Day 1
The backstory
This month I’ll be turning 30. After over a decade of building various revenue streams, I’m going to try things a bit differently. If you don’t personally know me, I've started several businesses in my life, some more successful than others. I've mostly made money in e-commerce, marketing, and financial technologies, but there have also been those smaller “lemonade stands” sprinkled in here and there.
While my ventures have been across different sectors, they all have had one thing in common, I've built them in stealth. Why? Well, if I'm being honest, until recently I thought that was the only way to do things. I assumed you had to hide all the messy stuff about your concept until it was developed enough to show the world a packaged-up "beta" version; this would be the time you first announced your "big idea".
However, with the crash of non-fungible tokens in 2022, when I made the hard choice to dissolve my last company, I started to spend a lot of time examining why some concepts succeed during this big crypto craze when others didn't. Like in all business, there are, of course, fundamental elements, including product-market fit, funding, team, and so on, the ones we all know, but the major sucsess factor I kept overlooking thus far during my career was community.
What if, instead of working with a small internal “founding team” to bring a concept to market, I used the power of the online community and social media to document a company's inception and hedged it’s bets along the way by opening up an organization to immediate scrutiny.
Terrifying? Absolutely!
But would it make a company, and the people in that communities companies, better off in the end?
Absolutely!
So that's how this whole thing started.
My Hypothesis
If I create a company while documenting it’s steps publicly, I believe a few things will happen:
I can ask my community online for their opinions during development because oftentimes what I think is best and what everyone else thinks is best are drastically misaligned.
I will be able to share the lessons I learn along the way with people in the community. That way, when someone wants to build a business of their own, they can see what did and did not work for me.
I will be more motiviated to persevere and overcome roadblocks, knowing other people are watching.
Apart from courage, there is also one other quality needed from for this to be successful, and that's honesty.
I need to be honest about where I am in this build, what is working, what I've spent money and time on thus far, and honestly reflect of overall sucsess at every stage. AKA, there is no gatekeeping or fibbing. This isn't going to be one of those online accounts that makes everything look easy because that's just bullshit.
P.S. A few weeks ago I was speaking with Scott Clary at an event in Miami, and I was telling him about my idea to create a business and document it to my community along the way. He explained to me the concept was called “building In public”.
