📰 The building blocks of building in public

I've been there. My last venture, a fitness app, had a great product, but growth felt stagnant. Then, a breakthrough: a simple 5-step playbook that ignited a viral firestorm. Millions of social media impressions, a passionate community - users were doing pushups at midnight, fueled by friendly competition!

Here's the secret sauce,ready to be applied to your startup journey.

How Haya goes viral on TikTok and turns viewers into newsletter subscribers TikTok, like all the other social platforms, doesn’t want users leaving their platform. But one of the most reliable ways for newsletter publishers to gain subscribers is to spend a bunch of time posting and engaging on social platforms, then share the link to their newsletter subscription page. These two things are always in conflict.

How do you get people to leave TikTok and check out your newsletter or other off-platform websites? First, you need people to actually watch your TikTok videos*.

(*These videos don’t necessarily need to be yours. See: Ali Abassi’s clever lead magnet. But it helps.)

Haya’s first TikTok video, published the same day as her first newsletter, still only has around 2k views. But her seventh video cracked 11k. And her 21st cracked 1M — and 148.2k likes, 869 comments, and 28.2k bookmarks. This was only 5 weeks after she started posting.

A few frames from Haya’s first 1M-view TikTok, including the newsletter plug at the end.

Haya has posted 155 TikToks since that first 1M-view video. Only 26 of them (or 16.7%) have received less than 10k views. Four more have received at least 1M views — one currently has 3.7M views.

Haya's TikTok strategy is simple. The newsletter goes out on Wednesdays. She posts a breakdown of one of the videos, repurposing the blurb she used in the newsletter the same day. A couple of days later, she'll round up the remaining few.

At least, that was her strategy, as described in her interview with Kate Lindsay in Embedded. It's still largely the same, but sometimes, she only posts once per week. The structure has loosened slightly; she experiments more. I'm most interested in her posts replying to commenters, but they're among her least engaged.

If anything, Haya’s approach is an endorsement of simplicity and low production value. That’s not to say it doesn’t take time for her to produce each video, or that she doesn’t write a script and record multiple takes. But these videos are so, so simple. It’s Haya greenscreened over a screenshot of a video thumbnail, talking animatedly about why the video is interesting.

When it's time to begin your indie hacking career, two things are really important. Oversimplification of the year, but bear with me. 😅 You have to:

Minimize risk Start And launching something quick and easy can take care of both things. It diversifies your revenue streams and allows you to knock out that easy one so that you can get into the habit of shipping.

I talked to someone with a lot of experience shipping products — in fact, he's currently launching 25 products in 25 weeks. 👇

Yep, that's right. Ayush Chaturvedi (@ayushchat) is launching 25 products in 25 weeks. This guy knows how to make a quick product, and he's turning a profit too. How is he doing it? Well, he certainly isn't building a SaaS every week. No, he's creating other types of digital products. Quick ones.

And yeah, I get it… SaaS is the end-all-be-all, right? We all prefer the idea of building a beautiful piece of software, so here's an unpopular opinion:

Not every product needs to be a SaaS. There are other options, and they exist for a reason.

Let's talk about the products Ayush was able to create in a week. And I'll outline some other options later.

That would be you.

Even if you’re not self-employed, your boss is you. You manage your career, your day, your responses. You manage how you sell your services and your education and the way you talk to yourself.

Odds are, you’re doing it poorly.

Like any good indie hacker, I started broke. I started by personally loaning $250 to the business. Shout out to Vercel, for having a very generous free tier that allowed me to incubate the business.

I built it using NextJS/React, Vercel, Tailwind, Planetscale, Resend (Notifications), and Clerk (auth).

At the time, I was looking for work while taking consulting jobs and building the prototype in my evenings.

Even though StealthGPT was my main focus, those additional consulting and contracting roles kept the lights on in the early stages. It took Stealth about six months before we made enough revenue to both keep expanding our ads and start paying me

If you want the time to do something, you make the time for it. I don’t believe in excuses. People spend way too much time talking about what they want to do. There are doers and sayers; the former are rare but far more successful.

The daily practice of building in public is the single most important habit I’ve developed. It supercharged my career in tech, grew my audience by 80x, attracted high profile jobs at startups, boosted revenue and traffic for my side-projects, carried my podcast to ~40 episodes, and helped me build relationships with business icons like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian and more.

In today’s edition, I intend to offer clarity and answers to 4 of these questions drawing from my expertise of building in public over 4 years on Twitter.

Let’s get started with the easy part.