How to #BuildinPublic?🚀

Presenting your work and progress in public can seem frightening in the beginning of the journey, especially if you’re new to the community, but remember that the community is made out of likeminded people who are doing the same thing as you - Building.

With building and learning in public, you can:

Open up your learning and share progress with the community
Receive feedback from peers and experts as you progress
Share anything you like from side projects, hobbies, tips and tricks while getting valuable insights
Changing your habits and getting encouraged to keep going with a community that supports you

So let’s start with the first thing that you can do as a new or inactive member of the community:

Introducing yourself 👋

Don’t be shy! Share your story and interests with us.

Why? Introducing yourself to the community helps you find the targeted audience and likeminded fellow makers. Sharing your passions and interests shouldn’t be related only to your project goals, but also creating the comfortable public space where we can connect and become friends.

How can you introduce yourself?

Post an introduction story; Tell us about yourself, your deeds and aspirations, share the information that you feel comfortable with sending out into public
Personalize your profile account: Add your biography, Use a profile picture that describes your personality or interests, add your skills and roles

Activity & Project presentations 📋

Being active in a community can open you a lot of doors for you in the makers world.

How? Imagine you've just developed an idea or built this fantastic project. When you share it publicly, you're not just showing off your skills – You're giving others the opportunity to engage with your creative building process by:

Building a community around your product
Building trust in your project
Provide user testing before making
Creating an user-maker emotional connection

While sharing your working process, PPP’s and user testing, you are opening the space for discussions and opportunities for other makers from similar or different backgrounds to offer insights and suggestions that can turn your project from awesome to mind-blowing. And the best part? Those open discussions can help everyone else level up too with provided information.

Fear of #BuildinginPublic 👻

These paragraphs are inspired by MTG’s post about the uncomfortable feelings he had while starting building in public, you can see his post here.

The idea of openly sharing plans, progress and problems with the community can be scary in the beginning of the #BuildinginPublic journey. We might ask ourselves questions like:

Why waste time on being publicly active when I can invest that time in my project?

Documenting the process of any project while letting people engage with it is one of the most useful feedback you can get from yourself and others. Placing all of your PPP’s on one “paper” and presenting your work gives you insight of everything you did, and getting various feedback from other makers helps you fill in the gaps and feel supported.

What if nobody’s interested in what I’m making?

There will always be someone who will be interested in what you’re doing and follow your growing while supporting it and learning from your process. Communities aren’t just based on individual works, support and insights should always go both-ways. If you give insights to other makers, most of them will look at your profile, see what you’re making and give the useful insights back. It’s easier to go trough creative and technical blockades when you know you’re not alone and can always reach out for help.

What if somebody judges me for making mistakes?

I'm sure a lot of us felt or still feel the same way, especially about mistakes. We can't learn without them, yet we feel so terrified by someone noticing them. It's a complexed issue that has been going on for ages in this world and visible in any kind of practice. We are taught that mistakes lead to failure, but almost never taught about mistakes being the main carrier of the process, we shouldn't fear them, we should learn from them and how to fix them and sometimes we can't do that alone, nor we shouldn't always go alone trough the learning process. That's why being active in communities make the journey easier and more fun! We have the opportunity to interact with a lot of people that have different knowledge and help us when we're stuck and vice versa. Communities are the place where making mistakes is normalized as a very important part of the process that brings useful interactions and conclusions. But also, you’re not building the project only for yourself, you’re also building it for your future users, that’s why it’s important to let other people point out the unclear spots and mistakes in order to build a better product.

Additional resources and stories from makers:

Question for makers:

What were your first impressions of #BuildinginPublic and how did they develop over time?

Tell us your experience in the comments, let's start a discussion! ✨