KP: Distribution is king and here are the benefits of building in public. I think I've touched on some of them through my personal example, my story. But the other thing that, there are one or two things I want to highlight that people don't usually, think about is like feedback loops. It's insanely valuable to have a direct and tight feedback loop with your customers.
Now, how do you do that? If you email them. Or if you get them on a zoom call, like you may get four people, two people, and you have to beg, beseech and harass them or incentivize them to come on a zoom call and they're like bored to death to hear about your product roadmap. But if you build in public and start sharing parts of your roadmap that are exciting to you, the reason why you chose a feature over to some other feature to build, the reason that you had a kickoff event or the reason you had a new marketing hire.
Suddenly, now you're building a public reality show that everybody wants to tune in. What happened to that hire? Ash just hired somebody last week. Did that work out? Are they doing great? What's going on? They want to know, right? For example, I'm just making this up. So like feedback loops is very important.
The other thing is access to wisdom of the crowd. I think there's so many times that I would want a particular recommendation on any thing. Let's say I want to, I want HR software. Like I have a couple of contractors in, in, in in India and Pakistan. How do I pay them? Is it PayPal? What's the right, what's the new solution these days?
Bam, four people reply saying deal. com, deal. com, deal. com. So I check out deal and like within, within, I don't know, five minutes. I'm like, yeah, I'm sold. This is it. So that's now you can really like access the wisdom of the crowd. If you in 2023 are running into bottlenecks. That you know that many other founders have solved before you then it's just very inefficient to build a company, right?
It's I just i'm sometimes shocked so many of my founders that i'm friends with Are building in stealth and they're suffering through some of the most ridiculous Problems that I would never have because I just have a public persona and then I just tweet about it. And then there are like eight people.
Especially the thing about Twitter is that it's the greatest platform where smart people love to show off how much they know about shit. So you just have to ask a dumb question and get out of the way. And then let the comment section like figure it out. What's the right answer? So i'm like, how are you building stealth?
I don't get it. It's just my brain just can't Okay. So here's some real examples of companies of different sizes who've been building in public. There's one called plausible. I love this tool is it's an alternative to Google analytics. They're crushing it. 2. 2 million ARR in three years. I interviewed them recently on my sub stack.
And of course they found their beta customers to building in public, right? And they do this even today. Which is mind blowing. Sanja is another tool again, a small indie hacker tool for testimonials on your websites. And they're just, I think close to one 50 right now, ARR, but either way, one in three signups and one in four paying customers come from Twitter.
Which is crazy if you think about it, right? The CAC there is virtually zero and any business if you talk to and you ask them what's the CAC and if they're at least four hundred, five hundred, six hundred dollars in some, like high ticket sales businesses, but like at least it's like 10, 15, 20.
And you may just get the lead, but you may not get this, converted customer in this case, they're getting both. Again, super powerful, even in those use cases.
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