SaaS founders' Build in Public journey: around $25.000 monthly recurring revenue, founders who have previously been very vocal about their revenue numbers stop sharing them. Why is this? What makes successful founders retreat into secrecy? It's oversharing, and it's one of the most hard-to-balance activities when it comes … Continue reading Building in Public: Oversharing
Passive Income and Entrepreneurship
For many entrepreneurs, having passive income is the ultimate goal. It's a great goal, too: having money coming in without having to do any work sounds better than selling your time and attention to the highest bidder. My entrepreneurial journey has mainly been focused on building a portfolio of income sources that are as passive … Continue reading Passive Income and Entrepreneurship
Building in Public: What to Share at Which Stage of Your Journey
There is no recipe for success while building in public, but there are a lot of tried and trusted ingredients. Let's fill up the spice rack today and put a few cans into the pantry for later. Every business moves through several stages: we all start in the Preparation Stage, where we conceptualize and plan … Continue reading Building in Public: What to Share at Which Stage of Your Journey
Building in Public: Taking Breaks
Let's get one thing straight right away: building in public is a performative act. It's not something that "just happens." It might be something that you do gladly because you love building and chatting with your audience. But whenever you act in public, either by sharing, teaching, or engaging with someone else, you expend energy. … Continue reading Building in Public: Taking Breaks
Building in Public: Balancing Building and Sharing
One of the major problems that Build in Public novices face is how to split their attention between creating their product and talking about their journey. How much do you build before you tell your audience? How much should you talk the talk before you walk the walk? The first step to finding answers to … Continue reading Building in Public: Balancing Building and Sharing