How I Built This In Public: Erwin

Hello everyone, it’s KP. Welcome to the 3rd edition of “How I Built This In Public“, a special series that features top founders and creators who’re boldly building their projects, startups and creative ventures in public. My intention is to ask them a consistent set of simple questions and distill insights and lessons so we can all learn from their experiments.

For this edition we have Erwin, co-founder of Tailscan - a browser extension for Tailwind CSS. I accidentally came across Erwin’s tweets recently and went down the rabbit hole of his ‘build in public’ content. He shared that he recently surpassed $500 MRR in ~6 months and I felt like his relatively early story would a great case study to showcase right after we published a very mature startup last week (Plausible Analytics that’s making > $100k MRR).

Why? Because sometimes the best inspiration comes from someone who’s 2 steps ahead of you.

Without further ado, here’s the full interview. Enjoy :)

“Hey there! My name is Erwin and I’m building Tailscan, a browser extension for Tailwind CSS. I also have a nomadic lifestyle, and little known fact about me: I can only type with 6 fingers, I never learnt how to type with 10!”

I started building in public with Tailscan even before it had a name! As a matter of fact, not only did I not have a name for it, I also did not have a website or email list either.

The very first thing I did after building a minimal MVP in two weeks was to post it on Twitter (in Oct 2022) and see if there was any interest. That turned out to be a great decision!

The biggest benefit of building in public for me is that people not only buy a product, but also partake in the journey with me and help shape the future of Tailscan.

It also helps build trust between me and (potential) customers. So I think it’s a win-win. They get a product that gets better over time with features they voted for themselves and it helps me to get the word out about Tailscan and acquire new customers.

First and foremost, I truly believe it’s important to be radically transparent to your users. It comes with many benefits and is always net-positive. That being said, there are also challenges.

The biggest challenge to overcome is the mental hurdle. Sharing a lot in public makes you feel very vulnerable. What if you get judged? Criticized? Or worse: copied?

What helped me overcome these fears is to ask myself the question: “So what?”. Turn it around and see the positive in each of these things. Received a critical comment? Either ignore it or learn from it. Someone copied your product? Massive compliment! And besides: Your journey of building in public and that marketing channel can’t be copied, it’s uniquely yours.

Yes! Many fellow founders I talk to think that what they do is not interesting enough to share (confession: I was one of them before Tailscan). Massive misconception. Don’t wait until you finish building your product before sharing anything publicly. The truth is that people don’t subscribe to you reaching your milestones, but to how you got to those milestones in the first place. Almost anything you do can be packaged into an interesting story.

Two activities jump out for me. The first is publishing the same content in different formats on different platforms. For example, besides posting on Twitter, I also write a newsletter and blog posts around the same content.The second activity is that I’ve spent a lot of time connecting with users and others building in public, and forming a relationship with them. They have helped me tremendously with giving that initial boost to a tweet that helps it go viral, for example.

Because I’m currently in the phase of early traction, building in public is a reasonably high priority in my list of marketing activities. I spend about 4 to 6 hours on it every week. This includes writing blog posts and tweets. The newsletter isn’t really public, but that one takes me about a day every month.

The motivation doesn’t come from high engagement or quick results, but from interactions I have with users. A single nice conversation, complement or friendly feedback can give me a mood boost for weeks!Building in public gives me an opportunity to have more of those conversations, and that’s why I do it! And if nobody seems to care about something I share, that’s okay. Better luck next time!

I’m trying to ignore it. I’m not always successful, but most often I quickly shake it off. In the end, most copycats don’t get their marketing off the ground. The reason is that they build it either to practice building (no marketing), or they build it for the money (won’t come across as authentic). A good friend of mine always reminds me: part of a product’s success is product-founder fit.

You need some expertise and passion for the niche you’re in, and copycats most often don’t have either

Can I name more than 3? I can’t choose!

That’s a wrap for now! Hope you enjoyed this piece.