In combat sports, you don't change anything unless you lose. When you lose, you reevaluate everything. Olu Adedeji, with a background in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, left investment banking behind to launch a start-up that failed 2 years later. As opposed to building in isolation again, with his second startup, Prelo, he's all in on building in public and enabling other founders to do the same via his platform. Here's why.
1 - Build real relationships + community
'Being able to engage with people who are going along the same journey as you. It's so powerful, and so intangible that you just can't begin to explain what that feels like if you've spent two years prior building in isolation...And this is the thing as other founders are concerned it's almost like a sisterhood, a brotherhood, it's a family because we are almost like soldiers who share the same lived experiences, right? Because of that, when I articulate some of my experiences on Twitter, it resonates with a lot of people because they've been there.'
2 - RIP spray + pray
'You don't actually need to do the spray and pray approach of firing out 1000 emails, you can just fire out 5 or 10 emails and actually look to build relationships rather than just a transactional engagement with the companies that you're reaching out to...When you're looking at you know, doing a search on LinkedIn for the decision makers in most companies, and then marrying or matching their company name with a data point in CrunchBase, for example...So, we are going from sort of 20-25 clicks and a few you know, probably even more to sort of 3 clicks to find Head of Marketing for any series A company in you know, in health tech, for example.'
3 - Engage with the right people
'When I started building in public I realized that I actually can do marketing. I actually can create a personal brand around myself and what I do based on what I believe in, and very quickly, people reached out to me and people wanted to connect. That's how we connected. Because they feel that they've lived it...there's so many ways that founders need to look at how they go to market and some of the things that we've done based on zero marketing, we've spent nothing on marketing to engage with the right people.'
Tweet Link.