# Build in Public with KP

## Video Information
- **Podcast:** Build in Public with KP
- **Guest:** Paul Yacoubian
- **YouTube URL:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_bVMNXL3mo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_bVMNXL3mo)
- **Video ID:** z_bVMNXL3mo
- **Transcript Language:** en (Auto-generated)
- **Extracted:** 2026-01-13 10:33:55

## Description
Paul Yacoubian on Build in Public with KP

## Transcript with Timestamps

[00:04] [Music]
[00:06] welcome everybody
[00:07] um welcome to the second episode
[00:11] of a billion public podcast i am your
[00:14] host kp
[00:15] and today i have with me an incredible
[00:18] duo
[00:19] um most both of them definitely don't
[00:21] need production
[00:22] in in the in the building public space
[00:25] but
[00:26] they are um polycubian uh who's the
[00:29] founder at
[00:30] copy.ai and blake ml who's now the cmo
[00:35] at copy.ai so copycats welcome
[00:38] thank you it's gonna be here yeah
[00:41] thanks for having me i um
[00:45] for the folks you know who are listening
[00:47] to this podcast for the first time
[00:49] um building public is of course you know
[00:51] near and dear to my heart
[00:53] and it it goes back to two three years
[00:56] ago when i was
[00:57] first on twitter in this twitter
[00:59] universe and i had no followers and i
[01:01] was swimming
[01:02] i felt like in a sea of noise and like
[01:04] you know a lot of a lot of
[01:06] random tweets and just discovered this
[01:08] beautiful signal
[01:09] where if you put out stuff consistently
[01:12] and you know rally people who believed
[01:15] in the same beliefs around around the
[01:17] problem
[01:17] you want to solve um you will actually
[01:19] be able to build the
[01:20] terrific community and i've seen this
[01:23] work
[01:24] in a couple places you know of course um
[01:26] we talked to martin brucey earlier
[01:28] uh in the podcast and you know we're
[01:30] going to talk to a few more but
[01:31] one of my favorite observations in the
[01:33] last maybe 12 months
[01:35] has been watching paul you know execute
[01:38] this playbook
[01:39] uh to almost great perfection and of
[01:42] course you know
[01:43] uh i know you you'll laugh but but
[01:46] he's done a terrific job as has taken on
[01:49] this building public mantra and
[01:50] put it put his own spin on it and uh i
[01:53] want to address
[01:54] actually a little bit around like where
[01:57] did he find inspiration
[01:59] um before getting started with billing
[02:01] in public because it was not very
[02:02] obvious
[02:03] six months ago so paul tell us yeah
[02:06] elon musk uh does it and he has a ton of
[02:09] followers and can raise
[02:11] any amount of money he wants and build
[02:12] any company he wants and rate and
[02:15] attract any talent he wants
[02:18] love it i mean so that was it it's that
[02:20] it was literally that clear and then the
[02:22] second
[02:23] case study was donald trump donald trump
[02:25] had like 90 million followers
[02:28] and got elected president because there
[02:30] was no filter between him
[02:32] and the people he was trying to reach so
[02:33] it's a very one-on-one direct
[02:35] communication
[02:36] but at scale and it was real time so
[02:39] like i think all of those factors
[02:40] kind of point to the same thing which is
[02:43] twitter can be
[02:44] this insanely high leverage point to
[02:47] build a real audience and
[02:49] and build like some something that's
[02:52] super powerful that has a really
[02:54] long long term advantage to it
[02:57] i'll i'll pop on the same question over
[02:59] to you blake when did you discover the
[03:00] magic of being in public
[03:02] for me it was it was more learning in
[03:04] public for a really really long time so
[03:05] i've been creating content
[03:07] on starting mostly on linkedin back when
[03:09] it wasn't so boring
[03:10] and platitudinal it's worse than it's
[03:13] ever been
[03:14] right now but uh like i was creating
[03:16] content before it was actually
[03:17] acceptable to do it when it was still
[03:18] like
[03:19] a recruiting resume website i was making
[03:22] content
[03:23] because i was a crazy person and thought
[03:24] that would work and it did
[03:26] so i was learning in public and sharing
[03:28] what i was learning along the way
[03:30] i really didn't become more like a maker
[03:32] and build in public
[03:34] until the past year or so i've been
[03:36] doing side projects forever
[03:38] mostly that looked like consulting but
[03:40] then recently i just like
[03:41] i want to put some products together i
[03:42] want to try my hand at some digital
[03:44] products see what i can do and just
[03:46] scrap together this really janky tech
[03:49] stack of like
[03:50] gumroad and you know free website and
[03:53] whatever
[03:54] and it worked it worked really well it
[03:56] wasn't like massive
[03:57] but it did work and so i started seeing
[04:00] the value of
[04:01] just putting that out there too not just
[04:03] sharing what i was learning but sharing
[04:05] what i was learning and doing
[04:06] and then just like creating this
[04:08] flywheel of content through that
[04:10] and that's that pretty much led me to uh
[04:13] getting more active on twitter
[04:14] and the rest is history love that well
[04:17] well there's
[04:18] not history i can still i get so really
[04:20] flame out here so let's
[04:23] so actually i i want to get to that
[04:25] segment where
[04:26] you um you're now cmo at copy
[04:29] and um well actually for the for the for
[04:32] the listeners and
[04:33] for the viewers paul do you want to
[04:34] quickly summarize what copy.ai does
[04:37] sure so it's an ai copywriting app and
[04:39] we use
[04:40] an ai platform called gpt3 which is the
[04:43] world's most powerful
[04:45] ai model for language generation and
[04:48] that was
[04:48] that was launched in summer of this year
[04:51] and
[04:52] since i had used gpt2 i was expecting
[04:55] three to be
[04:56] really good and so the first people that
[04:59] really saw gpg3 were on twitter because
[05:01] that's where you
[05:02] that's the fastest place to find like
[05:05] demos and early
[05:06] beta use cases and so it was immediately
[05:09] in my timeline
[05:10] i immediately recognized the power of it
[05:13] and um
[05:14] thought okay well this is this has got
[05:16] to be the next big thing and i became
[05:17] the unofficial gpt3 hype man
[05:20] on twitter and
[05:24] because i was doing investing i was like
[05:25] trying to find anyone building on it
[05:27] like
[05:28] what are the big things going to be um
[05:30] and trying to invest in those things and
[05:31] at the same time trying to get access
[05:33] as fast as possible which we did my
[05:35] co-founder chris liu and i
[05:37] and then we just started pumping out
[05:38] mvps and like launching them on twitter
[05:41] so if you don't have money uh you can't
[05:44] really run
[05:44] ads right so twitter is the best
[05:47] platform for generating
[05:48] finding your first users and what we
[05:50] realized very quickly was each time we
[05:52] launched anything
[05:54] we would get more followers which would
[05:56] give us more users
[05:58] the next time we launched there was
[06:00] there's the
[06:02] iteration domino effect that had occurs
[06:05] yes and then there's content that it's
[06:07] just like
[06:08] spewing out of these side projects
[06:10] people want to know everything about it
[06:12] your first dollar of revenue your second
[06:14] dollar of revenue
[06:15] like what are you thinking about doing a
[06:17] feature request like a customer
[06:19] testimonial all of that is content
[06:21] that people are generally curious about
[06:24] so when you start posting it
[06:26] you're basically sharing your journey
[06:28] with people you know that are on twitter
[06:30] so
[06:30] at first they're gonna be like dude
[06:32] everybody's really encouraging and happy
[06:34] for you
[06:35] and this is something i've noticed since
[06:37] the summer
[06:39] a tweet from someone that says just made
[06:41] my first dollar of revenue
[06:44] i will i'm always liking and retweeting
[06:46] that but those have gone
[06:48] from getting like 15 likes maybe 30
[06:50] likes to getting
[06:51] like 600 700 800 likes on it
[06:55] and so a big part of of that
[06:58] of my like the thing i want to do with
[07:01] twitter is
[07:02] to basically reinforce
[07:05] that as a positive thing yeah so because
[07:09] i know everybody
[07:10] wants to imitate success and we're all
[07:11] looking to see who's growing and
[07:13] whatever but
[07:14] that honestly that one tweet i just made
[07:16] my first dollar revenue will
[07:18] inspire more people to build right and
[07:21] where i'm all about
[07:22] inspiring people to build i think what
[07:25] one theme that sort of
[07:26] um consistently shows up in your feed
[07:29] and of course even in blake's two is how
[07:31] much
[07:32] you both cheer on the sidelines for
[07:34] others
[07:35] and and their micro wins and small wins
[07:37] right because you know i think one of
[07:39] the
[07:39] um harshest things that i've seen in the
[07:42] last 10 15 years is
[07:44] is how founder culture tends to be
[07:46] celebrating the hustle
[07:47] like the hours i worked or this or that
[07:50] this and
[07:51] there's actually not enough gratitude
[07:53] that goes into small wins
[07:55] so like someone like you co-signing on
[07:59] some maker who made like a dollar
[08:01] you know by selling a product on gumroad
[08:03] or maybe they got their first sas
[08:05] customer
[08:06] actually means the world to that maker
[08:08] or a founder
[08:09] right and i think it's one theme that
[08:11] i've seen both of you do really well and
[08:13] it speaks to
[08:14] sort of like the ethos of building in
[08:16] public you know for steering in public
[08:18] as well
[08:19] yes yeah absolutely because that was me
[08:21] in august i had three dollars a month
[08:24] in recruiting revenue you know there we
[08:26] go the next day
[08:27] i had we got another subscriber we had
[08:29] six dollars a month in recruiting
[08:30] revenue
[08:31] and i posted a tweet like growing 100
[08:33] day every day with all the fire
[08:35] emojis right and then somebody in the
[08:38] comments does the math he's like dude if
[08:40] you grow
[08:41] a hundred percent day every day for the
[08:43] next 30 days you're gonna be like
[08:44] this huge company and i was like i was
[08:47] like let's plan on it
[08:48] right let's plan on it so that's where i
[08:52] that's like my that's the neighborhood
[08:55] i'm coming from so
[08:56] people that were following me back then
[08:58] i might have had
[08:59] let's see at that point maybe like 1500
[09:01] followers
[09:03] um you know 10x that everybody that
[09:06] starts following you after that they
[09:08] miss that journey they don't realize it
[09:09] right so i i
[09:11] you know i i try to let people know hey
[09:13] look
[09:14] when when you have a startup that
[09:18] does strike something that people want
[09:19] you can grow extremely fast so in
[09:22] less than five months we're at 60 000 a
[09:24] month in revenue
[09:25] right and our in mrr yeah
[09:28] uh and yeah recurring revenue this is a
[09:31] huge
[09:32] it's a huge jump right so how did you go
[09:34] from taglines.ai
[09:36] which does one one tool which i think we
[09:38] ended up getting to like 300 a month in
[09:40] mrr which is maybe 20
[09:43] 20 or 30 paying customers how do you go
[09:45] from there and build the next thing with
[09:47] what you learned from that
[09:48] so that's all in my timeline which is
[09:50] fantastic because it's like my
[09:52] history my vlog like this is what we did
[09:54] moving to like
[09:55] the part about cmo and actually i'm
[09:57] curious before you announce that you
[09:59] were hiring
[10:00] on twitter uh paul what was going on in
[10:02] your mind about
[10:04] given how built in public you are how
[10:06] like the company was
[10:07] formed around that culture what was
[10:09] going on in your mind about
[10:10] what your first hire would look like and
[10:12] what you were looking from that person
[10:16] yeah so we uh you know chris and i
[10:20] before before we even started building
[10:22] we have our own
[10:23] understanding of how seed stage
[10:26] companies work
[10:27] and because you're investors right yeah
[10:29] we're yeah we're angel investors so
[10:31] the first one is does this company have
[10:34] traction or not
[10:35] and it was our viewpoint that most
[10:38] people should not quit their day job
[10:40] until they hit traction with something
[10:43] because it's so hard to do
[10:45] the second viewpoint was that a real mvp
[10:48] given all the tech that we have access
[10:50] to now shouldn't take more than
[10:51] a week or maybe a few weeks to get an
[10:54] actual mvp out the door
[10:56] so we use that to really rapidly build
[10:59] launch and iterate so we knew okay
[11:03] we're not quitting like our dream jobs
[11:06] unless we get
[11:07] serious traction in something and we and
[11:10] my hope was that the traction would be
[11:13] a strong enough signal that it was a
[11:14] no-brainer right it's not
[11:16] riding the fence like oh we got to you
[11:19] know three months in we're at 800 a
[11:20] month in revenue
[11:22] right it's like we have a little bit of
[11:23] traction but it's unclear that
[11:26] it's gonna it's gonna be very easy to
[11:28] scale this
[11:29] so once we um
[11:33] hit traction and we knew okay
[11:36] time time to like to go full time on
[11:38] this
[11:39] the second thing we knew was that the
[11:42] people you want to hire won't work for
[11:44] you
[11:45] until you have like a serious amount of
[11:47] traction
[11:48] right not just like 3 000 a month in
[11:51] revenue like you're not i can't get
[11:53] blake i can't get blake on board right
[11:55] blake's got
[11:56] a million offers so how am i gonna get
[12:00] the caliber of talent i'm gonna need to
[12:02] actually execute the real vision
[12:04] and the the uh the game plan was
[12:09] chris you and me we're gonna take this
[12:11] as far
[12:12] as and as hard as we can on our own
[12:15] right we're gonna build in public
[12:19] we're gonna hope that we can actually
[12:21] recruit talent off this building public
[12:23] playbook which is
[12:24] people can see us building and they get
[12:26] interested
[12:27] and maybe they get aligned with the
[12:29] vision and the mission
[12:31] so maybe either they reach out to us or
[12:34] when we reach out to them they've
[12:35] already they already know who we are
[12:38] so that was the playbook um so
[12:42] i think blake came on we we literally
[12:45] hit like
[12:46] 50 000 a month a day or two before he
[12:49] joined
[12:50] that is atypical for startups
[12:54] okay but the nice thing is when you if
[12:57] you do find meg attraction
[12:59] um you hope that that you have a game
[13:03] plan that's gonna work
[13:04] so the problem is you're you're now
[13:07] late to building the team out so we're
[13:10] like four months
[13:11] behind building a team but the team we
[13:13] have
[13:15] we're hoping is the right team that we
[13:16] need to actually take it to the next
[13:18] level
[13:19] right what were some qualities that you
[13:22] saw in blake
[13:23] or his profile and his playbooks that
[13:26] made you go okay that's my cmo bring it
[13:29] on
[13:30] i'm not a big fan of resumes so
[13:34] for a marketer i was looking for
[13:38] since we're totally like marketing focus
[13:40] as a platform
[13:41] right we're extremely heavily focused on
[13:44] organic marketing tools
[13:46] right which means that the marketer
[13:49] you want to bring on board needs to
[13:51] understand organic
[13:52] channels they need to understand how to
[13:54] build an audience
[13:57] they need they need to be data driven
[13:58] like hey what's working what's not
[14:00] working
[14:02] and then they need like uh they need
[14:05] hopefully have built side projects so
[14:07] they have like this creative
[14:09] energy that is doesn't like the
[14:12] if they're working a company that
[14:14] doesn't stop them from wanting to pursue
[14:16] these passion things because that
[14:17] that's a core focus of our tools
[14:21] and then if they're generating content
[14:23] like how
[14:24] literally how much content are they able
[14:27] to generate
[14:28] and then i saw blake i'm like oh this is
[14:30] the guy
[14:32] so you almost saw him before he applied
[14:36] it was no it's like the same like he
[14:38] showed up in uh
[14:40] he showed up in wit's thread but yeah
[14:43] and
[14:44] uh the bad unicorn founder woody
[14:46] anderson and uh
[14:48] yeah it's awesome uh atl and um
[14:53] i was like blake who's this blake guy
[14:55] look at his profile for like
[14:58] six seconds i'm like oh this this is
[15:00] this is who we want
[15:02] instant dm you know just like it took it
[15:05] from there
[15:06] just like it was we had a funny dm
[15:08] thread going on
[15:10] like it's like yeah you need help with
[15:11] something i'm like i need a podcast
[15:13] uh i need my own podcast so i can help
[15:15] you set that up or whatever
[15:16] and then i was like and also i need a
[15:19] 90-page
[15:20] growth plan can you help with that he's
[15:22] like yeah
[15:25] this is a joke so it was like instantly
[15:27] i for
[15:28] i knew that he has this output i knew
[15:30] that
[15:32] um not only they have followers because
[15:34] a lot of marketers on twitter they buy
[15:36] followers but he had real engagement on
[15:38] his tweets
[15:40] and then just from like personality you
[15:43] know if you're
[15:44] if you're a marketer you become like a
[15:47] core voice of the company right is this
[15:49] somebody that you want representing your
[15:50] company
[15:52] and uh blake's awesome like like
[15:55] incredibly nice humble and helpful
[15:59] and like this building in public thing
[16:01] like you said it's not just about
[16:03] you're you know just pumping out
[16:05] promotional content but really are you
[16:07] actually cheerleading other people are
[16:09] you helping other people and
[16:10] and uh you know i'd see threads like
[16:14] where people just offer help it's like
[16:16] hey reply if you need help with
[16:17] something and i'll
[16:18] i'll help you back but those are core
[16:20] values and virtues
[16:22] for us so from your from your vantage
[16:25] point blake
[16:26] what uh made this decision
[16:30] um inevitable for you to join copy and
[16:33] from
[16:33] from also from your i'm assuming
[16:36] long-term passion to build in public
[16:38] like
[16:38] how did these two worlds collide and
[16:39] what made it inevitable
[16:41] just the money yeah
[16:46] wait i thought paul was paying in
[16:48] bitcoin but
[16:53] yeah no it's so yeah so like honestly
[16:56] what i was looking at i've
[16:57] mentioned this to paul a billion times
[16:59] but the fact that i've never been able
[17:01] to work on a
[17:02] work at a company where i actually use
[17:03] the tool was huge i've worked in
[17:05] really boring industries worked at
[17:07] agencies and
[17:09] been in a lot of different industries
[17:10] none of which i would actually use any
[17:12] of their stuff
[17:13] and that's a big thing for a marketer to
[17:14] be able to be your own customer
[17:17] is huge being able to like go into the
[17:19] tool and automatically identify
[17:21] opportunities
[17:22] for growth there but at the same time
[17:24] get value out of the tool
[17:26] like simultaneously never had that
[17:28] before
[17:29] so that was a really big selling point
[17:32] beyond that like it's real it was really
[17:35] clear that
[17:35] my skill set personality all that good
[17:38] stuff would fit really well with this
[17:39] company and so the more that i
[17:40] researched
[17:40] the more i talked with paul um it just
[17:43] became
[17:44] clear like yes this is a good fit and i
[17:46] wasn't actively looking to leave my
[17:49] other job until i really started talking
[17:52] with paul
[17:52] and then i was actively looking to leave
[17:55] my job
[17:56] right like because i realized that even
[17:59] though i had it good
[18:00] where i was i was playing it safe
[18:03] at a company where i just would never
[18:05] get my hands on the tool i didn't get to
[18:07] work with tons of people all the time
[18:08] because like i was managing a remote
[18:09] team but
[18:10] it was just really there wasn't a lot
[18:14] going on
[18:14] it was a very traditional company and so
[18:17] the idea that i could take something
[18:19] over
[18:19] inject my voice and personality into it
[18:22] really make a difference
[18:23] and be able to attribute like because
[18:25] like marketing up until that point was
[18:27] word of mouth twitter right so like
[18:29] there's ground zero right there
[18:31] everything that's done above that
[18:33] i can directly contribute to and that
[18:35] was huge for me
[18:36] um also just the fact that they had
[18:39] insurance
[18:39] and they were a startup was it was a
[18:41] really really good selling point because
[18:43] i was really nervous that we weren't
[18:44] going to have insurance
[18:46] and if you know anything about paying
[18:47] for insurance outside of your employer
[18:50] it's like insanely expensive
[18:53] right so that was like the final little
[18:55] puzzle piece to fall in and then from
[18:56] there was like yeah i'm joining i'm
[18:58] doing this thing
[18:59] i love that so so now that paul
[19:02] um you picked your first hire in public
[19:05] is this going to be the hiring playbook
[19:09] at copy yeah so we hired our second
[19:12] uh person zach lee he built in public
[19:16] wow so his uh when quiet is his his
[19:19] handle but
[19:20] he um he built a company or a side
[19:23] project
[19:24] called potion there were two potions his
[19:26] was one of them
[19:27] and he ended up selling it but he had
[19:29] been following me since we launched
[19:32] and uh he said diet inspired him to
[19:34] build that project which he ended up
[19:36] selling so in in that time period you
[19:40] know that was like
[19:41] that was basically the story and um i
[19:43] think chris
[19:45] chris and he connected and then there
[19:47] was already an energy so like
[19:48] this especially in a remote environment
[19:51] you cannot
[19:52] like remote first company how do you
[19:53] convey energy like that right
[19:55] there's no vibe in an office so
[19:59] you need something to to like replicate
[20:01] that and take it to the next level
[20:03] because i've got like a family and kids
[20:05] you know living in the other rooms my
[20:07] house
[20:08] it's not the right it's not the same
[20:10] vibe right that you might get like being
[20:12] in a cramped office with your first
[20:13] hires and
[20:15] it's totally different so without that
[20:17] how do you build it how do you actually
[20:19] build a culture and onboard
[20:21] you know consistently so that
[20:23] everybody's excited about
[20:24] the project and waking up in the morning
[20:27] and so it's something
[20:28] that's super important so when
[20:31] um i i mean of course i was following
[20:34] parts recent parts of the story one of
[20:36] my favorite
[20:37] again another um moments that i thought
[20:40] i stopped scrolling which is a pretty
[20:42] big deal right like getting people to
[20:43] stop scrolling
[20:45] is when you mention something around
[20:46] onboarding and you were
[20:48] looking you know you're looking for
[20:51] advice
[20:52] and guidance around how to onboard in a
[20:53] remote first you know
[20:55] setup and i thought that was pretty
[20:57] vulnerable you know for a founder to
[20:58] come out
[20:59] and just say okay i need some guidance
[21:01] and help um
[21:02] in in onboarding because you know people
[21:06] you know people who don't live in the
[21:07] building public camp are very
[21:09] defensive about their strengths and
[21:11] weaknesses and things they know things
[21:13] that don't know and i think paul
[21:15] one thing that's refreshing um the way
[21:17] you lead
[21:18] uh copy or you know uh the new wave of
[21:22] leaders
[21:22] in my view is how vulnerable and open
[21:25] they are
[21:25] in sharing hey i don't know what the
[21:27] heck i'm doing here so help me out
[21:29] what what was your sort of genesis
[21:32] behind that tweet
[21:33] and that did does it mean something to
[21:36] you or you just did it
[21:38] i literally don't know what i'm doing
[21:39] man i don't know what to tell you
[21:42] he should be the one singer of this copy
[21:45] ai founder bears all
[21:46] right look i got what i'm doing
[21:49] i i swear to you i don't have a clue and
[21:51] i i hear people all the time
[21:54] talking about how they have imposter
[21:56] syndrome i'm like
[21:58] everybody can't if everybody has
[22:00] imposter syndrome then we just need to
[22:01] cut the crap
[22:03] right right like okay if you have this
[22:07] weakness
[22:08] how are you gonna fix it well you need
[22:10] to ask somebody for help
[22:12] twitter is like literally i don't know
[22:14] 300 million people
[22:16] that are scrolling their feed in order
[22:19] to find
[22:21] a place to actually say something that
[22:23] adds value
[22:24] right so now any question i have
[22:27] any problem it's a tweet and the answer
[22:30] is there in seconds
[22:32] right well so it's a superpower
[22:35] it's a total superpower i'll share a
[22:36] personal uh uh
[22:39] anecdote on that so a couple weeks ago
[22:41] i'm not sure if you guys saw but
[22:43] my my wife asked me um okay i need some
[22:46] book recommendations like that book
[22:48] recommendations or parent
[22:49] parent book recommendations um that you
[22:52] can ask your friends
[22:53] and i'm like what do you mean i have no
[22:54] friends i mean i have friends but
[22:56] what i would just ask twitter they
[22:58] always tell me and she did not believe
[23:00] it
[23:01] but i'm i just tweeted out and we had 65
[23:04] books recommended
[23:05] 65 so there's a whole inclined shelf in
[23:07] the next room the baby nursery
[23:09] filled with all the books and she it
[23:11] blew her mind and she was like
[23:12] i can't believe you had so many dad
[23:14] friends and i think the answer is really
[23:16] not
[23:17] like that you have dad friends or not
[23:19] it's really about like how twitter's
[23:20] algorithm works in a way
[23:22] that it surfaces your content and tweets
[23:25] to the people who tweet about that topic
[23:27] all the time
[23:29] right so and then there's also of course
[23:31] a community around you so why not tap
[23:33] into it
[23:34] um right that was one of my recent
[23:37] favorite memories i was like wow
[23:39] that's the power of twitter not just in
[23:40] tech beyond
[23:42] um yes yeah and so that that's exactly
[23:45] right so
[23:46] the twitter is a community built around
[23:48] yourself so if you tweet about politics
[23:50] then you're going to get people that are
[23:53] having certain expectations
[23:54] right they're coming to you they're
[23:56] going to that's going to influence what
[23:57] they're tweeting about so i've heard
[23:59] time and time again hey
[24:01] uh twitter is great until you hit 10 000
[24:03] followers
[24:04] right and then it just devolves right
[24:07] i've hit 15.6 k
[24:10] it's still amazing like i'm very focused
[24:13] on the content i'm putting out there
[24:15] right i don't want this
[24:16] i don't want to have a hot take yeah
[24:18] just to generate
[24:19] interest or likes or whatever i have no
[24:22] interest in that
[24:23] at all i feel like that ruins the
[24:26] experience of that community for a lot
[24:28] of people
[24:30] right yeah
[24:32] paul graham right brilliant mind has a
[24:35] million followers i would never trade
[24:38] his
[24:39] follower base for mine ever despite the
[24:42] fact that he's got a million because
[24:44] i look at what people tweet at him and
[24:45] i'm like i don't ever want this to
[24:48] happen
[24:48] to me in my life right
[24:52] he could be an influencer but man the
[24:54] amount of like
[24:56] problems and negativity that he attracts
[25:00] is off the charts right i'm like why why
[25:03] do this to yourself
[25:05] i mean you know i mean it's just
[25:09] it seems to me you just want to be paul
[25:10] y and not paul g
[25:12] so yeah i mean look not everybody's got
[25:15] the same
[25:15] things that they want out of it but in
[25:17] my head in my megalomaniac head i have
[25:20] this
[25:21] impression that this community will
[25:23] continue to grow
[25:24] like we'll get i'm at 15k
[25:27] i don't care about followers you'll
[25:28] never hear me see me tweet about how
[25:30] many followers i have or got
[25:32] that just doesn't happen because i don't
[25:34] care what the number is
[25:36] i care about the quality so if you the
[25:39] thing that i'm thinking about
[25:41] and you're helping to to make this
[25:42] happen and blake is too
[25:45] is if you had a hundred thousand people
[25:48] that want to be at the edge
[25:50] of tech in real time in a community
[25:53] where everyone's supportive
[25:55] yet when something gets launched like
[25:58] take a
[25:59] any make private maker communities it's
[26:01] great for support which we have in
[26:03] twitter anyway right
[26:04] but what they never have is when you
[26:06] launch
[26:08] math like it could be a massive success
[26:10] you know a million people could see this
[26:11] project
[26:12] it just doesn't happen so then they flip
[26:14] back and go to product hunt
[26:16] or they go to hacker news you know
[26:18] people that launch on product hunt that
[26:20] already have even a tiny twitter
[26:21] following will get four times as much
[26:24] i think yeah from twitter then they do
[26:26] the product on launch
[26:27] yeah which means twitter is the
[26:30] community
[26:31] so this is something like you have to go
[26:34] all in on one
[26:35] i went all in on twitter it's very um
[26:39] very purposefully so thank you so are
[26:41] you
[26:42] um blake are you taking notes of how
[26:44] many times he's saying twitter is a
[26:45] community
[26:46] because i think every time he says that
[26:47] we should take a shot or something do it
[26:57] we're here we're here to bring the
[26:59] future to people
[27:00] to keep it optimistic to to create a
[27:03] can-do attitude
[27:05] my feeling with elon musk is that while
[27:08] he's doing these awesome things
[27:10] i don't feel like enough people are
[27:11] inspired to actually try it because they
[27:13] think what he's doing is impossible
[27:15] right right it's like several orders of
[27:19] magnitude
[27:20] yeah i'm not elon musk i'm not albert
[27:22] einstein you know like that's
[27:23] that's the thought whereas me i'm trying
[27:25] to break it down i'm like this guy is a
[27:27] regular guy
[27:28] like how how does he construct his
[27:31] blueprint and road map and strategy
[27:34] so that he's able to pull off impossible
[27:36] stuff because if you can learn from him
[27:38] on how he did that
[27:39] you can pull off impossible stuff
[27:42] and um yeah so those lessons have not
[27:46] been lost on me
[27:48] and we continue to use them now
[27:51] of course i mean so that leads me to
[27:54] another segment which is um the notion
[27:57] of
[27:58] is it marketing or is it sales so blake
[28:00] this is probably more
[28:01] irrelevant to you like how do you view
[28:03] building public do you think is it more
[28:05] marketing or is it more sales
[28:09] um how do you view the the art of
[28:12] building public
[28:13] um yeah it's um
[28:17] the correct answer is that it's
[28:19] everything when you do it correctly
[28:20] it's nothing when you do it incorrectly
[28:24] so that's that's the same with any
[28:25] marketing tactic like it will result in
[28:27] nothing
[28:28] if you do it really bad if if you do it
[28:31] well and build relationships
[28:32] it will drive the results that you're
[28:34] looking for and so when you're building
[28:35] in public
[28:36] yeah up front like the the initial thing
[28:38] is it looks like marketing
[28:40] right it looks like because inherently
[28:42] if you're building in public the right
[28:43] way you're
[28:44] not just always pushing some call to
[28:46] action you don't look at
[28:47] what what paul is posting and you you
[28:49] don't think like
[28:50] every freaking day he's just pushing me
[28:52] to sign up for copy.ai
[28:54] like of course he wants people to do
[28:56] that right what he's sharing though
[28:58] is here's where we're at as a company
[28:59] here's what we're learning here's what
[29:01] i'm learning
[29:01] here's what you could try out here's me
[29:03] trying stuff out
[29:04] either looking like a fool or looking
[29:06] like a success along the way like
[29:08] he's showing the whole gamut of
[29:09] everything so
[29:11] yeah build in public can lead to sales
[29:13] really effectively
[29:15] but not because you're just trying to
[29:16] push something it's more because people
[29:18] start trusting your story they start
[29:20] trusting you as a person
[29:21] which leads them to trust the company
[29:23] which leads them to want to use
[29:25] the tool that the company offers it's a
[29:27] really simple funnel that works and you
[29:29] don't have to explicitly
[29:30] just guide people there like people
[29:32] aren't that dumb
[29:35] they know what what's expected like they
[29:37] know paul is the ceo of copy ai
[29:40] they kind of understand what action he
[29:42] would like them to take
[29:43] over time right but the way that the way
[29:46] that we talk about it
[29:47] it's not hey you should join it's more
[29:50] like
[29:51] hey here's here's some cool stories
[29:52] here's here's stuff you could try out
[29:53] i'm here to give you free knowledge
[29:55] this is what we're learning you don't
[29:56] have to make this mistake yourself we're
[29:58] throwing all this stuff
[29:59] at them and then they trust the person
[30:01] then they trust the company and this is
[30:02] why like people like dave gerhart have
[30:04] done really well over their careers
[30:06] uh love him hate him whatever he makes a
[30:09] podcast
[30:10] bearing out all the secrets of him and
[30:12] like and he used to
[30:13] have david cancel the ceo of drift on
[30:15] the podcast all the time too and
[30:17] just like get really specific with stuff
[30:20] right and then people
[30:21] liked drift as a brand a lot more not so
[30:24] surprisingly than than some of these
[30:25] other chat bots
[30:26] because they knew them and they knew the
[30:28] people behind them so
[30:30] it really becomes important when you're
[30:31] building in public especially behind a
[30:32] brand that
[30:33] you attach the brand to people which
[30:35] lets you tell stories and weaves them
[30:37] through this tapestry of eventually
[30:38] becoming sales but
[30:40] it's it's a lot more nuanced than the
[30:42] typical
[30:43] promotion culture that we've been living
[30:45] in right
[30:47] and it also ties into what we were
[30:50] trying to say earlier too is that it's
[30:51] not always about you
[30:53] right when you build in public yes you
[30:55] may share an update but that doesn't
[30:56] have to be
[30:57] always about like your product or
[31:00] um you know the number of signups you
[31:03] got that day
[31:04] could be about the problem you're
[31:05] solving you know a customer quote
[31:07] customer story a customer win you know i
[31:10] see you guys do that all the time like
[31:11] you know like pick
[31:12] someone who built a funny crazy thing
[31:14] with copy.ai and then
[31:15] highlight them right and um and those
[31:18] are the things that resonate you know
[31:20] um okay so if we don't have any comment
[31:23] on that
[31:24] uh i actually i have a comment go on i
[31:26] don't like that question
[31:30] i'm gonna edit that part out of this but
[31:33] well look because i get out this is an
[31:34] important topic yeah
[31:36] because i get asked you know and i i
[31:39] just see other makers
[31:41] you know not complaining but just like
[31:44] not it's not happy about the tweets that
[31:46] i make
[31:48] um saying basically hey just posting
[31:49] your mrr numbers isn't really building
[31:52] public
[31:53] i think that my
[31:58] the big thing i don't want people to
[32:00] miss is that when you
[32:01] look at social media in general
[32:05] there are very few spots where people
[32:07] are
[32:08] are trying to be open about you know how
[32:11] to build a company
[32:12] right i think that market for people who
[32:15] are interested in that
[32:16] is insanely big millions and millions of
[32:19] people
[32:19] so when you build in public if you go
[32:22] the i'm gonna go like
[32:24] it's just sales route i mean that's
[32:25] every corporate twitter handle is a
[32:27] sales route
[32:28] cta they get zero engagement so no one
[32:30] really cares
[32:32] so what you have to realize is the first
[32:33] thing you realize is this is people
[32:35] this is not followers this is a person
[32:38] right so once you realize it's a person
[32:40] you just have to
[32:42] like literally be a human yeah right
[32:45] write your tweet like you're talking to
[32:46] a human being
[32:48] who has you know might be interested or
[32:51] might not be
[32:52] get their attention and like explain
[32:54] what what this post is about and what
[32:56] they should
[32:57] think about it so so for most people
[33:00] like
[33:00] that will follow me they'll come in
[33:03] through like an mrr tweet
[33:05] it's basically the top of funnel like
[33:06] hey who's this guy growing this company
[33:08] what is the company well in the tweet i
[33:10] don't even put our company name in there
[33:13] right so it's not i'm not promoting the
[33:15] company i'm just saying hey
[33:17] i'm doing something that's kind of
[33:19] interesting and people happen to
[33:21] like this the fact that they can see
[33:23] this happen in real time
[33:25] right and people then want to like dm me
[33:27] hey how'd it like give any tips for
[33:28] billy in public i said
[33:29] check out my twitter timeline it's all
[33:32] here
[33:33] right it's all done laid out for you
[33:35] there yeah it's all laid out like i'd
[33:37] never delete a tweet
[33:38] so so i think i'll say one last thing
[33:42] yeah the whole point of this social
[33:44] media network
[33:45] is to surface the important things
[33:47] people are doing
[33:48] and like the vision and like how do you
[33:50] turn something like this into a movement
[33:52] right well the way you would do it is
[33:55] you have a few companies that do it and
[33:57] become really successful
[33:58] being very open so there are a number of
[34:01] venture-backed companies that
[34:02] are built that way and um
[34:06] and then you continue to just like layer
[34:08] it on and
[34:09] i think a lot of those companies they
[34:11] tend to be they grow
[34:13] and be like become more insular about
[34:15] how much they share
[34:16] yeah you know where it's like okay we're
[34:18] not interacting as much because we have
[34:20] this other thing to do
[34:22] so the hard part for me is like what's
[34:23] the right balance because what we do
[34:25] want to do is still
[34:26] foster as much as we can in that
[34:28] community without
[34:29] like spending too much time right on
[34:33] twitter
[34:34] i i'm sure you get that you gotta ask
[34:36] that question all the time too right
[34:37] like
[34:38] paul what are you doing how are you
[34:39] being the ceo of a company when all
[34:41] you're doing is spending time on twitter
[34:43] but people miss the entire point
[34:45] it it's it's a lot of being the ceo of a
[34:48] company so much of it is actually
[34:50] building the narrative
[34:51] yes story a movement for folks to rally
[34:54] around
[34:55] including investors including future
[34:56] hires like blake
[34:58] including your potential customers you
[35:00] know and it's not
[35:01] trying to close it on day one you know
[35:04] and
[35:04] um so i'm sure you get you get asked
[35:07] that all the time
[35:08] because people ask me that all the time
[35:09] and i'm like you're not getting it
[35:10] that's not the point
[35:12] it's everything it's how you reach
[35:14] anyone yeah
[35:16] like you ask them so okay how are you
[35:18] gonna reach how are you gonna find a
[35:20] um how are you gonna recruit someone
[35:23] they're like oh we'll post a job
[35:24] of posting we'll post that on linkedin
[35:27] indeed
[35:28] angel list something or it's on our
[35:31] website
[35:32] we hope someone clicks on it and like
[35:34] actually applies
[35:36] right first question we're gonna get in
[35:38] the interview is like
[35:39] okay how much this is gonna pay right
[35:43] and
[35:45] what what what percentage of those
[35:47] applicants are gonna be a good fit like
[35:50] one in ten so how much how many
[35:53] resources at the company level are you
[35:54] allocating
[35:56] to actually promote these openings
[35:59] and then to review them and like
[36:03] kpi i just don't have time man yeah like
[36:05] i got to build an awesome team
[36:08] blake quit his job the day like i gave
[36:10] him an offer it was like three days
[36:13] you know our our second hire
[36:16] we talked to him the next day he had an
[36:19] offer
[36:20] and accepted and quit the next day okay
[36:23] wow that's a great customer yeah three
[36:26] we made
[36:27] accepts the offer on monday
[36:30] starts tomorrow like
[36:35] there's power in in the vision and like
[36:38] understanding the company you're going
[36:40] to join and these are these are really
[36:41] big decisions for people these are
[36:43] life-changing decisions right right
[36:45] career-changing decisions so how do
[36:48] this other way the normal way people do
[36:50] it i don't think it's sustainable and
[36:52] when i look back on i'm like maybe
[36:53] that's why
[36:54] so many people are unsatisfied with
[36:55] their work because they don't
[36:57] they didn't get the first part right
[36:58] which is am i aligned with the mission
[37:01] this company's on
[37:03] right not just like okay am i going to
[37:04] get this title and then i can advance or
[37:06] and then once i have that then i can
[37:08] quit i don't
[37:11] you don't want your new hire to be like
[37:12] all right great this is gonna be awesome
[37:14] work here
[37:14] for three years and then i'm quitting
[37:16] you know and doing my next day
[37:18] you want them to be excited you know for
[37:20] the long run you know ideally i think so
[37:23] yeah so i'm going to be uh switching
[37:26] over
[37:26] now to the audience q a we had of course
[37:29] uh some questions from tweets and from
[37:31] twitter so i'm going to
[37:33] you know pop them up here in my screen
[37:35] and start asking them
[37:36] this one comes from reza um question for
[37:39] blake
[37:40] as the first marketing hire at an early
[37:43] real estate startup what's your
[37:44] framework for defining and prioritizing
[37:46] marketing programs
[37:48] yeah so uh established marketing
[37:51] programs
[37:52] that's that's the framework
[37:53] establishment
[37:55] yeah step one yeah so
[37:59] honestly it was coming in identifying
[38:02] what's
[38:02] absolutely crucial but isn't there and
[38:04] then
[38:06] the rest of like the cherry on top ideas
[38:07] come later right
[38:09] paul and i have had meetings where we
[38:10] just have a thousand and one ideas so
[38:12] many cool things we could do there's so
[38:13] many ways you could take this technology
[38:15] and the marketing for the technology all
[38:17] that good stuff
[38:18] when you boil it down though you have to
[38:20] be able to focus on
[38:22] a couple of things that actually move
[38:23] the needle up front so for us
[38:26] obviously there's there's some
[38:27] infrastructure stuff happening like
[38:28] hiring people that
[38:29] there are clear gaps with community or
[38:32] for content creation or for marketing
[38:35] operations whatever it is for whatever
[38:36] company
[38:38] there are going to be gaps that are
[38:39] readily apparent and building out a team
[38:41] is important because i can't do
[38:42] everything
[38:43] nor do i want to do everything all at
[38:45] once
[38:47] there's there's some structural stuff
[38:48] like setting up
[38:50] we use notion so setting up all the
[38:52] documentation you need for people to
[38:53] come on board new hires down the road
[38:55] setting up what programs we actually
[38:57] want to invest in and what's really
[38:58] important what's the mission
[39:00] of of marketing right now and how is
[39:02] that going to evolve
[39:03] there's a lot it's a lot of writing
[39:04] honestly like that's the biggest thing
[39:07] the more that we can write the better
[39:08] that we're going to perform over time
[39:10] because even if we write things that are
[39:12] bad ideas at least they're out
[39:14] there and we can start editing and
[39:15] finding the things that really
[39:17] do move the needle but you can't if you
[39:19] keep it all in your mind
[39:20] or keep it all in a zoom meeting without
[39:22] writing it down it all gets lost instead
[39:24] of just like
[39:25] needing to edit out some things that do
[39:26] need to get lost so that's that's been
[39:28] huge
[39:29] um outside of that we're a content
[39:31] creation company too
[39:32] like we got it we have to make content
[39:34] everywhere and so
[39:36] getting community set up across the
[39:38] board is massively important for us
[39:40] i know that that may not be a priority
[39:42] for
[39:43] some other companies i think it probably
[39:45] should be though uh that not to say that
[39:47] like the way copy does things is
[39:48] 100 the only way to do it that's
[39:50] absolutely not true
[39:52] but we're like paul's mentioned multiple
[39:54] times in this podcast we're looking to
[39:55] be
[39:56] at the edge of technology which means
[39:58] that our marketing has to be too
[39:59] we can't just be doing the old
[40:01] traditional way of marketing where we're
[40:02] just like seeking out pr
[40:04] and trying to get good uh you know good
[40:06] quotes and
[40:07] build like world build partnerships
[40:09] we're going to do pr we're going to do
[40:10] all that stuff but
[40:12] the people in this company are going to
[40:13] be interesting and that's
[40:15] what's going to make the company
[40:16] interesting love that
[40:19] so um another question from um that's
[40:22] due dennis
[40:23] dennis lynn now we know which dennis
[40:27] um your biggest building public related
[40:30] mistake
[40:31] or screw up what you have learned from
[40:34] that
[40:34] and how you grew from it so i'll go both
[40:36] of you uh paul you want to go first
[40:40] i've not made any mistakes
[40:43] [Laughter]
[40:46] another one-liner for this podcast
[40:48] episode
[40:50] oh
[40:59] i've not made any mistakes i mean maybe
[41:01] some like
[41:02] no i haven't made any mistakes when
[41:05] you're thinking about building public
[41:06] though like if you're
[41:08] really committed to building in public
[41:09] you have to show
[41:11] all of it so it can't necessarily be a
[41:13] mistake right like
[41:14] if you if you do something that doesn't
[41:16] work it doesn't mean it's a mistake
[41:18] it's like you're building this in public
[41:20] to show both sides and so
[41:21] um for me like at least there have been
[41:24] products that i put out that just
[41:25] totally flopped
[41:26] i've had some that have generated a few
[41:28] thousand dollars like almost instantly
[41:30] on the gumroad stuff that i've done i've
[41:33] had a couple that i thought
[41:34] were dope and they flopped immediately
[41:37] like i thought that i was gonna get tons
[41:39] of sales
[41:40] i put it out i did the same framework
[41:42] same thing as i've done that that had
[41:43] worked before
[41:44] crickets worse than crickets like it's
[41:46] like the crickets all got eaten
[41:48] and there was just like nothing but pure
[41:50] silence out there and so
[41:51] that's happened and it's documented in
[41:53] my timeline too for sure
[41:55] so i have one more from um i did think
[41:58] about it more
[41:59] what is that i did i don't have any i
[42:02] just want to let you know i did think
[42:03] about it because i saw the question come
[42:05] in
[42:05] on twitter i'm like oh that's a good
[42:06] question and i'm like
[42:10] i i hope someone can like identify one
[42:13] but i'll be honest with you like the one
[42:15] that would stand out is like oh
[42:17] well you're you know you show people
[42:18] your revenue
[42:20] so what if like you have a hiccup in
[42:22] your revenue falls
[42:24] um well i'm like dude the revenue would
[42:27] not be as high
[42:28] if i never reported it
[42:31] so that's just a risk i mean there and
[42:34] then the other risk building in public
[42:36] is
[42:37] everybody sees what you're doing your
[42:38] competitors
[42:40] if you're worried about competition you
[42:42] shouldn't really start a company
[42:44] that way especially in this market that
[42:46] we're in actually
[42:47] i i actually have a specific question on
[42:50] that and i want to
[42:51] understand succinctly your view on it
[42:54] very briefly because i have a couple
[42:56] more questions coming in how does copy.i
[42:59] view competition
[43:01] i mean we going into it chris and i were
[43:04] like hey we're going to have
[43:06] 100 200 300
[43:09] 400 competitors are we ready to go
[43:15] that was it it was like all right
[43:18] what are you gonna do all right so you
[43:20] need you need things that work
[43:22] that you can do that other people aren't
[43:23] as good at
[43:25] and so we knew okay if it's competition
[43:27] yeah they might clone the product
[43:28] maybe entirely at least the early
[43:31] product before you can build
[43:33] in layer layer and technical complexity
[43:35] that makes everything better
[43:37] so then you got your you're about uh
[43:39] distribution
[43:40] so that's why we're all in on twitter
[43:42] like all in
[43:43] 100 so when you go all in
[43:47] on one platform it has a huge advantage
[43:50] and and it's on us now to really
[43:54] extract the maximum value out of those
[43:56] advantages
[43:57] i think we've done an adequate job
[43:59] [Music]
[44:00] um but you know those advantages don't
[44:03] solve
[44:04] those big core business problems you
[44:06] still have to build a company you know
[44:07] you can't just make it
[44:09] sound and look like a startup it
[44:10] actually has to work as a real business
[44:13] right like i want to pop on that to you
[44:16] and i'm curious have you viewed
[44:18] competition before joining on
[44:20] copy generally your thesis around built
[44:23] in public
[44:24] you're much more likely to be copied
[44:25] which you know technically is true right
[44:26] because people can see
[44:28] what you're you know building on and
[44:30] they can simply clone because there's
[44:31] everybody's attention is here
[44:33] like how do you sort of mentally wrestle
[44:35] with that or you don't
[44:36] you know you don't even care like paul
[44:38] just like say i don't care
[44:40] i yeah i think that competition is
[44:43] is more of a traditional like going
[44:45] after competitive analysis is more of a
[44:47] traditional marketing play
[44:48] than it is marketing in the new world i
[44:50] think it's important to know
[44:52] what what other people are doing to be
[44:53] able to see that but i would never in a
[44:56] million years formulate my entire
[44:57] marketing strategy
[44:59] around what other people are doing i
[45:01] want to be able to control
[45:02] the story and what we are doing and
[45:04] build something special
[45:06] i don't think it's possible to build
[45:07] something special when you're looking
[45:09] behind your shoulder
[45:10] i just don't um so i'm
[45:14] keenly i've been keenly aware of
[45:16] competitors and even even like
[45:17] just when i'm doing consulting for
[45:19] myself who are the other people out
[45:20] there that are offering the same thing
[45:22] but i'm more likely to try to make
[45:23] friends with those people than try to
[45:25] ever publicly combat them or copy what
[45:28] they're doing
[45:29] because relationship building is the
[45:31] name of the game so
[45:32] the more that we can build relationships
[45:33] with people uh whether that's
[45:35] competitors even um
[45:37] or or just anybody else i think that
[45:40] builds a lot better for
[45:41] for a company than saying like okay
[45:44] copy copywhatever.com is
[45:47] copying us and they want to uh you know
[45:50] we need to check out what they're doing
[45:51] like yeah we can be aware of it but
[45:53] what's going to move the needle really
[45:55] is it going to be
[45:57] copying somebody else's fee somebody
[45:58] else's features worrying about other
[45:59] people copying our features or are we
[46:01] going to take it to the next level do we
[46:03] have the right team do we have what we
[46:05] need infrastructure to go forward
[46:06] that's what i value much more
[46:10] gotcha all right so um one more
[46:13] question um what was one of the most
[46:15] important things you had to unlearn
[46:18] um from college and going through your
[46:21] first couple jobs that
[46:22] got you where you are paul
[46:26] i didn't learn much in college so that
[46:29] was easy
[46:30] so yeah you didn't have to learn a lot
[46:33] because
[46:33] no honestly i had a degree in business
[46:36] economics and accounting business
[46:38] administration so
[46:40] all the economics was very useful like
[46:43] makes sense it's a world view
[46:44] it explains incentives and how things
[46:47] work and
[46:48] how that machine's put together on the
[46:50] accounting side
[46:51] um you know i knew i wanted to become a
[46:53] cpa which i did become a cpa
[46:56] we didn't even learn like quickbooks so
[47:00] like how how are you gonna graduate
[47:01] someone with a degree in accounting when
[47:03] you never taught how to use quickbooks
[47:05] or any accounting software for that
[47:06] matter
[47:07] and then the second thing was in
[47:09] marketing literally
[47:11] we never talked about like how to use
[47:14] facebook ads
[47:15] google ads anything i'm like man this is
[47:18] so stupid
[47:19] like no one people are gonna graduate
[47:20] not know how to the first thing about
[47:22] starting a business so i kind of knew at
[47:24] the time
[47:25] okay this is not really going to get me
[47:28] anywhere
[47:29] and this was that was back in 2009 when
[47:32] i graduated
[47:33] so i spent three years and or two years
[47:36] in public accounting three years at a
[47:38] hedge fund as a cfo
[47:40] three years at a startup and then four
[47:42] years
[47:43] at a venture capital firm before i felt
[47:46] like all right now i actually have
[47:48] i feel like i'm reasonably
[47:52] in a good position like to take this
[47:54] next step
[47:56] um but yeah no didn't have to unlearn
[48:00] anything because i i kind of knew what
[48:02] it was even at the time
[48:03] like okay this is something people do at
[48:06] this point in human history we're still
[48:09] doing this it's very expensive so i
[48:11] graduated in three years instead of
[48:13] staying
[48:13] four and doing a master's which was
[48:16] great
[48:17] but i think at the end of the day like
[48:20] just the amount of content blake's
[48:21] putting out there like you want to learn
[48:23] marketing
[48:25] youtube and some podcasts will get you
[48:27] up to speed really really quickly all
[48:29] the right people
[48:30] so um blake well is there something that
[48:33] you have to
[48:34] learn from college yeah i mean i was a
[48:36] little bit more naive in college than
[48:38] paul like i didn't know anything i'm
[48:39] cynical man yeah maybe you're
[48:41] maybe so maybe so so i i went in like i
[48:45] had no clue what i wanted to do
[48:46] i was actually i was two years behind
[48:48] because i was a i was a missionary in
[48:50] france for two years at right after high
[48:52] school so
[48:53] everybody else is going off to college
[48:55] i'm doing that for two years and then i
[48:57] go to college after
[48:58] so i'm going i'm an old man when i start
[49:00] college at 21
[49:01] and then i had no clue what i wanted to
[49:03] do i started working in seo and then
[49:06] that's when i really started having my
[49:07] marketing courses
[49:08] kind of at that same time and so i get
[49:11] into these more
[49:12] advanced marketing classes and they'd be
[49:13] talking about this great new fad
[49:16] called search engine optimization that's
[49:19] like how they'd say it every single time
[49:21] optimization and the things that they
[49:24] would teach were just so ridiculously
[49:25] irrelevant and not close to what actual
[49:27] good seo was and that was kind of
[49:30] a wake-up call like oh okay so these
[49:32] people don't know anything about the
[49:33] practical side of what i'm about to face
[49:35] in this in this world with my career and
[49:38] so
[49:40] yeah i mean i i kind of had to unlearn
[49:43] just
[49:43] blindly trusting organizations like
[49:46] college
[49:47] i went in just blindly trusting because
[49:49] everybody in my life was telling me you
[49:50] have to get a degree or else
[49:52] but they never finished that sentence
[49:54] they never said or else what
[49:56] they just said or else and i've learned
[49:58] oh that that doesn't even exist there's
[50:00] no or else like there are a lot of
[50:02] viable options like do you think
[50:03] barrackette is going to go to college
[50:04] that just going to be a billionaire
[50:05] before he goes to college he's not going
[50:07] to need to go to college
[50:09] yeah what are they going to teach them
[50:12] it's just kind of a joke
[50:14] yeah it's a kind of a joke shout out to
[50:16] barricate
[50:17] if the folks who are listening uh don't
[50:19] know who it is blake you wanna tell him
[50:21] he's who's what 12 year old yeah he's
[50:23] just some 12 year old kid that's way
[50:24] better than all of us at everything
[50:28] including bullying in public oh my god
[50:30] he started he started learning to code
[50:32] six months ago and has launched
[50:33] like 10 projects on product time this
[50:36] year and
[50:37] took his got it they just hit five
[50:39] thousand follows
[50:42] his his villain public game is way
[50:44] better than
[50:45] me or blake like probably combined just
[50:48] his weight yeah his way of engaging is
[50:51] like
[50:52] insane insane i can tell you what i was
[50:54] doing at 12
[50:55] i was definitely not billing in public i
[50:58] was mostly just worried about
[50:59] what what you know what grades to get
[51:01] and all that so
[51:02] one last question and i was trying to
[51:04] learn how to code and it was c
[51:07] and i bought this book this thick yeah
[51:09] the first
[51:10] thousand pages was on modules and it was
[51:13] totally abstract and i just
[51:14] i threw it away i threw the book away
[51:16] yeah i was i was gathering change in the
[51:17] couch cushion scope
[51:18] my hot pockets by myself at the store
[51:22] that was 12. good times play good times
[51:25] all right
[51:25] so one last question we'll wrap up this
[51:27] this is coming from glenn
[51:29] um the twitter handles at uh
[51:32] uh the flow agency i'd love to know from
[51:36] your esteemed guests
[51:37] what anxieties they had when they
[51:39] started building in public
[51:41] and how they addressed them please i'll
[51:43] wait uh for
[51:44] actually let's do paul and then i'll
[51:46] wrap it up with blake
[51:49] paul give us a real answer you can't say
[51:50] no anxiety is unlearning
[51:53] give us a real look make something up at
[51:55] least right make something up
[51:57] no look when when you're on twit like
[52:00] you join twitter
[52:01] you're literally just trying to get
[52:03] likes so you'll you'll post whatever the
[52:05] hell you need to to get a like so if
[52:07] it's posting
[52:08] am like hey i got my first customer hey
[52:11] that's a tweet we'll try it out
[52:13] so there are a million tweets to get no
[52:14] engagement and then you find something
[52:16] that does and you do more of it so this
[52:18] is a
[52:18] this is definitely a positive feedback
[52:20] loop especially for people building in
[52:22] public
[52:23] so it's it's i think some people have
[52:26] gone on twitter and done it and then
[52:28] they they will leave but
[52:30] what i'm trying to figure out is this
[52:32] core group that's doing it now will they
[52:34] be consistent in doing it
[52:36] um will they be able to see results in
[52:39] it so like
[52:40] even the you know the anxiety would come
[52:42] from
[52:43] being alone like loneliness as a founder
[52:46] and just anxiety of doing and you run
[52:47] into a problem you can't solve
[52:49] with this community boom you get all the
[52:51] answers you need so if you say i'm
[52:53] running
[52:53] this issue one founder said um
[52:57] you know it's hard there's burnout like
[53:01] what do i do i'm not able to grow things
[53:03] as quickly i'm shipping a lot but it's
[53:05] not really working those are the core
[53:07] things that like
[53:07] your your community can really help with
[53:10] so what i'm hoping for
[53:11] is that the community attracts people
[53:14] like more knowledge um found like high
[53:17] level founder knowledge
[53:19] that i think is probably still missing
[53:21] so that when someone has
[53:23] you know a question like that somebody
[53:24] can come in with some real insights to
[53:26] help them out rather than just like
[53:28] encouragement which encouragement's fine
[53:30] but it's not that's not going to solve
[53:32] the problem
[53:32] when you started billing in public what
[53:34] were some anxieties you had and how to
[53:35] address them
[53:36] yeah real quick here um i my anxieties
[53:39] weren't around like what i was going to
[53:40] say
[53:40] or how it was going to be perceived my
[53:42] biggest anxiety
[53:43] always and to this day is i hope that as
[53:47] my account keeps growing that my content
[53:49] doesn't start sucking more
[53:50] because when you get into like 10 000
[53:54] follower range which is where i'm
[53:56] narrowing in on that now um
[53:59] everything kind of works a little bit
[54:00] for you when you get to a certain point
[54:02] when you're just starting out nothing
[54:04] works and then when something does it's
[54:05] like this
[54:06] aha moment and you keep grinding from
[54:08] there and figuring stuff out
[54:10] you get to a certain point where
[54:12] everything kind of at least works enough
[54:14] for you not to be embarrassed by it
[54:16] um that's dangerous to me and i get
[54:18] anxious about like
[54:20] i want to make sure that i have ways
[54:21] that i can still tell
[54:23] that this is valuable to people because
[54:25] the likes might not be a good metric for
[54:27] that anymore
[54:28] that's that's the big thing but i found
[54:30] that if i'm still able to generate
[54:31] conversations that's probably a fairly
[54:33] good
[54:34] way of knowing that i'm not i'm not like
[54:37] hitting my i haven't hit my peak yet i'm
[54:39] not still
[54:40] working up to that but that that would
[54:42] be the number one thing
[54:43] the the one takeaway i got from there is
[54:45] that clearly
[54:47] shots were fired paul and you and me
[54:50] because we just passed 10k or whatever
[54:52] number and then he said he's already
[54:53] indicated insinuating that our content
[54:55] sucks so
[54:56] yeah whatever
[54:58] [Laughter]
[55:02] dude i just got 2600 likes on a post
[55:05] about
[55:06] naming a startup like six rules and but
[55:09] that post
[55:10] i've given that can we address that for
[55:12] a second
[55:13] says the guy who literally earlier in
[55:14] the podcast says i don't care for likes
[55:16] i don't look at likes i don't look at me
[55:18] there we go what you're talking about
[55:21] likes correlating with like content
[55:23] this was actually a high quality content
[55:25] post because because i've actually
[55:27] delivered this to people one-on-one a
[55:29] lot and it's a
[55:30] mistake founders fall into this trap
[55:32] about what they named their company
[55:35] so i was like okay here are the six
[55:36] rules and then i try to like
[55:39] you know great names are worth millions
[55:41] everybody wants to like that tweet right
[55:44] but that got like 837 000 impressions
[55:47] so people i think they don't understand
[55:50] how
[55:51] far the reach can go on twitter yeah
[55:53] yeah that's another thing too people
[55:54] don't understand like
[55:56] how many free impressions you can get
[55:58] just by
[55:59] pumping out like you know organic
[56:01] content i appreciate you spending your
[56:02] time with me
[56:03] and where can people follow you or
[56:06] tick tock i'm on tumblr
[56:10] and only fans my only fans is
[56:13] onlyfans.com
[56:15] hey blake and i share all my my deepest
[56:18] darkest secrets
[56:20] for my audience but where really though
[56:23] like where can people find you
[56:24] and paul i'm in memphis
[56:30] just fire paul just get him out i'm just
[56:31] gonna i'm on twitter at hey blake
[56:34] thank you follow me before you follow
[56:36] paul i'm at paul yakubian the twitter
[56:39] and that's that's the only place i want
[56:40] you to find that i don't want you
[56:42] look at me on linkedin anywhere else
[56:44] don't don't ping me on there
[56:46] at polycubian all right thank you
[56:49] copycats
[56:50] excited uh for wrapping this up and
[56:52] we'll i'll see you around on slack oh
[56:54] see you around on twitter all right
[56:56] sounds good

## Full Text (No Timestamps)

[Music] welcome everybody um welcome to the second episode of a billion public podcast i am your host kp and today i have with me an incredible duo um most both of them definitely don't need production in in the in the building public space but they are um polycubian uh who's the founder at copy.ai and blake ml who's now the cmo at copy.ai so copycats welcome thank you it's gonna be here yeah thanks for having me i um for the folks you know who are listening to this podcast for the first time um building public is of course you know near and dear to my heart and it it goes back to two three years ago when i was first on twitter in this twitter universe and i had no followers and i was swimming i felt like in a sea of noise and like you know a lot of a lot of random tweets and just discovered this beautiful signal where if you put out stuff consistently and you know rally people who believed in the same beliefs around around the problem you want to solve um you will actually be able to build the terrific community and i've seen this work in a couple places you know of course um we talked to martin brucey earlier uh in the podcast and you know we're going to talk to a few more but one of my favorite observations in the last maybe 12 months has been watching paul you know execute this playbook uh to almost great perfection and of course you know uh i know you you'll laugh but but he's done a terrific job as has taken on this building public mantra and put it put his own spin on it and uh i want to address actually a little bit around like where did he find inspiration um before getting started with billing in public because it was not very obvious six months ago so paul tell us yeah elon musk uh does it and he has a ton of followers and can raise any amount of money he wants and build any company he wants and rate and attract any talent he wants love it i mean so that was it it's that it was literally that clear and then the second case study was donald trump donald trump had like 90 million followers and got elected president because there was no filter between him and the people he was trying to reach so it's a very one-on-one direct communication but at scale and it was real time so like i think all of those factors kind of point to the same thing which is twitter can be this insanely high leverage point to build a real audience and and build like some something that's super powerful that has a really long long term advantage to it i'll i'll pop on the same question over to you blake when did you discover the magic of being in public for me it was it was more learning in public for a really really long time so i've been creating content on starting mostly on linkedin back when it wasn't so boring and platitudinal it's worse than it's ever been right now but uh like i was creating content before it was actually acceptable to do it when it was still like a recruiting resume website i was making content because i was a crazy person and thought that would work and it did so i was learning in public and sharing what i was learning along the way i really didn't become more like a maker and build in public until the past year or so i've been doing side projects forever mostly that looked like consulting but then recently i just like i want to put some products together i want to try my hand at some digital products see what i can do and just scrap together this really janky tech stack of like gumroad and you know free website and whatever and it worked it worked really well it wasn't like massive but it did work and so i started seeing the value of just putting that out there too not just sharing what i was learning but sharing what i was learning and doing and then just like creating this flywheel of content through that and that's that pretty much led me to uh getting more active on twitter and the rest is history love that well well there's not history i can still i get so really flame out here so let's so actually i i want to get to that segment where you um you're now cmo at copy and um well actually for the for the for the listeners and for the viewers paul do you want to quickly summarize what copy.ai does sure so it's an ai copywriting app and we use an ai platform called gpt3 which is the world's most powerful ai model for language generation and that was that was launched in summer of this year and since i had used gpt2 i was expecting three to be really good and so the first people that really saw gpg3 were on twitter because that's where you that's the fastest place to find like demos and early beta use cases and so it was immediately in my timeline i immediately recognized the power of it and um thought okay well this is this has got to be the next big thing and i became the unofficial gpt3 hype man on twitter and because i was doing investing i was like trying to find anyone building on it like what are the big things going to be um and trying to invest in those things and at the same time trying to get access as fast as possible which we did my co-founder chris liu and i and then we just started pumping out mvps and like launching them on twitter so if you don't have money uh you can't really run ads right so twitter is the best platform for generating finding your first users and what we realized very quickly was each time we launched anything we would get more followers which would give us more users the next time we launched there was there's the iteration domino effect that had occurs yes and then there's content that it's just like spewing out of these side projects people want to know everything about it your first dollar of revenue your second dollar of revenue like what are you thinking about doing a feature request like a customer testimonial all of that is content that people are generally curious about so when you start posting it you're basically sharing your journey with people you know that are on twitter so at first they're gonna be like dude everybody's really encouraging and happy for you and this is something i've noticed since the summer a tweet from someone that says just made my first dollar of revenue i will i'm always liking and retweeting that but those have gone from getting like 15 likes maybe 30 likes to getting like 600 700 800 likes on it and so a big part of of that of my like the thing i want to do with twitter is to basically reinforce that as a positive thing yeah so because i know everybody wants to imitate success and we're all looking to see who's growing and whatever but that honestly that one tweet i just made my first dollar revenue will inspire more people to build right and where i'm all about inspiring people to build i think what one theme that sort of um consistently shows up in your feed and of course even in blake's two is how much you both cheer on the sidelines for others and and their micro wins and small wins right because you know i think one of the um harshest things that i've seen in the last 10 15 years is is how founder culture tends to be celebrating the hustle like the hours i worked or this or that this and there's actually not enough gratitude that goes into small wins so like someone like you co-signing on some maker who made like a dollar you know by selling a product on gumroad or maybe they got their first sas customer actually means the world to that maker or a founder right and i think it's one theme that i've seen both of you do really well and it speaks to sort of like the ethos of building in public you know for steering in public as well yes yeah absolutely because that was me in august i had three dollars a month in recruiting revenue you know there we go the next day i had we got another subscriber we had six dollars a month in recruiting revenue and i posted a tweet like growing 100 day every day with all the fire emojis right and then somebody in the comments does the math he's like dude if you grow a hundred percent day every day for the next 30 days you're gonna be like this huge company and i was like i was like let's plan on it right let's plan on it so that's where i that's like my that's the neighborhood i'm coming from so people that were following me back then i might have had let's see at that point maybe like 1500 followers um you know 10x that everybody that starts following you after that they miss that journey they don't realize it right so i i you know i i try to let people know hey look when when you have a startup that does strike something that people want you can grow extremely fast so in less than five months we're at 60 000 a month in revenue right and our in mrr yeah uh and yeah recurring revenue this is a huge it's a huge jump right so how did you go from taglines.ai which does one one tool which i think we ended up getting to like 300 a month in mrr which is maybe 20 20 or 30 paying customers how do you go from there and build the next thing with what you learned from that so that's all in my timeline which is fantastic because it's like my history my vlog like this is what we did moving to like the part about cmo and actually i'm curious before you announce that you were hiring on twitter uh paul what was going on in your mind about given how built in public you are how like the company was formed around that culture what was going on in your mind about what your first hire would look like and what you were looking from that person yeah so we uh you know chris and i before before we even started building we have our own understanding of how seed stage companies work and because you're investors right yeah we're yeah we're angel investors so the first one is does this company have traction or not and it was our viewpoint that most people should not quit their day job until they hit traction with something because it's so hard to do the second viewpoint was that a real mvp given all the tech that we have access to now shouldn't take more than a week or maybe a few weeks to get an actual mvp out the door so we use that to really rapidly build launch and iterate so we knew okay we're not quitting like our dream jobs unless we get serious traction in something and we and my hope was that the traction would be a strong enough signal that it was a no-brainer right it's not riding the fence like oh we got to you know three months in we're at 800 a month in revenue right it's like we have a little bit of traction but it's unclear that it's gonna it's gonna be very easy to scale this so once we um hit traction and we knew okay time time to like to go full time on this the second thing we knew was that the people you want to hire won't work for you until you have like a serious amount of traction right not just like 3 000 a month in revenue like you're not i can't get blake i can't get blake on board right blake's got a million offers so how am i gonna get the caliber of talent i'm gonna need to actually execute the real vision and the the uh the game plan was chris you and me we're gonna take this as far as and as hard as we can on our own right we're gonna build in public we're gonna hope that we can actually recruit talent off this building public playbook which is people can see us building and they get interested and maybe they get aligned with the vision and the mission so maybe either they reach out to us or when we reach out to them they've already they already know who we are so that was the playbook um so i think blake came on we we literally hit like 50 000 a month a day or two before he joined that is atypical for startups okay but the nice thing is when you if you do find meg attraction um you hope that that you have a game plan that's gonna work so the problem is you're you're now late to building the team out so we're like four months behind building a team but the team we have we're hoping is the right team that we need to actually take it to the next level right what were some qualities that you saw in blake or his profile and his playbooks that made you go okay that's my cmo bring it on i'm not a big fan of resumes so for a marketer i was looking for since we're totally like marketing focus as a platform right we're extremely heavily focused on organic marketing tools right which means that the marketer you want to bring on board needs to understand organic channels they need to understand how to build an audience they need they need to be data driven like hey what's working what's not working and then they need like uh they need hopefully have built side projects so they have like this creative energy that is doesn't like the if they're working a company that doesn't stop them from wanting to pursue these passion things because that that's a core focus of our tools and then if they're generating content like how literally how much content are they able to generate and then i saw blake i'm like oh this is the guy so you almost saw him before he applied it was no it's like the same like he showed up in uh he showed up in wit's thread but yeah and uh the bad unicorn founder woody anderson and uh yeah it's awesome uh atl and um i was like blake who's this blake guy look at his profile for like six seconds i'm like oh this this is this is who we want instant dm you know just like it took it from there just like it was we had a funny dm thread going on like it's like yeah you need help with something i'm like i need a podcast uh i need my own podcast so i can help you set that up or whatever and then i was like and also i need a 90-page growth plan can you help with that he's like yeah this is a joke so it was like instantly i for i knew that he has this output i knew that um not only they have followers because a lot of marketers on twitter they buy followers but he had real engagement on his tweets and then just from like personality you know if you're if you're a marketer you become like a core voice of the company right is this somebody that you want representing your company and uh blake's awesome like like incredibly nice humble and helpful and like this building in public thing like you said it's not just about you're you know just pumping out promotional content but really are you actually cheerleading other people are you helping other people and and uh you know i'd see threads like where people just offer help it's like hey reply if you need help with something and i'll i'll help you back but those are core values and virtues for us so from your from your vantage point blake what uh made this decision um inevitable for you to join copy and from from also from your i'm assuming long-term passion to build in public like how did these two worlds collide and what made it inevitable just the money yeah wait i thought paul was paying in bitcoin but yeah no it's so yeah so like honestly what i was looking at i've mentioned this to paul a billion times but the fact that i've never been able to work on a work at a company where i actually use the tool was huge i've worked in really boring industries worked at agencies and been in a lot of different industries none of which i would actually use any of their stuff and that's a big thing for a marketer to be able to be your own customer is huge being able to like go into the tool and automatically identify opportunities for growth there but at the same time get value out of the tool like simultaneously never had that before so that was a really big selling point beyond that like it's real it was really clear that my skill set personality all that good stuff would fit really well with this company and so the more that i researched the more i talked with paul um it just became clear like yes this is a good fit and i wasn't actively looking to leave my other job until i really started talking with paul and then i was actively looking to leave my job right like because i realized that even though i had it good where i was i was playing it safe at a company where i just would never get my hands on the tool i didn't get to work with tons of people all the time because like i was managing a remote team but it was just really there wasn't a lot going on it was a very traditional company and so the idea that i could take something over inject my voice and personality into it really make a difference and be able to attribute like because like marketing up until that point was word of mouth twitter right so like there's ground zero right there everything that's done above that i can directly contribute to and that was huge for me um also just the fact that they had insurance and they were a startup was it was a really really good selling point because i was really nervous that we weren't going to have insurance and if you know anything about paying for insurance outside of your employer it's like insanely expensive right so that was like the final little puzzle piece to fall in and then from there was like yeah i'm joining i'm doing this thing i love that so so now that paul um you picked your first hire in public is this going to be the hiring playbook at copy yeah so we hired our second uh person zach lee he built in public wow so his uh when quiet is his his handle but he um he built a company or a side project called potion there were two potions his was one of them and he ended up selling it but he had been following me since we launched and uh he said diet inspired him to build that project which he ended up selling so in in that time period you know that was like that was basically the story and um i think chris chris and he connected and then there was already an energy so like this especially in a remote environment you cannot like remote first company how do you convey energy like that right there's no vibe in an office so you need something to to like replicate that and take it to the next level because i've got like a family and kids you know living in the other rooms my house it's not the right it's not the same vibe right that you might get like being in a cramped office with your first hires and it's totally different so without that how do you build it how do you actually build a culture and onboard you know consistently so that everybody's excited about the project and waking up in the morning and so it's something that's super important so when um i i mean of course i was following parts recent parts of the story one of my favorite again another um moments that i thought i stopped scrolling which is a pretty big deal right like getting people to stop scrolling is when you mention something around onboarding and you were looking you know you're looking for advice and guidance around how to onboard in a remote first you know setup and i thought that was pretty vulnerable you know for a founder to come out and just say okay i need some guidance and help um in in onboarding because you know people you know people who don't live in the building public camp are very defensive about their strengths and weaknesses and things they know things that don't know and i think paul one thing that's refreshing um the way you lead uh copy or you know uh the new wave of leaders in my view is how vulnerable and open they are in sharing hey i don't know what the heck i'm doing here so help me out what what was your sort of genesis behind that tweet and that did does it mean something to you or you just did it i literally don't know what i'm doing man i don't know what to tell you he should be the one singer of this copy ai founder bears all right look i got what i'm doing i i swear to you i don't have a clue and i i hear people all the time talking about how they have imposter syndrome i'm like everybody can't if everybody has imposter syndrome then we just need to cut the crap right right like okay if you have this weakness how are you gonna fix it well you need to ask somebody for help twitter is like literally i don't know 300 million people that are scrolling their feed in order to find a place to actually say something that adds value right so now any question i have any problem it's a tweet and the answer is there in seconds right well so it's a superpower it's a total superpower i'll share a personal uh uh anecdote on that so a couple weeks ago i'm not sure if you guys saw but my my wife asked me um okay i need some book recommendations like that book recommendations or parent parent book recommendations um that you can ask your friends and i'm like what do you mean i have no friends i mean i have friends but what i would just ask twitter they always tell me and she did not believe it but i'm i just tweeted out and we had 65 books recommended 65 so there's a whole inclined shelf in the next room the baby nursery filled with all the books and she it blew her mind and she was like i can't believe you had so many dad friends and i think the answer is really not like that you have dad friends or not it's really about like how twitter's algorithm works in a way that it surfaces your content and tweets to the people who tweet about that topic all the time right so and then there's also of course a community around you so why not tap into it um right that was one of my recent favorite memories i was like wow that's the power of twitter not just in tech beyond um yes yeah and so that that's exactly right so the twitter is a community built around yourself so if you tweet about politics then you're going to get people that are having certain expectations right they're coming to you they're going to that's going to influence what they're tweeting about so i've heard time and time again hey uh twitter is great until you hit 10 000 followers right and then it just devolves right i've hit 15.6 k it's still amazing like i'm very focused on the content i'm putting out there right i don't want this i don't want to have a hot take yeah just to generate interest or likes or whatever i have no interest in that at all i feel like that ruins the experience of that community for a lot of people right yeah paul graham right brilliant mind has a million followers i would never trade his follower base for mine ever despite the fact that he's got a million because i look at what people tweet at him and i'm like i don't ever want this to happen to me in my life right he could be an influencer but man the amount of like problems and negativity that he attracts is off the charts right i'm like why why do this to yourself i mean you know i mean it's just it seems to me you just want to be paul y and not paul g so yeah i mean look not everybody's got the same things that they want out of it but in my head in my megalomaniac head i have this impression that this community will continue to grow like we'll get i'm at 15k i don't care about followers you'll never hear me see me tweet about how many followers i have or got that just doesn't happen because i don't care what the number is i care about the quality so if you the thing that i'm thinking about and you're helping to to make this happen and blake is too is if you had a hundred thousand people that want to be at the edge of tech in real time in a community where everyone's supportive yet when something gets launched like take a any make private maker communities it's great for support which we have in twitter anyway right but what they never have is when you launch math like it could be a massive success you know a million people could see this project it just doesn't happen so then they flip back and go to product hunt or they go to hacker news you know people that launch on product hunt that already have even a tiny twitter following will get four times as much i think yeah from twitter then they do the product on launch yeah which means twitter is the community so this is something like you have to go all in on one i went all in on twitter it's very um very purposefully so thank you so are you um blake are you taking notes of how many times he's saying twitter is a community because i think every time he says that we should take a shot or something do it we're here we're here to bring the future to people to keep it optimistic to to create a can-do attitude my feeling with elon musk is that while he's doing these awesome things i don't feel like enough people are inspired to actually try it because they think what he's doing is impossible right right it's like several orders of magnitude yeah i'm not elon musk i'm not albert einstein you know like that's that's the thought whereas me i'm trying to break it down i'm like this guy is a regular guy like how how does he construct his blueprint and road map and strategy so that he's able to pull off impossible stuff because if you can learn from him on how he did that you can pull off impossible stuff and um yeah so those lessons have not been lost on me and we continue to use them now of course i mean so that leads me to another segment which is um the notion of is it marketing or is it sales so blake this is probably more irrelevant to you like how do you view building public do you think is it more marketing or is it more sales um how do you view the the art of building public um yeah it's um the correct answer is that it's everything when you do it correctly it's nothing when you do it incorrectly so that's that's the same with any marketing tactic like it will result in nothing if you do it really bad if if you do it well and build relationships it will drive the results that you're looking for and so when you're building in public yeah up front like the the initial thing is it looks like marketing right it looks like because inherently if you're building in public the right way you're not just always pushing some call to action you don't look at what what paul is posting and you you don't think like every freaking day he's just pushing me to sign up for copy.ai like of course he wants people to do that right what he's sharing though is here's where we're at as a company here's what we're learning here's what i'm learning here's what you could try out here's me trying stuff out either looking like a fool or looking like a success along the way like he's showing the whole gamut of everything so yeah build in public can lead to sales really effectively but not because you're just trying to push something it's more because people start trusting your story they start trusting you as a person which leads them to trust the company which leads them to want to use the tool that the company offers it's a really simple funnel that works and you don't have to explicitly just guide people there like people aren't that dumb they know what what's expected like they know paul is the ceo of copy ai they kind of understand what action he would like them to take over time right but the way that the way that we talk about it it's not hey you should join it's more like hey here's here's some cool stories here's here's stuff you could try out i'm here to give you free knowledge this is what we're learning you don't have to make this mistake yourself we're throwing all this stuff at them and then they trust the person then they trust the company and this is why like people like dave gerhart have done really well over their careers uh love him hate him whatever he makes a podcast bearing out all the secrets of him and like and he used to have david cancel the ceo of drift on the podcast all the time too and just like get really specific with stuff right and then people liked drift as a brand a lot more not so surprisingly than than some of these other chat bots because they knew them and they knew the people behind them so it really becomes important when you're building in public especially behind a brand that you attach the brand to people which lets you tell stories and weaves them through this tapestry of eventually becoming sales but it's it's a lot more nuanced than the typical promotion culture that we've been living in right and it also ties into what we were trying to say earlier too is that it's not always about you right when you build in public yes you may share an update but that doesn't have to be always about like your product or um you know the number of signups you got that day could be about the problem you're solving you know a customer quote customer story a customer win you know i see you guys do that all the time like you know like pick someone who built a funny crazy thing with copy.ai and then highlight them right and um and those are the things that resonate you know um okay so if we don't have any comment on that uh i actually i have a comment go on i don't like that question i'm gonna edit that part out of this but well look because i get out this is an important topic yeah because i get asked you know and i i just see other makers you know not complaining but just like not it's not happy about the tweets that i make um saying basically hey just posting your mrr numbers isn't really building public i think that my the big thing i don't want people to miss is that when you look at social media in general there are very few spots where people are are trying to be open about you know how to build a company right i think that market for people who are interested in that is insanely big millions and millions of people so when you build in public if you go the i'm gonna go like it's just sales route i mean that's every corporate twitter handle is a sales route cta they get zero engagement so no one really cares so what you have to realize is the first thing you realize is this is people this is not followers this is a person right so once you realize it's a person you just have to like literally be a human yeah right write your tweet like you're talking to a human being who has you know might be interested or might not be get their attention and like explain what what this post is about and what they should think about it so so for most people like that will follow me they'll come in through like an mrr tweet it's basically the top of funnel like hey who's this guy growing this company what is the company well in the tweet i don't even put our company name in there right so it's not i'm not promoting the company i'm just saying hey i'm doing something that's kind of interesting and people happen to like this the fact that they can see this happen in real time right and people then want to like dm me hey how'd it like give any tips for billy in public i said check out my twitter timeline it's all here right it's all done laid out for you there yeah it's all laid out like i'd never delete a tweet so so i think i'll say one last thing yeah the whole point of this social media network is to surface the important things people are doing and like the vision and like how do you turn something like this into a movement right well the way you would do it is you have a few companies that do it and become really successful being very open so there are a number of venture-backed companies that are built that way and um and then you continue to just like layer it on and i think a lot of those companies they tend to be they grow and be like become more insular about how much they share yeah you know where it's like okay we're not interacting as much because we have this other thing to do so the hard part for me is like what's the right balance because what we do want to do is still foster as much as we can in that community without like spending too much time right on twitter i i'm sure you get that you gotta ask that question all the time too right like paul what are you doing how are you being the ceo of a company when all you're doing is spending time on twitter but people miss the entire point it it's it's a lot of being the ceo of a company so much of it is actually building the narrative yes story a movement for folks to rally around including investors including future hires like blake including your potential customers you know and it's not trying to close it on day one you know and um so i'm sure you get you get asked that all the time because people ask me that all the time and i'm like you're not getting it that's not the point it's everything it's how you reach anyone yeah like you ask them so okay how are you gonna reach how are you gonna find a um how are you gonna recruit someone they're like oh we'll post a job of posting we'll post that on linkedin indeed angel list something or it's on our website we hope someone clicks on it and like actually applies right first question we're gonna get in the interview is like okay how much this is gonna pay right and what what what percentage of those applicants are gonna be a good fit like one in ten so how much how many resources at the company level are you allocating to actually promote these openings and then to review them and like kpi i just don't have time man yeah like i got to build an awesome team blake quit his job the day like i gave him an offer it was like three days you know our our second hire we talked to him the next day he had an offer and accepted and quit the next day okay wow that's a great customer yeah three we made accepts the offer on monday starts tomorrow like there's power in in the vision and like understanding the company you're going to join and these are these are really big decisions for people these are life-changing decisions right right career-changing decisions so how do this other way the normal way people do it i don't think it's sustainable and when i look back on i'm like maybe that's why so many people are unsatisfied with their work because they don't they didn't get the first part right which is am i aligned with the mission this company's on right not just like okay am i going to get this title and then i can advance or and then once i have that then i can quit i don't you don't want your new hire to be like all right great this is gonna be awesome work here for three years and then i'm quitting you know and doing my next day you want them to be excited you know for the long run you know ideally i think so yeah so i'm going to be uh switching over now to the audience q a we had of course uh some questions from tweets and from twitter so i'm going to you know pop them up here in my screen and start asking them this one comes from reza um question for blake as the first marketing hire at an early real estate startup what's your framework for defining and prioritizing marketing programs yeah so uh established marketing programs that's that's the framework establishment yeah step one yeah so honestly it was coming in identifying what's absolutely crucial but isn't there and then the rest of like the cherry on top ideas come later right paul and i have had meetings where we just have a thousand and one ideas so many cool things we could do there's so many ways you could take this technology and the marketing for the technology all that good stuff when you boil it down though you have to be able to focus on a couple of things that actually move the needle up front so for us obviously there's there's some infrastructure stuff happening like hiring people that there are clear gaps with community or for content creation or for marketing operations whatever it is for whatever company there are going to be gaps that are readily apparent and building out a team is important because i can't do everything nor do i want to do everything all at once there's there's some structural stuff like setting up we use notion so setting up all the documentation you need for people to come on board new hires down the road setting up what programs we actually want to invest in and what's really important what's the mission of of marketing right now and how is that going to evolve there's a lot it's a lot of writing honestly like that's the biggest thing the more that we can write the better that we're going to perform over time because even if we write things that are bad ideas at least they're out there and we can start editing and finding the things that really do move the needle but you can't if you keep it all in your mind or keep it all in a zoom meeting without writing it down it all gets lost instead of just like needing to edit out some things that do need to get lost so that's that's been huge um outside of that we're a content creation company too like we got it we have to make content everywhere and so getting community set up across the board is massively important for us i know that that may not be a priority for some other companies i think it probably should be though uh that not to say that like the way copy does things is 100 the only way to do it that's absolutely not true but we're like paul's mentioned multiple times in this podcast we're looking to be at the edge of technology which means that our marketing has to be too we can't just be doing the old traditional way of marketing where we're just like seeking out pr and trying to get good uh you know good quotes and build like world build partnerships we're going to do pr we're going to do all that stuff but the people in this company are going to be interesting and that's what's going to make the company interesting love that so um another question from um that's due dennis dennis lynn now we know which dennis um your biggest building public related mistake or screw up what you have learned from that and how you grew from it so i'll go both of you uh paul you want to go first i've not made any mistakes [Laughter] another one-liner for this podcast episode oh i've not made any mistakes i mean maybe some like no i haven't made any mistakes when you're thinking about building public though like if you're really committed to building in public you have to show all of it so it can't necessarily be a mistake right like if you if you do something that doesn't work it doesn't mean it's a mistake it's like you're building this in public to show both sides and so um for me like at least there have been products that i put out that just totally flopped i've had some that have generated a few thousand dollars like almost instantly on the gumroad stuff that i've done i've had a couple that i thought were dope and they flopped immediately like i thought that i was gonna get tons of sales i put it out i did the same framework same thing as i've done that that had worked before crickets worse than crickets like it's like the crickets all got eaten and there was just like nothing but pure silence out there and so that's happened and it's documented in my timeline too for sure so i have one more from um i did think about it more what is that i did i don't have any i just want to let you know i did think about it because i saw the question come in on twitter i'm like oh that's a good question and i'm like i i hope someone can like identify one but i'll be honest with you like the one that would stand out is like oh well you're you know you show people your revenue so what if like you have a hiccup in your revenue falls um well i'm like dude the revenue would not be as high if i never reported it so that's just a risk i mean there and then the other risk building in public is everybody sees what you're doing your competitors if you're worried about competition you shouldn't really start a company that way especially in this market that we're in actually i i actually have a specific question on that and i want to understand succinctly your view on it very briefly because i have a couple more questions coming in how does copy.i view competition i mean we going into it chris and i were like hey we're going to have 100 200 300 400 competitors are we ready to go that was it it was like all right what are you gonna do all right so you need you need things that work that you can do that other people aren't as good at and so we knew okay if it's competition yeah they might clone the product maybe entirely at least the early product before you can build in layer layer and technical complexity that makes everything better so then you got your you're about uh distribution so that's why we're all in on twitter like all in 100 so when you go all in on one platform it has a huge advantage and and it's on us now to really extract the maximum value out of those advantages i think we've done an adequate job [Music] um but you know those advantages don't solve those big core business problems you still have to build a company you know you can't just make it sound and look like a startup it actually has to work as a real business right like i want to pop on that to you and i'm curious have you viewed competition before joining on copy generally your thesis around built in public you're much more likely to be copied which you know technically is true right because people can see what you're you know building on and they can simply clone because there's everybody's attention is here like how do you sort of mentally wrestle with that or you don't you know you don't even care like paul just like say i don't care i yeah i think that competition is is more of a traditional like going after competitive analysis is more of a traditional marketing play than it is marketing in the new world i think it's important to know what what other people are doing to be able to see that but i would never in a million years formulate my entire marketing strategy around what other people are doing i want to be able to control the story and what we are doing and build something special i don't think it's possible to build something special when you're looking behind your shoulder i just don't um so i'm keenly i've been keenly aware of competitors and even even like just when i'm doing consulting for myself who are the other people out there that are offering the same thing but i'm more likely to try to make friends with those people than try to ever publicly combat them or copy what they're doing because relationship building is the name of the game so the more that we can build relationships with people uh whether that's competitors even um or or just anybody else i think that builds a lot better for for a company than saying like okay copy copywhatever.com is copying us and they want to uh you know we need to check out what they're doing like yeah we can be aware of it but what's going to move the needle really is it going to be copying somebody else's fee somebody else's features worrying about other people copying our features or are we going to take it to the next level do we have the right team do we have what we need infrastructure to go forward that's what i value much more gotcha all right so um one more question um what was one of the most important things you had to unlearn um from college and going through your first couple jobs that got you where you are paul i didn't learn much in college so that was easy so yeah you didn't have to learn a lot because no honestly i had a degree in business economics and accounting business administration so all the economics was very useful like makes sense it's a world view it explains incentives and how things work and how that machine's put together on the accounting side um you know i knew i wanted to become a cpa which i did become a cpa we didn't even learn like quickbooks so like how how are you gonna graduate someone with a degree in accounting when you never taught how to use quickbooks or any accounting software for that matter and then the second thing was in marketing literally we never talked about like how to use facebook ads google ads anything i'm like man this is so stupid like no one people are gonna graduate not know how to the first thing about starting a business so i kind of knew at the time okay this is not really going to get me anywhere and this was that was back in 2009 when i graduated so i spent three years and or two years in public accounting three years at a hedge fund as a cfo three years at a startup and then four years at a venture capital firm before i felt like all right now i actually have i feel like i'm reasonably in a good position like to take this next step um but yeah no didn't have to unlearn anything because i i kind of knew what it was even at the time like okay this is something people do at this point in human history we're still doing this it's very expensive so i graduated in three years instead of staying four and doing a master's which was great but i think at the end of the day like just the amount of content blake's putting out there like you want to learn marketing youtube and some podcasts will get you up to speed really really quickly all the right people so um blake well is there something that you have to learn from college yeah i mean i was a little bit more naive in college than paul like i didn't know anything i'm cynical man yeah maybe you're maybe so maybe so so i i went in like i had no clue what i wanted to do i was actually i was two years behind because i was a i was a missionary in france for two years at right after high school so everybody else is going off to college i'm doing that for two years and then i go to college after so i'm going i'm an old man when i start college at 21 and then i had no clue what i wanted to do i started working in seo and then that's when i really started having my marketing courses kind of at that same time and so i get into these more advanced marketing classes and they'd be talking about this great new fad called search engine optimization that's like how they'd say it every single time optimization and the things that they would teach were just so ridiculously irrelevant and not close to what actual good seo was and that was kind of a wake-up call like oh okay so these people don't know anything about the practical side of what i'm about to face in this in this world with my career and so yeah i mean i i kind of had to unlearn just blindly trusting organizations like college i went in just blindly trusting because everybody in my life was telling me you have to get a degree or else but they never finished that sentence they never said or else what they just said or else and i've learned oh that that doesn't even exist there's no or else like there are a lot of viable options like do you think barrackette is going to go to college that just going to be a billionaire before he goes to college he's not going to need to go to college yeah what are they going to teach them it's just kind of a joke yeah it's a kind of a joke shout out to barricate if the folks who are listening uh don't know who it is blake you wanna tell him he's who's what 12 year old yeah he's just some 12 year old kid that's way better than all of us at everything including bullying in public oh my god he started he started learning to code six months ago and has launched like 10 projects on product time this year and took his got it they just hit five thousand follows his his villain public game is way better than me or blake like probably combined just his weight yeah his way of engaging is like insane insane i can tell you what i was doing at 12 i was definitely not billing in public i was mostly just worried about what what you know what grades to get and all that so one last question and i was trying to learn how to code and it was c and i bought this book this thick yeah the first thousand pages was on modules and it was totally abstract and i just i threw it away i threw the book away yeah i was i was gathering change in the couch cushion scope my hot pockets by myself at the store that was 12. good times play good times all right so one last question we'll wrap up this this is coming from glenn um the twitter handles at uh uh the flow agency i'd love to know from your esteemed guests what anxieties they had when they started building in public and how they addressed them please i'll wait uh for actually let's do paul and then i'll wrap it up with blake paul give us a real answer you can't say no anxiety is unlearning give us a real look make something up at least right make something up no look when when you're on twit like you join twitter you're literally just trying to get likes so you'll you'll post whatever the hell you need to to get a like so if it's posting am like hey i got my first customer hey that's a tweet we'll try it out so there are a million tweets to get no engagement and then you find something that does and you do more of it so this is a this is definitely a positive feedback loop especially for people building in public so it's it's i think some people have gone on twitter and done it and then they they will leave but what i'm trying to figure out is this core group that's doing it now will they be consistent in doing it um will they be able to see results in it so like even the you know the anxiety would come from being alone like loneliness as a founder and just anxiety of doing and you run into a problem you can't solve with this community boom you get all the answers you need so if you say i'm running this issue one founder said um you know it's hard there's burnout like what do i do i'm not able to grow things as quickly i'm shipping a lot but it's not really working those are the core things that like your your community can really help with so what i'm hoping for is that the community attracts people like more knowledge um found like high level founder knowledge that i think is probably still missing so that when someone has you know a question like that somebody can come in with some real insights to help them out rather than just like encouragement which encouragement's fine but it's not that's not going to solve the problem when you started billing in public what were some anxieties you had and how to address them yeah real quick here um i my anxieties weren't around like what i was going to say or how it was going to be perceived my biggest anxiety always and to this day is i hope that as my account keeps growing that my content doesn't start sucking more because when you get into like 10 000 follower range which is where i'm narrowing in on that now um everything kind of works a little bit for you when you get to a certain point when you're just starting out nothing works and then when something does it's like this aha moment and you keep grinding from there and figuring stuff out you get to a certain point where everything kind of at least works enough for you not to be embarrassed by it um that's dangerous to me and i get anxious about like i want to make sure that i have ways that i can still tell that this is valuable to people because the likes might not be a good metric for that anymore that's that's the big thing but i found that if i'm still able to generate conversations that's probably a fairly good way of knowing that i'm not i'm not like hitting my i haven't hit my peak yet i'm not still working up to that but that that would be the number one thing the the one takeaway i got from there is that clearly shots were fired paul and you and me because we just passed 10k or whatever number and then he said he's already indicated insinuating that our content sucks so yeah whatever [Laughter] dude i just got 2600 likes on a post about naming a startup like six rules and but that post i've given that can we address that for a second says the guy who literally earlier in the podcast says i don't care for likes i don't look at likes i don't look at me there we go what you're talking about likes correlating with like content this was actually a high quality content post because because i've actually delivered this to people one-on-one a lot and it's a mistake founders fall into this trap about what they named their company so i was like okay here are the six rules and then i try to like you know great names are worth millions everybody wants to like that tweet right but that got like 837 000 impressions so people i think they don't understand how far the reach can go on twitter yeah yeah that's another thing too people don't understand like how many free impressions you can get just by pumping out like you know organic content i appreciate you spending your time with me and where can people follow you or tick tock i'm on tumblr and only fans my only fans is onlyfans.com hey blake and i share all my my deepest darkest secrets for my audience but where really though like where can people find you and paul i'm in memphis just fire paul just get him out i'm just gonna i'm on twitter at hey blake thank you follow me before you follow paul i'm at paul yakubian the twitter and that's that's the only place i want you to find that i don't want you look at me on linkedin anywhere else don't don't ping me on there at polycubian all right thank you copycats excited uh for wrapping this up and we'll i'll see you around on slack oh see you around on twitter all right sounds good

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*This transcript was automatically extracted using the YouTube Transcript API.*
