Day 21: Build in public
The first step to building in public is documenting your work as you build. This post includes at least 3 things that I’ve worked on or thought about today. Maybe these notes will turn into social posts. Regardless they tell the story of my journey. My founder’s log.
Communities are spread thin
You can only be truly engaged in a small set of online communities. Though many of us are members of multiple group chats across many platforms like Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc., it isn’t possible for us to have meaningful social interactions in all of them because that requires presence, which is a limited resource. So what we end up with is extremely weak ties.
At the same time, companies are trying to turn their customers and users into community members as both a marketing function and a customer support function. They want brand ambassadors who will evangelize their product and generate word-of-mouth referrals, and who help solve the problems for early customers, lightening the load on the support team and bolstering the development of brand loyalty with those customers.
However, if every company you engage with has a community they want you to be apart of, and you actually try to be active in all of them, you would end up being valuable to none of them. You’d be spread way too thin.
So there are two options: Either you pick 2 communities to be active in with 1 rotating spot for when it is convenient, or you join a single community where you can engage with multiple companies. Developer ecosystems are doing a decent job at creating a space for the second option.
