Iterate and consider doing it in public.

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we?

[00:00:16] As we enter the home stretch of The Daily Five's experimental run, one of the biggest things I've learned this year that I wanna reflect on is that creating in private, creating in a vacuum, rarely serves us. The desire to create secretly and then reveal something large and great, often comes from a place of fear.

[00:00:42] Fear that someone else will steal your idea. Fear that someone will mock it. Fear that someone will call you out in a way that evokes your imposter syndrome. Or maybe some other 7 million fears we've all experienced at some point or another. Don't get me wrong, I think almost every idea needs some kind of incubation period in isolation before being shared in public.

[00:01:10] Now, how long that period is and what that looks like changes from project to project. For example, the mini course I'm working on? This would've been far, far better done in public, sharing my progress very publicly as I went. I didn't do that because one: I was afraid I wouldn't be able to ship, and this would be another thing I failed at in public.

[00:01:34] And two, I was afraid someone would mock me and question whether I'm even the right person to do it, and that would dishearten me and demotivate me. It's too late for me to change course on this course, I'm just gonna release it all in one go. But if I did it all over again, I would definitely do it more in public.

[00:01:57] Hmm. Then there's this other project I'm working on a little bit. That project requires a small incubation period and it's being given that, but I'm really looking forward to sharing it with the community and seeing what they think of it. In creating my other podcast, the tech one, with my co-host, here is kind of what I have learned.

[00:02:22] What we thought was just a glimmer of what could be, and it wasn't until we tried a few things that we really started to realize what we wanted to do with the podcast and where we might want to take it. In fact, we're still experimenting and we're still testing out a hypothesis. That podcast is only nine episodes in, it's still early days.

[00:02:45] It's a baby podcast. If there is one big, huge lesson I would want someone to take away from the experiment that The Daily Five has been, it's that iterative work done and available to public feedback throughout its evolution will often create something cooler and more valuable than if you had created in a vacuum.

[00:03:12] And you know, feel free to take the term "public" with a grain of salt here. Sometimes public just means another person, one other person, who can take a look at your work and give you some honest feedback. Sometimes it means all the people on the bird site and other times it's somewhere in between.

[00:03:34] Everything is a hypothesis till you test it out with the potential audience. There is a reason why product-market fit is a big deal. There are ways to ensure you're iterating on a somewhat sound idea, and that concept is called user research, or as Amy Hoy calls it, safari. You venture into the environment of the folks you wanna serve and you listen, you watch, you consider what they talk about, what their pain points are. You figure out the patterns and then you try to see where what you can create and what their pain is collide. And that's how you create a product with market fit. Now, safari will only get you so far in a larger project.

[00:04:16] You still need to iterate on top of that. And we see larger businesses and software as a service products do this all the time. They iterate in public, in front of their paying customers, listening to feedback and addressing it through fixes and features, because ultimately the practice of iteration, it never ends.

[00:04:34] And ideally it becomes a collaborative loop between you and your audience and it's to your mutual benefit. So iterate my friends. And consider doing it in public. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.