Build in Public: The Secret to Transforming Your Journey

If there is one person who comes to mind for building his company in public, it is Adam Robinson - the CEO of Retention.com and RB2B. He has built 3x businesses, all bootstrapped, with Retention.com currently at $22m ARR since its launch around 2021-2022 and RB2B at $2m ARR since its launch in March 2024.RB2B started with the idea of building a personal-level identity product for B2B in November 2023 (they publicly shared the idea long before it was a product) and announced that they were going to build the entire company in public - the good and the bad. Their goal was to have a strong community of potential users even before they launched the product. They managed to do just that through their building in public strategy and multiple other non-conventional GTM motions.

In this article, I map out the common themes that Adam Robinson posts about in his building in public journey and snippets of his own story as examples of how founders can try to recreate it for themselves.Building in public essentially stands at the junction of four things - founder, content, company, and community. The founder (and executive team) leverage content strategies to extensively talk about what they are building, thereby creating a community of potential adopters of the product. This manifests as strong distribution, sustainable revenue, and a killer team amongst other things.

Why Does Building in Public Work?

We all know that B2B selling has evolved to make content an integral part of a company's growth strategy. Think of building in public as a part of your content strategy which has the potential to set off a killer inbound-led outbound motion for your product. Once you start building your founder brand and talking more and more about your product and company, your audience will start trusting you, and they will start associating the problem with your solution. This will kickstart a natural inbound motion where you might get fewer but high-quality leads that will truly care for what you build. You can then use a host of tools to target these leads in your outbound efforts and thus create a solid pipeline for your company.

Things you should consider when building in public

1. Setting Context About Your Product

Almost 9 months ago, Adam started posting about their new 'personal-level identity' product for B2B SaaS (RB2B) and declared that he would be building the entire company in public. He set the context for the product by addressing where his competition - 6sense and Demandbase - were currently falling short (because they were providing only broader account-level/company-level data) and talked about how RB2B was what the market needed to solve existing ABM issues.Context setting is key in the early stages of building your company as it:

• Acknowledges the problems in the status quo.

• Familiarizes the audience with your solution.

• Helps them understand how you are differentiated against the competition.

Talking about all these aspects openly to your audience will help you position your product in the market and help you stand out from day one. It is also important to note that openly talking about competition is beneficial (and not harmful) for your product as it helps set clear expectations and positioning in the market for your product. This type of context setting can also be a great segue to attract beta users and validate the market demand for your product.

2. Finding Any and Every Reason to Talk About Your Product

Capitalize on trends, news, and market actions to create more awareness about your product. The team at RB2B finds innovative ways to tie almost any trend in B2B back to their product! It is a great way to:

• Keep the product in the eyes of the audience.

• Help them build a deeper understanding of the product from different POVs.

• Help them understand how the product is stacked in the broader market.

Adam addressed the Outreach/Google announcement about restricting bulk emails to lay down a playbook for the new "Inbound-led outbound" cold email motion, which performs much better than the traditional spray-and-pray bulk email motion. He then pointed out how RB2B, with its personal-level identity of website visitors, can help with this new motion and can offer more targeted email campaigns

3. Openly Talking About Your Pricing and GTM Strategy

In the screenshot below, Santosh Sharan, COO at Retention and RB2B, talks about their thinking and process of coming up with RB2B's pricing and GTM. He discusses how their goal of prioritizing adoption over short-term revenues led to their freemium pricing model and how their pricing model directed their focus to establishing a strong self-serve GTM motion.Most founders might not be comfortable discussing these intricacies of company building in public, but as you will see in the further sections, being transparent can create a great feedback loop with the audience and can help you when you are stuck or when your initial assumptions don't work out as expected.

4. Creating Thought Leadership Content

Adam spearheaded the entire inbound-led outbound GTM motion, which brought in tremendous engagement from the LinkedIn community. He created multiple content channels like podcasts, workshops, and posts to explain this motion. He also mentioned that this was the motion for RB2B and created a playbook stating how other founders can leverage it too for their GTM.This is just an example of what thought leadership content looks like. It will likely differ for each founder based on their expertise, past experience, and circle of competence. However, the key here is to understand that thought leadership content brings in tremendous engagement, and founders should leverage it to build trust among the audience. Over time, your audience will start associating that particular concept with you (and thereby your product) and create a nice inbound channel for quality leads.

5. Talking Publicly About Your Failures

Even before RB2B launched their product, they had done an amazing job at creating awareness about the product through the means described above - this resulted in ~2000 signups before launch. However, of these, only 14 converted to paying customers! Definitely not the conversion rate they had expected. The team publicly acknowledged that they had failed at their pricing and conversion strategy and needed to refine it.LinkedIn is one of the safest social media platforms in terms of hate, and true to its image, these posts about their pricing strategy failure actually worked in their favor. The LinkedIn community and even some RB2B users who did not convert to the paid product gave honest and open feedback to the team, which helped them refine their pricing strategy. Currently, RB2B is at $2m ARR within 6 months of launch. Had they not been so open about admitting failure, they never would have realized what went wrong or how they could make it right, and the outcome would have been totally different for the company.

6. Giving Regular Updates About the Company

These updates can include website changes, product updates, new integrations, and financials. They are extremely helpful in consistently keeping your product in the minds of the audience and maintaining excitement about your product. RB2B did a whole website revamp and created a lot of content around their creative process, which created curiosity about their website and eventually directed traffic to it.They also talk about their newer integrations - their HubSpot and Salesforce integration and their ICP filter, as these are key features that reach a newer audience (mid-market segment). They even have a live dashboard where you can track the real-time revenue and metrics for RB2B! That might be slightly extreme, but that is how transparent and committed they are to their approach.

7. Talk About Your Use-Cases

These are slightly different from testimonials in that their goal is not essentially to vouch for the product but rather to:

• Showcase the creative ways in which the product can be used.

• Highlight the kind of workflows that can be built to derive maximum value from the product.

• Illustrate how the product can be used with other tools.Through this, you also drive the audience from the other tools to take notice of your product and increase your visibility across multiple audience categories. Folks at RB2B actively talk about how their product can be used alongside Clay, Sendspark, etc., to build efficient GTM workflows. To conclude, everyone's product and journey of building their company is different. However, you can always start with the basics and then tweak based on what works and what doesn't. Your build in public playbook might look completely different based on your preference, but one thing is certain - it is not a comfortable process talking about your company, especially the tough parts in public where your peers and employees can see them. But once you break out of the initial discomfort, it activates a whole motion that will help you build a sustainable revenue channel for your business.

This post is brought to you by Himani Sheth, who is a fellow writer from our writer’s program.