Build In Public To Find Your Audience
Once you know the jobs to be done that you want to do, then you need to find the audience that is paying for that job to be done.
The easiest way to do this is to build in public, which can be described simply:
Show people that you currently do this job successfully for others.
Results are the best way to grow your brand and your audience.
Tyler Rye is a photographer who does adventure elopement photography.
The way he managed to do this exclusively was to go from a “I’ll take any photo any time” photographer to a photographer that only does adventure elopements.
If you look at his social feed and his website, all you see is proof that he is able to deliver on that very specific job to be done.
Every time he does his work, he posts about it, sharing the results he got for someone else.
Naturally, if you want photos of you and your spouse on the edge of a cliff, Tyler is the guy that you call. You may not even know that you want photos of you and your spouse on the edge of a cliff, but you may suddenly find that desire when you come upon one of his images.
He’s amassed a massive following of 55k+ people, and has a thriving business that has expanded from photography to workshops, online courses, and expeditions.
Building his audience by showing his work allowed him to discover new jobs to be done that he could either accept or reject depending on the goals he has for his life and his business.
Share What You Learn Along The Way
Building in public often includes sharing your struggles, the lessons learned, the opportunities you discovered from doing the work.
But the most important aspect is to show the results.
Andrew Gazdeki created the website MicroAcquire to help creators sell their businesses with as little friction as possible. Multiple times a week he shares another successful acquisition that came through his platform, reinforcing that his company is the best company for the job to be done of selling your company / acquiring a business.
The @microacquire October update!
— Andrew Gazdecki (@agazdecki) November 3, 2021
- $27,199,283 in closed acquisitions
- 56 acquisitions successfully closed
- Average acquisition size $485,701
- $1,053,496 in ARR
- Launched M&A Advisor Directory
Full update below... 🧵 pic.twitter.com/IA5iTS7hAH
Hayley Barry is my favorite example of building in public. While still in school at Utah Valley University she started sharing her hand-lettering work online.
She’d design a birthday card, an invitation, a poster. She would take a phrase and design it in her own style of hand lettering.
Soon she created an audience that loved her work. She expanded it by getting more involved in our small city of Provo, Utah. She partnered with local events to design posters.
She did a project with a well-known local photographer, Justin Hackworth, to highlight Provo-natives doing awesome things.
All of this expanded her audience to the point where she started getting hired for the job she was already doing - hand lettering.
People would hire her to create or hand-letter logos in their shops, on walls, and on murals.
The school she was attending put out a request for quotes for a big marketing campaign, and Hayley won the bid. They didn’t even know she was still a student at the school, because her work was so good and she had become THE hand-lettering artist in Utah to hire for those jobs.
She then expanded her audience more and started getting hired by national brands and businesses in other parts of the country.
Her audience started asking her to teach them how to do hand-lettering as well, so she created workshops and then an online course. In the first weeks of her course launch, she enrolled students from all over the world in over two-dozen countries.
That’s the process.
Decide the job you want to be known for.
Find and connect with an audience who wants to hire you for that job by building in public.
Become the person people want to hire for that job
Rinse and repeat.
Building in public can be nerve-wracking for some, but that anxiousness can be alleviated when it's put into the proper perspective.
The best part about building in public is that it's a simple way for you to put out into the world what you're doing and what you're learning, your thoughts and feelings on your work and your industry, and let the people who resonate with that join you in the journey.
Showing a side of yourself that is less polished and less calculated makes it easier for people to feel that affinity toward you, which is what will pull them into your world and get them excited to be a part of it.