Read time: 4.5 min
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My goal was 300 on the waitlist and 100 paying customers.
Very hairy. Very audacious.
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The result:
300+ waitlisted, 180 paid. 🥹
Building in public, baby! There's a reason people swear by it.
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PLEASE give it a go next time you're creating a new offer.
If you need specific examples to wrap your head around this concept, I got you. But first...

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What exactly is 'building in public'?

Building in public (BIP) is about openly sharing the development of an offer with your audience as it happens, involving them in the journey. It can also be done by founders who are building their company in public...but today we'll focus on BIP for new offers.
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"But building in public sounds risky..."

Many of us tend to create a new offer in secret. We don't talk about it publicly until everything is set to sell.
From the convos I've had, people opt out mostly because it's nerve-racking.

“What if no one likes my idea?”
“What if no one cares about my process?”
“What if exposing my unpolished process reduces my credibility as a professional?”

Well, if no one likes the idea, no one will buy it. It’s better for us to realize that before we spend all our time and money building it out to completion, no?

And if no one in our audience cares about our process, it might be a sign that we’re building something that isn’t relevant to them (wuh-oh!).
On the flip side, if it is relevant, sharing our process can get the early adopters on board. It creates buzz and builds anticipation which makes sales a lot easier, once we launch.
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As for protecting our credibility, being transparent with our process actually builds trust. It humanizes business owners. It dismantles the oppressive “professional” standards. (I do recommend having boundaries around what you share when you BIP though. Lemme know if you want me to address that in another email.)
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What BIP looks like in practice

Here are 7 (of many, many) BIP posts that I published for my new offer, Momentum.
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Note: For most of these posts, I didn’t know when exactly I was going to launch Momentum. I didn’t know which platform I was going to use for its delivery. I knew it was going to be low cost but I hadn’t decided the exact price when I first started talking about it. And I hadn't named it yet.
What I'm saying is, I didn't have all my ducks in a row before I started sharing.
And that's the whole point.
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Now onto the examples...

Post 1: What’s stopping you?
​Purpose:
1) To start the conversation about a problem that I was planning on solving with my new offer
2) To gather data and understand my prospects' struggles further

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Post 2: The remedy
​Purpose:
1) To introduce the offer idea
2) To gather signals of interest
3) To show my audience that my offer was created based on their genuine need (ie. By referring to the poll I did - see above post.)

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Post 3: Who it’s for
​Purpose:
1) To announce which specific problems I plan on solving with my offer.
2) To show my audience just how low I decided to go with the price.
3) To gather more signals of interest

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Post 4: Shared struggle​
Purpose: To start a conversation around a relatable struggle that was the inspo behind a feature in my new offer.

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Post 5: The numbers I need
​Purpose:
-To rally my Day Ones to help spread the word.
-To share my Google Doc sales/waitlist page
-To be transparent about the numbers I needed to make this low-cost offer sustainable for my business.
BTW telling everyone that I needed 300 on the waitlist made me shweatayyy! It's a big number—7.5x bigger than any other offer max/min capacity I’ve announced. AND I’d say that sharing this goal was the number one reason I got so much support from my advocates and early adopters.

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Post 6: Sales page collabo
​Purpose: To gather questions for my FAQ section.
Since this was my first time creating the offer, I had zero questions to put in the 'frequently asked questions' section of my sales page. So I turned to my audience to see what questions they had about the offer. Et voilà, the FAQ was born.

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Post 7: Almost there
​Purpose:
-To update my audience on just how close we were to reaching the numbers goal that I needed to make this offer live.
-To get the last few sign ups.
(And guess what, I actually hit 300 sign ups on July 19th! Read the post. It's wild.)

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Those are seven examples but there are endless ways we can do this.

• Ask for input/feedback.
• Share what you're doing with the input/feedback you received.
• Give regular updates.
• Announce goals.
• Share progress/milestones
• Share screenshot sneak previews.
• Share lessons learned along the way.
• Share a day in the life behind-the-scenes.

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Bonus tip: You know you’re on the right track when the offer creation process starts feeling like co-creation—for both you and your audience. It's exciting for them and validating for you (not in the ego way...in the 'I'm-definitely-onto-something' way).
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What's risky is when we don't co-create our offers with the people we want to sell them to. Marinate on that.
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Ok that's it from me. Thoughts? Questions? Hit reply.
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-Natalia (she/her)

P.S. Next week I'm re-opening Momentum for a few days. If you're interested in saving time and writing better content on LinkedIn, click here to be notified when access opens.

P.P.S. This song has been on repeat all week. It's so good that it got me to dust off my guitar and start learning again...after I dunno how many years. (Mannn I wish fingertip calluses stayed forever. 😣) Enjoy!

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