How To Build In Public As A Founder Successfully?

Entrepreneurship and being a founder can 100% be learned and taught. And you, you, it's not, but the teaching, the method of the teaching and the syllabus of the curriculum is more like martial arts, more like stuff that is learned through like, you know, dojo, like learning a dojo where it's like you have to be willing to

Get hit.

Get hit.

Fall down.

Fall down. It's not buttoned up in a classroom and like you listen to pitch decks and like, yeah, I get it. So there's— you cannot over-intellectualize this shit is what I'm trying to say.

Yep.

You have to get to the arena. Yeah.

Welcome back to Founders Found Here. I'm here with KP. KP is on our team at Day One, joined quite recently. Probably, I mean, we're like brothers from other mothers now. Is that a brother from another mother? Feels like that now. That's how I feel about you. I'm psyched you're here. Psyched we get to chat. So you're the build in public guy. What does that mean? Let's talk about that.

Great question. It's the question that I keep getting all the time. The way I would describe building in public is a practice. It's, to me, it's more like a practice and a craft, not necessarily a one-time, you know, one-time outcome kind of thing. So a lot of people are obsessed about outcomes, but the way I think about it is it's a practice and it's a craft of creating content intentionally on the internet. Mm-hmm. To attract other like-minded people like you around the world on the internet, so you can build and nurture these relationships.

So literally just like publicizing what you're building as you're building it.

As you're building it, right? Everywhere. Now there's a slight nuance here, which is when I say create content to attract other like-minded people, most people, if you notice, like social media generally, people create content to broadcast their message. There's a slight nuance here. It's not just about broadcasting, it's not just standing up on a podium and feeling like you are an expert and you have something to give to the world. It's more like a peer-to-peer conversational experience where you're sharing, not preaching, what you just learned, which calls for authenticity and vulnerability. Because if you don't throw that in there once in a while— don't have to be every day waking up and sharing raw, candid, vulnerable things— but if you don't have a blend of authenticity and vulnerability, you just, you just create this echo chamber, which is what a lot of influencers and a lot of social media creators eventually end up being. It just, and it gets very frustrating at the receiving end. You've been, you know, at the receiving end because you feel like they're out of touch, right? They're not, they're speaking at you. And people also, the other belief that I have is that people in 2022 in this era, in the next 10, 20, 30 years, people don't want to be marketed to. People don't want to be sold to. So do not come on a podcast, do not come on your Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse or your tweets or TikTok and try to, uh, you know, speak at them. So building in public to me is a way to speak to them, share all the lessons and learnings, insights good stuff, bad stuff along the way.

Super vulnerable.

Vulnerable.

Yeah.

Raw, imperfect, but kind of opening up that side of you, which you would do typically with your best friends and your spouse, you know, but doing that at scale, because internet has scale. And I think that was the missed opportunity in my view, Web 2.0, or, you know, the last 20 years that we'd really never leveraged the scale of the internet to be authentic. We only leveraged it just to broadcast shit and just like get eyeballs and eyeballs and eyeballs. So my thing is, a great story, a great brand, a great founder, a great startup should not just optimize for attention, which is eyeballs. I could say something controversial, I could say something about Joe Rogan, I could just say something about Donald Trump, and like, that's just attention. It's actually a combination of attention and trust, and trust is built on the bedrock of vulnerability. Brené Brown. So,

so you've chosen Twitter as your place to build in public. Yeah, you're constantly tweeting. I mean, dozens of times a day. Yeah, everything from like, I just sent this email out and it didn't work, or I made this stupid mistake in a pitch or whatever. First, why'd you choose Twitter?

Yeah, I don't know if you noticed, but I took a photo of us Yeah, even like right here, you just— yeah, so I'm gonna tweet about the fact that we just had this cool moment.

Always happening.

Always happening.

Yeah,

I mean, why Twitter? I think there's, you know, this is my answer to that is I want— I mean, I, I can be smart about it and say like, well, I had this great, you know, calculated view on it, but it was actually very accidental. I just ended up with Twitter, and the way I've been Um, reflecting on it is that you have to pick a platform among the 5, 6 major platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, or Instagram, YouTube, whatever, Twitter, LinkedIn. Pick what feels natural to you so you can stay, you know, a very long time in the game because it's completely about consistency. Mm-hmm. I had 400 followers in 2018 when I resurrected my account. It was dormant for 10 years, I think. And I resurrected that account. I had 400 followers, and now I have 35,000 and growing. But it's a long game, 2018 to 2022, 4 years, right? So I always enjoyed Twitter 'cause it felt like a bit of a creative challenge.

Yeah.

To summarize succinctly what just happened, or to reflect on what my day was, or if I had just a VC pitch, or if I talked to a founder, if I mentored a founder, If they said something about go-to-market that was unique, that metaphor was new, I like to succinctly summarize in like, you know, 140 characters, but now it's 280.

Yeah.

And kind of challenge myself to express it in a brief way. It's a great way to test your marketing ability and copywriting skills too.

Sure, sure. So let's run it back to the beginning. Why did you start doing this?

Why did I start building in public?

Yeah.

So again, as I look back, of course I can come up with a great hero's journey story, but in the sense that I discovered the secret of building in public, but it wasn't that intentional. It was accidental discovery, but the practice of building in public since the discovery has been intentional, right? Mm-hmm. But I'll take you all the way back to like why really, how did I even discover this practice or this philosophy? Philosophy. So it was 2018, and I remember, um, being completely burnt out and at the, at the rock bottom of my adult life, you know, career, because I was always in these, um, product teams at corporate jobs, kind of like played safe. And I had to play safe because I had— I was on visas, you know, being an immigrant in the US. It's like a, you know, it's like a puzzle. You have to navigate through this visa maze. And so I was always taking these corporate jobs, playing safe. I was at Turner Studios, I was at Delta Airlines, all these companies, but I was on product teams. So I always had this latent potential or this whisper in my head that said, you should build products. You know, you are in these product teams, you should just go to market. You should take some of your ideas, turn them into products, go to market. Go to market. And, you know, so it's this relentless desire, force to be an entrepreneur. I don't know where I got that, but I just had this thing. And I know a lot of people have this. You know, once it's in your head, you have to go test it. You have to go take these ideas to market. But I was afraid, you know, and I was— this is my first time trying anything, you know, building a product. And But I didn't face the truth of the fact that I was afraid of going to market and testing ideas. Instead, I chose the lazy excuse, which is that I couldn't afford it.

What were you afraid of?

I was afraid of failure. I was afraid of taking an idea that I had in my notebook. By the way, I had a Notion doc, like Google Docs. I had this idea document of 80+ ideas. What if there was a better Product Hunt? What if there was a better, you know, whatever? Like, I always had these things in my head. I've always been an idea guy. And instead of facing the truth that actually it's freaking scary and hard and fearful to take an idea all the way to reality and to market, and face the truth that sometimes, you know, maybe it will be a dud, people maybe don't want that, maybe you want something else. Instead of doing that multiple times, I gave myself a lazy excuse that I didn't know how to code. It's legitimate, it's rational, I didn't know how to code, but I used that as a crutch and said, well, clearly I don't know how to code, so I can't build products, which means I can't go to market. So I skirted around the actual issue, and then I went around a whole tour of trying to fix the wrong problem, which is— so I went after trying to get a CTO, trying to find co-founders, technical co-founders, founders, and by this point I had 400 followers on Twitter. I was an absolute nobody in tech industry, in startup industry. No network. I was in Atlanta. I had like a little bit of social connections, but no social capital, nothing that I created for the world that was valuable. I was just a nobody, absolute nobody. So where did I have the leverage to go convince a CTO who knows how to code, who can build whatever they want, come join me? It's a massive mismatch in terms of leverage. They have the leverage.

Yeah.

So of course, a lot of them said no, and that was even more debilitating because I'm like, oh my God, I think that I have great ideas. Why are these people not getting it? Now it's funny, I think about it, right? So I did the other ultimate move, which is I went and hired an offshore agency, spent $16,000 of my life savings until then. I think I was 26-something at the time. Went broke. All that money, six months of building an MVP, right? Like those, I don't blame the agency. It's just that we were over-engineering the MVP, which is a problem that a lot of first-time founders have. They think that MVP has to look like V ninety-five as opposed to V one. Like you know, and it's it's a sense of insecurity. It's a sense of feeling like oh my god, they're going to judge me on this thing. And now my answer is so what? You know, if you don't have the thick skin to be judged, you're in the wrong game of entrepreneurship. Totally. So, blew that money. I wrote a blog post on that recently, and I had to dissolve the team, 'cause I had a small team, and it was very painful, hit the rock bottom. I had so many, I had so much imposter syndrome and second doubt, self-doubt, that I just, maybe I'm not meant to be an entrepreneur, maybe I'm not meant to be building products. And so I was in this mess, crisis, existential crisis. And in that fog, I discovered Signal, which was on Twitter, where I noticed other smart, ambitious, interesting founders talk about this thing called no-code. So this is 2018, October-ish, and they were talking about no-code and low-code tools like Webflow.

How would you define no-code for people who don't know what that is?

Well, no-code's kind of like The way I would describe it is basically if you've used Canva and you know that Canva is a much easier beginner-friendly version of Photoshop or Figma, right? Mm-hmm. So it's like a spectrum. So you take something like Photoshop, which requires very deep expert-level, pro-level knowledge and insights of how to operate, and it can— you can, you can really customize whatever the heck you want. That's on the other spectrum. That's the extreme pro level. It's Photoshop, Illustrator. Figma is somewhere in the middle where you don't need to go that pro, but you can— if you know a little bit, you can teach yourself a little and you can still produce great output. Canva is at the beginner level. No-code is basically this first— the, the, this whole area around beginner to slightly advanced, but not code.

Yep.

And it's the greatest— it's the fastest way to learn code as well. So I'm not saying No-code versus code, that's a bogus debate in my view. It's like, you know, it's just a way to get to build products, but you can build them before you've learned and mastered code, 'cause code will take you at least a year to really master to produce something valuable. No-code will take you 4 weeks to produce something valuable.

So essentially we're saying there's a whole world of tools out there. Tools like some of the ones most people have heard of, Squarespace. Start there.

Squarespace, Canva, Wix. We got Bubble, which is bubble.com.

You can patch together different spreadsheets and CRMs and intake forms to create something that feels like an app, but it's not an actual built-on code. It's built on other tools that already exist.

It's visual coding. That's no-code. Yeah. It's kind of, I mean, to me, it's also funny. We can go into a whole different tangent here, because if you listen to any modern hip-hop 95% of that was made on an iPad. Literally. Because it's, it's, it's, if you know the, you know, because nobody's really literally recording piano chords anymore.

Yeah,

right. Unless you want to do a classical or something, right?

Sure.

Most music is electronic. Most music is produced electronically, right? Even if you want to play the clarinet in a hip-hop record,

find a sound, a

sample. Yeah, exactly. Pull it together. So it's all happening through computers and visual, like, like drag and drop, click, tap, tap, tap, as opposed to like writing the, like the script of music, writing music in sheet music.

Yep.

So that's where technology has allowed us, especially in product building with no-code, where it's like you, you, you have to be savvy enough to know how, what to use at what point to produce the same sound at the end.

Yep.

Now everyone's obsessed about like, oh my God, like what the sound— like, no, if the person doesn't like the sound, then go fix the product. Sure. Go fix your idea, get better at it. But they don't wanna hear that. They're like, no, no, no, let's go get to the code way of doing it. Still, you're gonna get the— so I heard, I had the same outcome where I learned about, I built this thing called ClosingPage, which was a SaaS platform in 2018, you know, with code, offshore agency full of devs. It was a bloated, over-engineered product. never made any sales. 45 people who were on the pipeline never converted. So I hit rock bottom, discovered no-code, got super curious, and I swore that I will never ever build something without testing with an audience along the way. Mm-hmm. And I— so my timeline went from building something for 6 months to 2 weeks. Sprints. It's all about sprints. Test it and test even when it's feeling imperfect. It's okay, take a small sample size of people that I know and share this with them and see what they think. Yeah. What feedback will they give, et cetera. But I did this from 2018. I built 15 no-code projects till today. I still do it every 2 hours. I get a chance, I'll build something new. The biggest surprise to me that I thought that I, um, I thought the whole journey, the whole game was supposed to be about, um, Learning how to build, you know, products and bringing them to market, like that whole iteration, you know, I've realized the biggest learning for me was it's not just enough to learn how to build. You have to learn how to build in public, to have an audience who's captivated, willing to give you feedback, and willing to try your product and close the feedback loop.

So for people that want to start building in public, and maybe they really want to start building, but there's no audience for them yet.

Yeah.

How do you suggest they quickly build an audience so that the things that they build, there are people to actually use it?

Yeah. I think the biggest myth is that, you know, it will, it can happen quickly, because it won't.

Just accept the fact that it takes a while.

Accept the fact that it takes time.

But you start now, because—

You start now, because every day you're not building in public is a day you're not building a relationship with a potential customer, potential user, potential teammate, potential investor, right? So I'm from— nothing in life that's worthwhile comes quickly, even though— but the thing is, we underestimate what we can do in decades, and we overestimate what we can do in days.

Totally.

So it took me from 2018 to now where we're recording this in September 2022, 4 years. I built 35,000 people on Twitter, more than 10,000 on email, and I have infinitely bigger, wider cast, uh, um, net of people who are like close friends like you, who are, which I call the network, who are happy to give me feedback, happy to jump on a call, happy to do customer discovery calls with me. It's just way different now. Yeah, I don't have the problem that I had when I had at the time, which is I built something and nobody wants to check it out.

Yep. Yep. So step one is get over the fear of failure, fear of judgment. Who cares? Who

cares? And and the thing is, appreciate every step along the way. So when I had the four fourteen followers, I wish we could show this in our show notes or somewhere. I have. I made a tweet. I remember distinctly celebrating, saying like, thank you for all the 414 souls on the internet who give your time and attention and hit the follow button. Think about how powerful it is that somebody somewhere in Sweden is hitting follow for your content, and we take it for granted. Mm-hmm. But if somebody shows up at your doorstep and says, hey, I'm here, you know, I want to check out your new products, I want to play with it, you're like, oh my God, this is awesome. Great. It's

not too far off.

But it's the same person. Yeah,

yeah.

When we were building software, especially when we were in like in this entrepreneurship and tech world, it's the same thing, it's the same user, right? So

here's a strange, bizarre question. I fundamentally believe that the only way for essentially first-time entrepreneurs to learn that they should MVP, they should validate more, they should not over-engineer, the only way they actually learn how important that is, is to go over-engineer and fail. 'Cause everyone's out there saying, like, don't over-engineer, start with an MVP, validate, talk to customers, but no one does it, 'cause it's scary, it's hard. So everyone thinks they're right, thinks that they know the market, 'cause they're building for themselves, whatever, so they over-engineer. And you had that story, I had that story.

Yeah, right.

Every single founder, first-time founder, they all do the same thing, and they all fail. And then the second time around, now they learn the lesson. This is why so many studios don't work with first-time entrepreneurs, 'cause they need to learn on their own first to validate. They need to learn on their own first to MVP, to use no-code, to hack. Right. Same with accelerators, same with lots of VCs, who just don't look at first-time founders that much.

Yeah.

What do you say to them? They can't even hear it yet. They're not able to even understand what you're saying, 'cause they haven't figured out by failing themselves.

I mean, I'll just say that, you know, I think to an extent you're right that, you know, you cannot avoid the pain, right? You will inevitably fail. There will be a lot of adjustments, a lot of stumbles along the way. What I think a better, you know, worldview is to just not let them fail, crash, and burn, maybe people like you and me, you know, that's something we try to do at Day One, is that as they stumble, you go and help them. You know, I think that's sort of become my mission now, is that I've seen myself stumble and actually fail and crash and burn and almost give up. And I'm actually quite concerned about millions of people who woke up today and said, this is it, I'm calling quits. Mm-hmm. Maybe I'm not meant for being a founder, being an entrepreneur, and they went back to that soulless job that they didn't like anyway, but they have to keep paying the bills and they went back. And the world has lost such great talent, you know, the creativity that would have come to life. So I have more of a sort of a compassionate, empathetic take on that, saying like, you know what, let's catch them before they completely burn out or fail, Dramatically. Maybe if they stumble, we'll say, hey, can I help you? Is there something you want to share? What's the choke point? What's the obstacle that you're struggling with? And typically they say what they're struggling with, and it's somehow connected to this fear of failure. Usually it comes out to be the fear of failure thing, or a deep sense of insecurity that they think their MVP is not good enough, which is somehow they feel like it's a reflection of the fact that they think they're not good enough. Which is bogus, right? My biggest lesson from the last four years of my short tech career, startup career, and I'm you know I want to go decades into this. But at least as of now, the biggest lesson is that entrepreneurship and being a founder can 100% be learned and taught. And you you it's not, but the teaching, the method of the teaching. and the syllabus of the curriculum is more like martial arts, more like stuff that is learned through, like, you know, dojo, like learning in a dojo where it's like you have to be willing to—

Get hit.

Get hit.

Fall down.

Fall down. It's not buttoned up in a classroom and like you listen to pitch decks and like, yeah, I get it. So there's— you cannot over-intellectualize this shit is what I'm trying to say. Yep. You have to get to the arena, you know?

Yep, love it. So

that's my mission now. Yeah, it is huge. I've been saying this since I joined. I am insanely obsessed to get hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of people off the sidelines into the arena where the action happens, which is you're building shit, you're building features, building products, building ideas that you think are valuable to a set of people, the world, et cetera, but you're also building in public so that you don't have marketing challenges, you don't have sales challenges, 'cause people are already warmed up about what you're building so that when you have it ready, a better version or whatever, they will buy.

So I ran a marketing agency for about 7 years, and I remember when I started, The go-to strategy for growth was blogging. It was like, it was super hot. It's like, you need a blog, you gotta blog. And then that led to SEO. And then the last couple years, and even still, the hot thing is community. Have community. Blogging's over, SEO's over. Now it's all about having community. Do you think building in public could be the next thing?

You're talking to the guy who has in his life—

Who proved that it is working.

Well, but also I have this in my head. that I'm the building in public guy, so of course my answer's gonna be yes.

Yeah.

I mean, I think what I'm curious to see is there's a lot of hype right now. The other day I talked to somebody, shout out @itsmejules on TikTok. She made a beautiful video and she's got like, I don't know, 400K followers on TikTok, and, you know, she's super smart, and she talks about how brands can leverage building in public, especially D2C and consumer brands, like the modern CPG brands, and I agree. And then what she and I were riffing on was just that this is like sort of a new inflection point, and it's gonna stay this way, that people don't want old school, like traditional marketing flyers anymore. Nobody wants to be sold to, as we said, nobody wants to see commercials.

They wanna feel like they're part of the experience.

Give them a story. Give them a story to root for. Give them a story, get them involved, you know. A great brand builds their story like a theme park where it's interactive and you feel like you're part of a bigger than yourself, larger than yourself story. A shitty brand makes their story like a boring lesson that you wanna hit skip.

Totally.

So

you shared your Your mission of it is bring hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of people off the sidelines into the world of building, even if it's building a small little side project, starting a bake sale, or building a whole high-growth tech company, everything in between. What happens next?

I think the actualization of this mission, you know, and it's happening, it's like filling up the drops. in a bucket, right? It happens slowly, and then suddenly you hit like an inflection point, and then it's like, oh my God, we have this amazing, you know, compounded effect where this becomes the norm, right? It still feels a little fringe. Like when I talked to somebody, like last night I was at a party, and like, you know, we were there, and I had to explain, I had to break it down what building in public was, and I was like, okay, we're not there yet. Yeah. Right? But it feels to me like, Like veganism in the '90s or something. It's like so fringe and like a little weird at this point, but going forward it'll become a very standard alternate path. I'm not gonna say, oh, building a web app is gonna replace marketing, it's gonna replace sales.

It's just part of how you market.

Exactly. It becomes its own sort of like parallel path along with other paths you have, and to be a very robust and a big, you know, probably multi-billion dollar industry, and everybody's gonna do a version of this. You know, I also think another hot take I have is that like how we have a CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, at startups and brands, we will in the future see a CCO, which is Chief Content Officer. Sure,

we're already seeing quite a bit of that.

We're already seeing that. Yeah. And because I think content is different than marketing.

Sure.

Right, as you would attest to it. I mean, I feel like I've gotten, you know, a little farther in my mission. In helping a lot of people get off the sidelines in the last 2 or 3 years since these, you know, programs that I've been launching at startups, including now at Day One. I've helped over 500 MVPs come to life, right? So I always think about that. That's a proud thing. Like, of course, 400 of them failed, as in didn't never get to a second version. But these 500 entrepreneurs would be still spending a lot of money with dev agencies or whatever, or would still be stuck in this rut or fear of like not shipping. So if I can convince and inspire 500 people to ship, I think I can do 5,000, and I think I can do 50,000. And the rest is all up to, you know, community and the people, so.

What do you think about vlogging?

Yeah?

Kinda feels like vlogging has been the OG— One of the OGs, yeah.

Of being public. I think Casey Neistat vlogging—

Casey Neistat started on YouTube, Right. It's moved to Instagram Stories. Now it's totally a thing on TikTok.

Yeah, the stories, Instagram Stories is a thing, TikTok's a thing. So I think, I mean, vlogging was, that's what I'm saying, I think a lot of these ingredients have been in the making, you know, over the last decade. And I feel like it was a perfect storm that in the last 2, 3 years that building public became so mainstream now that everybody, like Kanye West, his whole Donda album, if you saw the series of things he did, Like the fact that he played some of these records not to people publicly on the Apple Music, whatever, but only to these people in the stadium. Remember the Atlanta thing he did? Like he bought out the stadium and then they're like tickets to watch him give a glimpse of what would be in the final thing. He's building in public. He was building his album.

Here's a really cool example actually that ties in super great here. So two of my favorite musicians right now are Noah Kahn and Zach Bryan. They're both both in the country folk Americana style. Right. And something they both are doing, and I assume at this point it's pretty intentional, on TikTok, they are just putting up little, you know, 30-second videos of them writing music with their guitar, like in the process of them just jamming. And these are very famous musicians, like top charts on Spotify, selling out huge shows. And, but then either somehow encouraging people to duet it, Yeah, and create their own covers or remixes of it, right? But the songs aren't even released yet. And so what's happening is people are feeling involved in the songwriting process. Yeah, in the acoustic, raw, yeah, behind-the-scenes process. And then when the song actually drops, they're obviously promoting it like crazy. On day— the first day it drops, it's got like tens of millions of listens and top charts immediately because so many people are bought in, are bought into the journey of that song being written.

Yeah.

Why are more brands not doing this? as they're building their company. So when they finally do drop the product, so many people felt like they were involved in the building in the first place. Influencers do this, obviously musicians are doing it. Gary Vee has been telling us all for years— Oh my God, that's true. To be doing this. Is it too hard? Why are we not doing this?

Yeah, I mean, I asked Gary the same question, and you know, he was on my podcast, the Building Public podcast, and I asked Gary like, What makes people not build in public? 'Cause his version of this was document, don't create.

Yes.

Remember? And I said—

He probably said that 10 years ago.

I know, 10 years ago. I said, oh my God, this feels like you've been saying this, calling shots at this for 10 years.

Yeah, so why are people not doing it?

He said fear.

Yeah.

It's the fear of imperfection, fear of—

Fear of being cringey.

Feeling like, it's the fear of judgment, right? Ultimately everything boils down to, oh my God, someone out there is gonna think that I'm not good enough.

Yep.

You know, which is, um, which is a whole different therapy topic, right?

Yep.

I fundamentally believe that everybody is unique and they're special. You know, I, um, we talk about this all the time, like, you know, being a dad, new dad now, has changed my perspective on what it feels like to be a freaking human. Like that, like, you know, watching my son Neil go through like 0 to 1, like his You know, he's just 1 year old now. It's a triple miracle to be born human being and to be born intelligent, to be born with like, you know, all the senses working and everything is like 700 times harder.

Yeah.

And everybody in the world who don't have these gifts will tell you that. And you're sitting on a mountain of blessings and gifts that you already have and you're worried about some rando You know, Pinky 946's TikTok comment that they think your yeah, you know landing page is not perfect yet. Like screw you.

Part of me even thinks like how amazing is the time now where you can totally in a valid way create an avatar on the internet.

Yeah.

Use even an NFT or some cartoon face as yourself. Yeah. It's like half of tech Twitter now. Go if you're afraid of failure, you're afraid of being judged. Go anonymous.

Use it. Go anonymous. Yeah.

Put on dead mouse's mask. mask because he was scared shitless to be on stage playing music.

Yeah, I think, you know, I'm glad that you brought up this anonymous thing. I do think though it requires a little bit of skin in the game, which means it requires a little bit of showing who you are.

Yeah,

because like I said, you're banking— the artists you talked about, intentionally or unintentionally, have been building this album in public, but they're— what they're doing unintentionally or intentionally is basically they're creating trust and building community and leading them, letting them in before the paint is dry. It takes courage to let people in, you know, into your life when you haven't figured it all out yet. Yeah. You know, and so you cannot do this under a veil. Like, you have to show that I don't know everything. I don't have all the answers. But my favorite lesson from all of this, apart from like the fact that, you know, Bloomberg Public Works, all this works, is that, look, the greatest way to inspire somebody to be an entrepreneur is to normalize how failure is a daily and a weekly and a monthly occurrence in your life as an entrepreneur. So if everybody is waiting to write their 30-year reflection biography where everything is flowery and perfect and you kind of forgot like what happened 30 years ago, you're really not giving them the real deal, the real, you know, emotions that went in on a certain day.

Yeah.

You're just like kind of like architecting your story to feel like a hero's journey, you know, and then the book is a runoff success, but how many people have been inspired? But if you're able to share what's going on, if— one of my dreams is to go from an idea to an IPO myself, or maybe have a few other friends do it in public. Yeah. To show that the day before you ring the bell at the NASDAQ thing, you're scared shitless, which humanizes people like Brian Chesky, Mark Zuckerberg, whoever. Because the problem is for millions and billions of people to connect with them, They are putting them on a pedestal that, oh my God, Brian Chesky or Gary Vee's got all figured it out. No, they don't. So my favorite, my favorite part about getting part of Day One and like, you know, all these startup lessons is that, oh my God, I'm shocked at how much they actually don't know.

Yep.

Like Gary Vee, Alexis Ohanian, you know, people that we work with. Oh, they're figuring it out along the way. Hence I can also take a shot at something that I believe in, and make tiny progress, and not feel like I need to know all the answers on day one.

So you've helped 500+ MVPs, small little projects come to life. You have 35,000 followers on Twitter.

Yeah.

There's probably quite a few people out there listening to this now that are thinking, oh, I would love KP's help, or at least his guidance, or, Working with him on a regular basis so that I can be one of the next 500 that he helps build, how can people get in touch with you or find you?

I mean, my majority of the day has been designing programs and tracks, what we call tracks at Day One, and experiences and constraints that force people who are sitting on ideas to take take a shot at them, build them using no-code, low-code tools, and go to market. So a majority of my day goes into that, you know, into Day One and what I'm designing here. So one way to be a part of that is join Day One. Shamelessly plugging.

Shameless plug.

Shameless plug, I know. The CMO in you is happy now, right?

I'm psyched. Thank you for saying that.

But like genuinely, just be in the orbit that we all share, you know? And I treat, I treat the arena where you build stuff, the programs, the tracks, retreat, as holy ground. And it's, it's, it's got— it's like the new church for me, where you're going from being an idea person and you're going through a transformation to being a builder, a maker.

Yeah.

It's a gift, a lifelong gift, because I was a maker. I became a maker 2018. I'm forever going to be a maker. 'Cause at what point will I forget Webflow? You think in 2035 I'll wake up and I suddenly like forget Webflow, forget how to build, forget how to write landing page copy, forget how to go hunt on Product Hunt? These skills are lifelong assets.

Yeah.

So that's why I want people to learn these, whether they do it on their own or through Day One or through whatever method that may be, that's fine. But you should definitely lean in towards moving closer to the market, which is the arena where your ideas are tested and you're tested as an entrepreneur.

Sure.

Because what comes out of it, the person that walks out of that arena is a changed person.

Yep.

You know, so that's how they can find out. Also on Twitter, I'm @thisiskp_.

Yep.

And you know, you can find me on other places.

All right, to the next 500. 5 million people. Cool. Thank you so much, my friend.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.