Should You Build In Public? (I May Reveal All My Numbers!)

All right, so today we're going to be talking about if you should be building in public and what that actually means. So right now on Twitter, you can see there are a lot of— maybe not you, but I can see there are a lot more people that are talking about their businesses and revealing numbers, revealing traction, and just showing how things are going over time. And what happens is the people that are interested start to tell other people and a crowd starts to gather whether to see if this thing is going to succeed or if it's going to fail. It's like watching The Bachelor or The Bachelorette where you want to see how things develop over time. Or a better example would be like a business show where you see how they do, if they crash and burn or not. It's entertainment at the end of the day and it's real entertainment. I was thinking about this, I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like in a second, but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense because people talk about, I've talked about on this channel, You gotta be the one-man media company. Everyone's trying to build, everyone's trying to build an audience right now. And if you want unique content, why don't you go ahead and build in public? Everyone talks about, oh, I wanna start this shoe company, this e-commerce company, this software company, this food delivery company, whatever it is exactly. You might as well just, you have nothing to lose if you reveal it. Besides the fact that people might judge you, but who cares if people judge you? 'Cause those that mind don't matter, those that don't, right? Right? Who said that? Dr. Seuss. So why don't we take a look at this real quick? So I'm going to show you one guy right here. His name's Paul Yacoubin. I can't pronounce it exactly, but you can see, so he's the founder of this company called copy.ai and he is, he's building in public right now. So December 4th, he's at $14K MRR. So that's monthly recurring revenue. And let's see what he says in this thread over here. Maybe he shares some learnings. That's it. That's, it's like a live blog over here, $14K MRR. Okay, what else is going on? So then he'll have a normal tweet over here. By the way, his tweets get a ton of engagement. What else is going on? Okay, check this out. So someone's emulating him. Okay, he's at $13K MRR and he's got his socks up here and it just shows how things are going over time. That's cool. And okay, here's— he's got an update right here. So let's look at this. So in November 2020, he launched a Chrome extension. Here's what happened in terms of product launches. And then in terms of usage, here's what happened. And ideally, you're gonna reflect back on the numbers each month and see if things are actually improving or not. And the good news too is if you actually have this in public, investors are gonna see it too. And okay, you might be like, okay, competitors are gonna see it, but who cares if competitors see it? Because if they're just looking at what you have going on, then they might be behind. The counterargument to that might be if you're a big behemoth in this space and you see how things are going, you might wanna copy. But usually when things are this small, you might as well not. So I would just say, you know, if I were to ever do something like this, I would probably stop sharing my results after a certain point because it starts to not be in my advantage at a certain point. But I think in the early days, certainly, and some people might disagree with me there. So traction, 20,000 users while he's going for 100,000 users and then MRR, $12,000, and then he's plus 227% month over month. So he's growing quite a bit. And then this is how he's talking about his social media following. So these are basically the things that are important to him. And these are things that he needs help with, so just letting you guys know, hey, here's what I need help with, I'm trying to hire these people. This is amazing. I'm actually thinking that I want to do this as well. If you can drop in the comments or tweet at me if you'd like to see me do this, because I work on a host of different projects and I jump around helping my different operators. On the different projects, but it seems to make sense to do this and I love the idea. I'm going to reveal some numbers around some of the smaller projects that we have going on. ClickFlow right here, I have this pulled up right on my screen. So, you can see ClickFlow in January 2020, we did $18,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Now, December, about $13,000 in MRR. So, year-on-year growth rate, or I guess we're approaching year-on-year, would be 600%. That's good. And the reason you might be asking, so now I get to elaborate a little bit. Yeah. Why things haven't been even faster is because we've spent a lot of time overhauling our backend and making sure we can launch features faster. And here's another thing that we have going on that we're building in public. Marketing School Pro. And you can see for this one, we did a launch for it and we made $30 grand in a weekend. And so that's $2,600 MRR and we're starting to ramp that more. And then also I have this thing called Consulting School, which we charge $1 for, then it's $500 a month where I hop on a monthly call with people. And it's paying $7,000 a month right now, which is not bad. $1 trial model, and then here's our conversion rates and $1K ARPU. So just sharing this stuff with people in public, it's cool because these are the, the little side hustles that we have going on, and I don't mind sharing this information. I think it's cool. I'm happy to talk about the stuff that's bigger as well, but just to give people a sense of where things are going, and I might even share the other stuff too. So this is the benefit of sharing in public. And again, let me know if you'd like me to share what's going on. I'm happy to share podcast revenues, how many listens we get, all that cool stuff. And I'll have different summaries each month just to talk through, hey, like I'm happy to answer any questions because I think it does also inspire people at the same time. So, that is it for today. Don't forget to go to levelingup.com to get a free chapter of my book that I've been— that I've worked years on called Leveling Up. And just go to your favorite online retailer if you want to just buy it. But you can get a free chapter at levelingup.com and we'll see you tomorrow.