3 Key Learnings from First Week Building a Product in Public
Hey friends,
If you’ve read the last issue, you’ve known that I’ve committed to build Notion Tweet in public and share with you everything I learned, both success and failure. So this is the first week, I got 3 valualable lessons for you. It has been really challenging and rewarding!
Building in public is the most rewarding and challenging sales approach
Before last week, building in public to me is to blog, vlog, and talk about your product everywhere. That is still partially true. However, after the first week doing so, I realized that building in public really is to offer as much value as possible to your target users before launch, so that it’s just natural they’ll help you back in form of feedbacks, purchases, and words of mouth. Don’t force people to take your help though, just be kind, be helpful, and be human to others.
I enjoy doing this so much, because the reason I’m building products is to create value for others. Being helpful to others is to prove that you can create value for them. And it just feels good doing so, it’s a win-win game, both receive value, I don’t feel like taking money from people at all.
Twitter hashtags actually work
I’m very new to Twitter and for all the past time I thought hashtags is just a stupid game. But I tried this time, I tagged my tweets with #Notion, #NoCode, and #Productivity, I got replies from people I’ve never seen on Twitter, most of them are Notion fans, 3 of them are Notion ambassadors. And from there, I managed to get 7 people are interested in being early adopters through my tweets and a landing page:
landing is live ⚡️. Didn’t allow public access yet, but start recruiting early adopters now. Leave a reply, I’ll DM you with details. Early adopters get features you want the fastest, free access for months, and more. #Notion #Tweets #productivity
Notion Tweet - All-in-one Twitter tool for Notion users
Twitter all-in-one tool for Notion users. Write, plan, schedule, and see detailed analytics of your tweets seamlessly on Notion, so you can focus on the creative.
Find a way to outsource design if you’re not a designer
Really! I learned this lesson so hard this week. I always wanted to believe that I’m a good designer (I think most engineers do). So I spent A LOT of time designing this week to prove that to myself. Just for the landing page, it took me 3 days, and I got this:
A little update on Notion Tweets today. Showcasing how it works (35% done). You write and edit with @NotionHQ, just like how you normally take notes. Notion Tweets convert and publish to Twitter seamlessly, on your schedule. #Notion #Productivity #NoCode
I’m happy with it. But really, 3 days for a landing page and it was not even responsive yet? Implementation was done in 2 hours and the rest was for design. Design is hard!
So, I told to myself: “I’m the worst designer, I shouldn’t do this, I need the best designer”. It hurt but it helped me get out of the rabbit hole. I bought Tailwind UI to solve the problem, it wasn’t cheap but I got the best designer team for myself (well, at least their “child”). I got the site live after 3 hours.
Updates on Notion Tweet
Alright, that’s it, there are actually more lessons but I’ll keep it for next week. Now let me update you a bit about Notion Tweet and what’s next.
So this week I got Notion Tweet‘s landing page live (specifically yesterday) and started to recruit early adopters.
I’m taking early adopters really seriously!
Early adopters have to be the ones who receive a lot of values from the product, even at MVP stage, so that it’s a win-win, they gave me real problems and feedbacks, and I solve real problems for them.
After a day, there’re 7 people have shown interests in being early adopters. Probably not all of them will be good fit, but I’m so happy and I believe I can find more.
My plan next week is to help early adopters in some (Notion-related) ways then find a chance to talk to them about my plan for Notion Tweet and hopefully can get meaningful feedbacks later.
Other than that, I’ll focus on the product and find other ways to create value in public - the most obvious way to me is to create Notion-related opensource projects (one is live very soon 😉)
That’s it! You have a great week ahead! Ending with a very humble analytics after a day 😜