My weekly update about building in public| Projects and thoughts- Ep03

The book is coming along. There's a few new workshops. I'm gonna go to Vietnam. You won't believe what's happening in my calendar and how am I gonna keep doing all these YouTube videos. Are you ready? Building in Public, episode 3. Let's start. Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel. If we haven't met, my name is Nir Zavaro and I think it's episode number 3 of me building in public. How are you? How are things? Because on my end it's been crazy this whole past week. I've been so focused on getting so many things done, it was unbelievable. I think today we're going to talk a little bit about the concept of building in public when it comes to the calendar. How do I look at the million of things I want to achieve? How do you plan something a year in advance, like publishing a book or launching a new company and stuff like that? And how can you reverse engineer to figure out the things you need to do in order to get there? But the best thing is, instead of me telling you what to do, I'm just gonna show you the things I've been working on the last week. So the main idea now is to try and figure out What building in public would look like. What are the things I'm gonna update? And I thought maybe the right thing to start is by talking about business, maybe personal life, if I'm training, what I'm eating. I'm trying to figure it out. If you have any ideas or thoughts, please let me know. My main focus and the reason why I came here was to step away from everything I was doing and say, what if I took the time, I left everything and focused on my stuff, if I focused on myself. I've always been kind of free when it came to my calendar. I didn't mind, people could book. I would love to have more meetings. I like to see the calendar get full, you know, the— this concept like if there's a lot of colors, that means you're busy, that means you're making progress. A big part of spending time now in Thailand meant I'm not focusing on getting my calendar booked. But rather on creating. So the concept is very simple.

I want to take my idea, turn it into a book, turn the book into a franchise. I believe everything we've done in branding is wrong, and I'll save this for another video.

So I'm working on the big chapter. That's the beginning of the book where you say everything we've done is wrong. This is why, why I can prove it, and this is how I plan on fixing it. And these are the chapters. The problem was, once that is established, what is the main concept of the book and can you actually prove it? I've been testing a lot of things. I've had dozens of calls. I've spoken with different branding agencies from all over the world. Once that's done, I plan on sending that to some publishing houses. If you know anyone, I am interested. Please DM me, which is also going to be a long process. One of the interesting things is I'm not just submitting this chapter, which I think is a breakthrough.

It's—

for me, it's mind-blowing, the fact that I've been able to bring everything into fruition and say, I have it. But it would also be connected to who am I, why is it relevant, what's the business model, how would I even publish the book. So the fact that they will publish it into stores is one thing. What am I gonna do with my social media and other stuff? And that's a big part of why I think building in public would really help the book. I will submit this during this week, so hopefully next week I can share with you a little bit about how it feels. But just to start, it might take a year before anyone even replies, and I don't have a year to wait. I need to keep going. Wish me luck, but that's for the next episode.

The second thing I'm working on, which I think might be of interest to you all, is taking the book Fuck the Slides here and trying to see if I can rekindle this operation. I'm going to try now and see if I can reach out to 100 universities and maybe get 1, 2, 5 replies. We're going to try and do it with accelerators and hubs. I believe Fuck the Slides should be studied and should be taught everywhere. But if they don't know about the book, then how am I going to sell it? Now let's see what we can actually achieve. We already have a list. Monday we're gonna start sending them out. The plan is to do about 20 a day. I think it's doable. Let's see what happens. But that's exciting to be able to do that.

Another thing, I'm gonna go visit Israel in April for about a month. I, I probably will have to fly to Europe for something else. I'll tell you about it when it's done. When I can share, but I'm gonna try and see if I can cram as many meetings, events, and sessions. One of the things is already booked, um, it's going to be big, 100 startups, a workshop. I'll share more once it's signed, but it's in the making and the company is pretty big. I also signed 2 more workshops. I'm on the way to sign another one, so hopefully the plan is to have about 10 events during that time to kickstart the whole thing and bring the book to Israel. I don't know if you know this, but the book was launched in November just after the war started. Nobody cared. Even I didn't really care about publishing the book. There were no posts. I didn't say anything. The whole book was launched by EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization members, friends of mine who have helped for years. About 500 people came together from all over the world. To buy the book. That's how it got to be an Amazon bestseller on the first day. I didn't do a single thing to promote that book for about a year. When the book was, uh, having its first anniversary, I posted something on LinkedIn.

I think if I put a bit of time, a bit of effort— not necessarily my time or my effort— I think this would be a huge success. 'Cause we know, even this week I got a message from a friend in Amsterdam that the students who've bought the book, guess what?

They won.

It works. The whole idea, the whole methodology works. Another thing, I'm trying to understand how much time does YouTube really take? I don't know if you know this. This is time-consuming. Doing 2 YouTubes meant that I was trying to figure out how to do everything. The Building in Public is on Monday, so I would spend now 10 hours a day. Suddenly I'm finding myself at 2 AM editing, and it's hard and it's complicated, and I know I'm not gonna stay at this capacity. I can't. There's no way.

But here are the things I think I can change. The most important is how my calendar is structured. So I started by saying, um, I'm gonna ideate, edit, record, do everything in the mornings. Doesn't work, and I want to use these hours for creativity and writing. Second, I think the biggest mistake was that you don't need to edit last minute, and I am that type of a person to do things last minute. I love it. I like the pressure and stuff. Not good. So I'm now recording this a couple of days before where I have all the information. The week is over, I can record, and then it gives me about 48 hours or so to edit, prepare, add the B-rolls, work work on the audio, do some small stuff. And later on, I think that will enable me to send this out to an editor, which I already know who I want to work with, and hopefully it will play out very soon. I think the first thing is being consistent, feeling comfortable with the camera, recording more. And I think when I do about a dozen of these, then we can outsource stuff. But at the moment, unless I become A regular on YouTube.

Let's wait.

By the way, the— I think what I can do is the Thursday educational that I'm working on, which by the way, the video went number 1 on Google after 24 hours. Should I start a newsletter? It will be focused on marketing, sales, and branding. Another key thing for that aspect is I'm thinking about maybe filming a playlist. So 15 minutes will be, you know, 3, 4, 5 videos where I can teach you something. Because I think if people watch, we'll get more watch time. They'll be invested and interested. They get the value out of it. So that might be a good idea actually. I think I'm gonna do that. Let's start with the newsletter concept because I've already recorded one. If you want anything, DM me. Maybe I'll do the playlist for you specifically and then it will help other people. I think we need to focus on pitching and sales because that's the biggest thing that people asked on the newsletter. Shout out, I need 4 more people to get to 500. The newsletter has become a thing. The reason, by the way, for me spending more time is that I'm writing it on a Friday, and I noticed that I'm really enjoying spending some time on Saturdays refining. And the last newsletter, I changed almost everything, which was really cool. I really liked it. It was fun. So I think I'm enjoying the creative process again. I'm enjoying the writing again. But when you look at the calendar, the basic concept is this: creativity in the morning, um, let's say just before lunch. After lunch will be everything that's, um, easy. So calls, stuff like that, things I don't need to really concentrate. And I think crafting is the third piece of the day. So the third part of the day would be about crafting. Um, could be just editing, reviewing, uh, watching different stuff that I need to learn. It could be the editing for the YouTube, stuff like that. But that enables me something completely different in terms of the, the mindset and what I need to do. I want to touch briefly on personal because I think it's important. I am documenting everything, so if I'm bullshitting you, you can check. And if you look, I'm being quite good, even I'd say very consistent with 90% of the things. So if you go to the spreadsheet, you can actually see everything I'm doing. My main struggle at the moment is with the flat whites. The coffee in Thailand is amazing, especially here in Chiang Mai. And this week I've had too many flat whites. I went down, I cut down from 21, I think, this week to 5, which isn't bad. Exercising, gym, running, squats, uh, daily videos. I'm, I'm doing it. Uh, journaling, all these stuff. And the idea is that I want to have some sort of a, a routine, more habits. And it's funny, but I need more constraints to be free. Does that make sense? Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, I think that's a key, um, to enabling me to do more things and create more things. And I'm starting to see the change, both physically, mentally. Even now, everybody went out drinking. I was like, I don't want to feel bad, I don't want to feel exhausted, I have stuff to do. You know what, let me finish and I'll come, I'll join you guys. I don't think I'll join them tonight because we went out yesterday and was There was a lot of drinking involved. The more of these I'm doing, I'm noticing that the commitment level to myself is getting better and higher. But more than that, I want you guys to say, oh, this is interesting. And I'll share with you, this week I had 3 different workshops, and actually the most important one wasn't very good. I, I think I missed the mark, and maybe that's also an interesting video to make.

One day.

But the third one I did was an in-person interview at Alt. It's a co-living place here with John, the founder. We had like 40 people attending. It was in a nice garden. And during the interview, the idea was to talk a little bit about storytelling and the stories we tell ourselves. And someone reached out and said, um, hey, so you've done a lot of things and you're ahead In the game. And I said, dude, I'm starting again. I'm trying something completely different. I've never pushed a book this way. I never pushed the YouTube in a serious way by myself. There's so many things I've never done. So don't think that other people are ahead of you. And on the other hand, I'm meeting people who have— I literally 2 weeks ago met a guy after a workshop I did here Who has 1.2 million subscribers, and he was very modest about it. By the way, amazing channel about freediving. I think a big part of the journey is understanding it's just a game, and if it's a game, how do we want to play it, and what are the levels? What do I need to do now? And that's what I'm trying to structure that will take me to the next level. And I think these videos, the educationals and other stuff, is the key. I think I missed that. I didn't do it for many years. I started in '16, I started in '18, I started in COVID. In 2022, the team was pushing me and I just—

I wasn't there. I didn't feel it.

Whereas now it's starting to not burn in me to do something, but I think it's starting to feel a bit more comfortable to do these things, to talk to you guys, to bring new ideas.

So this is it. This is the update. I'm not sure if I want to talk about numbers, but just so you know, we— YouTube has grown by like 30 subscribers in the last 2 weeks. So that's not bad. There's like a 5 or 6% scale on Medium. There's an average of almost a 1% growth on LinkedIn, which if you think about it compounds. I'm seeing more and more posts on LinkedIn getting likes, but the posts are like 2, 3 weeks old. So that goes to show you, post every day, try different things, something will stick. It's becoming very, very interesting. I'm gonna see if I can upload this week all the daily posts are prepared until I leave Chiang Mai and go to Vietnam.

And then everything I post after that is the add-on, is the bonus, which then the bonuses would be, um, the polls that I've started, something about storytelling, something about branding, and, and so on. I'm gonna start using the old newsletters, so the tech stack I have there was going to become a post. My thoughts are going to become articles. The articles are going to go to Medium, and I'm starting to structure this. And the last thing that maybe we should touch briefly on is Shorts. I'm going to start uploading a bit more. I have a few dozens ready. It'd be interesting to see if I start posting 1 or 2 a day and then in different platforms. That means roughly 100 to 150 a month. With the other posts, we're talking about 250, I think, at the moment. And I'm gonna see what it takes for me as a, um, a one-person show to get it to 1,000 posts. It doesn't mean that it's 1,000 different ones. So one show will go on 5 different platforms, then there's repurposing and other stuff. If you can get to 1,000 I think that's a game changer, and I think that will be an idea and something I'm working on, because I think once we get to 1,000, we can then offer that service. Guys, if you've watched until now, thank you. Looking forward to seeing you. If you need anything, ping me, DM me. Um, if you see me on socials, leave a comment, be a friend.

I'm Nir Zavaro.

It was great seeing you.

See you next time.

Talk soon.