You already know it's the creator spaces show. Do you consider yourself? Yeah, definitely. I consider myself a creator because I think creators someone who creates content for other people to take a look and to learn. So that's exactly what I'm doing right now. But I think if you asked me about eight months ago, when I first started, or even six months ago, I had the imposter syndrome, but I think what really helped me is that along the way, my content gets some readers.
I mostly do written content in the beginning. So when people come to me and say, come on, I really like your content. It helps me move from a to B. And I think my company. Grows a little bit over there, but honestly, there's something I'm struggling with, which is what's the difference between a creator and an educator? It feels pretty much the same to me nowadays. So I would call myself a creator, but probably not Decatur. So I would flip that question to you and.
What's the difference between a creator and a founder or a creator and a maker. Any of those start with creator and a founder. I think if you just call yourself a founder, you're mainly focusing your time on building the system of their company. You're managing someone to do the product and you're managing someone to do the marketing side. Well, of course you can start by doing it yourself. I think for creator is a bit different.
A creator doesn't care so much about how their whole company runs, but more so we just focus on creating content to help people out. And then I think most creator evolve to be a founder anyway. So I think it's just where the starting point. Yeah. And you mentioned that you've got a little background in startup land. Do you like the creative life more? And so I've been working with for eight, nine years now and I've always been in startups.
I've never been in a corporate, so I don't actually know what that feels like, but I think it really depends on my life stage because in the last eight, nine years, I was a young adult willing to sacrifice time to learn. So the startup environment just forced me to grow up, but now I'm a creator. I'm all by myself. And I think without those experience, I'm not able to handle what I'm doing right now, all by myself. So if you ask me, am I enjoying right now?
Yes, I'm enjoying it a little too much because of the flexibility and the satisfaction that comes from reaching to people worldwide. So I'm curious, what exactly do you create? Yeah, I mostly focused on writing. I actually never knew this about myself. Obviously English is my second language. I never consider myself a good writer, but only after I started to focus on my personal blog dedicating some time to reflect on what I'm doing. And then put it into writing to share with people.
I realized I'm actually okay in writing because people tell me, Hey, Kavala your writing is great. It's easy to read. And to me, I know the reason is because my vocabularies are lacking. So I only know the single words, if you would like it this way, it's easy to read. So it's mostly writing this days, which I'm comfortable. It gives me a good results, but I'm also doing a little bit of video and audio like this.
What I'm doing right now is building in public audience, building this kind of topic. And I know that if you really want to touch the people around you and you need to go beyond your words. So putting your voice out there, putting your face out there is super important to connect with this. And so you write, but also you've got a cohort or a challenge or a course, or a building public diagnosis, a little bit of all three. Yeah. It's kind of vague because I'm still figuring it out.
At first, it was more like a challenge where it's email prompts and videos that I recorded and then I sent it to you. But next month I'm trying something new, which is doing everything. So I'm going to teach live. And then we have like live sessions for people to bounce ideas and discuss. So it's becoming more like a course. So that's the one thing I run. And then I also run the community for building in public interested. What made you decide to start?
Did the community come first or the education committee? So definitely start with the education end of last year, the startup I was running was struggling to a point that I couldn't carry on. On one hand, I'm trying to figure out product market fit. But on the other hand, I had a bunch of injured investor asking me for results, which I'm not able to deliver at the end of October, 2020. I decided to quite a day, I left the company and at that point I was. Figuring out what I should do.
And that's when I started writing more articles for my blog posts. Once a week, I figured out that writing individual blog posts is not going to get me anywhere. I'm not going to build a personal brand online with just standalone blog posts about different topics. So I decided, Hey, I need to create a killer piece of content that people will look at it and say, this is so good. I need to share it with my friend. I was looking for something like that.
And at that point, I came across keywords like micro SAS, no code, and then also building in public. And when I saw this word, I'm like, what the hell is this? But when I learned about the meaning behind these words, it resonated with me so much because I live my life with this kind of principle being open, vulnerable, being myself. And I just love it so much.
But the key thing is when I look at how many people are jumping into building in public on Twitter and indie hackers, And when I Google search what's out there to help people, nothing like there are only four or five articles and that's it. So I knew there's an opportunity there for me to play a part. And I created a non chapter. I call it the guide, but people call it ebook to help people get into a building. And that's where I started. People started gathering around me because of this topic.
I didn't know whether I can make money or not, but I just knew, okay. Let's just focus on now. What I need to do now is I want to build some credibility under my name. So I just focused on creating a good piece of content, whatever comes to the next. It's too much for me to think about at that moment. Yeah. You saw the traffic, you saw low competition. You saw something that resonated with, I don't think you'd be able to beat the micro and acquire team and micro SAS.
And I feel like if they want to run that beach, they can have it. Well, you know, the funny, anything his analysis told me that I should go for no coat because it has a lot more keywords and traffic. Building in public. If you look at the Tropic the keyword planner, it has Ciero to a 10 per month.
If you look at that and no one is searching, those are two of the like heaviest overlapping topics that I can think of when I think of no code, I think of building public and I think of people building micro SAS in public. So I guess I've got to ask, how did you end up with these different search terms? How did you get down to this? Because they are so heavily integrated. Yeah, three years ago, I started a YouTube channel and you know what topic I focus on, I was focusing on parenting.
And at that point I wasn't married. I didn't have a kid. So, you know what happened? I borrowed my cousin's kids and then I shoot a video taking care of them. So from that experience, I understand that I can not just come up with any topic and think that I can create a ton of content around it. If you're forcing yourself to do. It's never going to last. So this time around the reason why you see all these keywords, which is kind of like a cluster is because I'm interested in these keywords.
I want to be playing a part in the, how do you start building your audience from there? How do we get to the build in public guy that we all know today? This is the fun part. Creating a piece of content they would just write and then post it and then wait for things to happen. But because I'm learning a ton about building in public. So I decided to write in public the day I decided I'm going to write this easy guide on building in public. And I have nothing written down.
I post it on Twitter and now's it. Hey guys, this guy called Kayvon is going to write a guide on building in public. So I just keep people updated, even though I have nothing like going on. And you know, what the building in public community is pretty awesome. They just hop in and say, wow, that's awesome. I'll be really interested to help out if you launch your first part, let me know. So I just slowly corate or hang out or connect with these people in the space.
And I keep them warm when I've finished the first part, like three, four chapters. I post again on Twitter. Hey, who wants to be? My early reader is free anyway, as a final product, but you can get the content first and 10 people jump in and I just work with them and they really helped me figure out like, oh, I still have this question. Maybe you should talk about this in the guide. So they not just helped me get the word out, but they actually helped me improve the quality of the writing.
So I just kept doing that finished part one, three. Get early readers for part two, throw it out there, launch. And by the time I launch it, I already have 30, 40 people that knows that I'm doing that. So it makes it super easy to get the word out. How do you go about monetizing? Now? What triggered me to start monetizing is because I've been writing free content for six years. The first six months up to April this year, everything is free, not just the building and public definitive guide.
I'll also have another meeting product called making Twitter friends, and a bunch of blog posts. Everything is free. And I intentionally do that because in my previous startup experience, I had the mindset of charging people from day one to show that I'm doing something valuable, but now I realize it might not work for create a path. The trust and the credibility is everything. So I intentionally spent six months not charging anything.
So what happened is I was just thinking about, okay, I have all these people around me. What else can I help them with? The first thought I have is community. A lot of people are doing community. It seems like straightforward. What I did was I sent out a Google form and I got 10 people and I basically didn't start creating a slack or circle. I just create a DM group on Twitter for a month and I observe how they interact and how I can help them. I got that DM group.
And then eventually I got 20, 30 people and then I started up a circle community, but it was just really hard. 2030 people is not enough to get the community going. People are not posted on. And don't realize that you really need the hundred, hundred 50 people to keep an active community in most of those. Yes. Especially if you choose to use circle, which is asynchronous, this problem just got amplified. People joined for many different reasons.
They might join for the connections they might join for the live events. So at first I was really harsh on myself. Why are people not posting on the forum? And I force myself to figure that out, but later I figure out a community is just an identity. As long as you bring the like-minded people together, there's so many ways they feel connected and want to stay part of it.
So I figured the community is not really working out because people come to the community and they don't even know how to start building in public just by giving them a place to post is not helping. So then I figured actually what I need is a course to teach people how to start. And then I developed the course. I'm still figuring out how to blend them together to go hand in hand, but it seems to be working well side by side right now. So I only have these two ways to monetize so far.
What's your north star metric for success? How do you know you're on the right. I'm not really looking to be like a bill in there or something. So my ultimate goal is to make enough sustain my family, support my family live a comfortable life, but I look at it two ways. There's a financial metric side, which is, I want to catch up with what I made in my last salary.
A lot of people that don't think that should be a north star, but I think to me, that's important because if I don't do it, I need to go back to the old path. So I always have that number in mind. But I think intrinsically the other metric is like, I'm doing courses, I'm doing community. So I myself really want to see how many students I can help to make that transformation. So there's a lot of things I need to design in the course and community to make that happen.
I don't think I'm doing a great job right now, but at least I am aware of what is missing. So I think I'll be counting how many students I can help make that progression. What's your current goal as a creator then right now, community has like 80 people. So it's still actually very small. You said even at least a hundred to get started. I want to grow it to like 200 people. Maybe within this year. It is tough because there's a paid membership. So I need to figure that out.
The other thing is you set, being a creator is hard to become like a full-time thing. So to me to achieve that I really need the course to be doing well. So like maybe 20 students a month, that would be my other goal. Like if by December, but that month can I get 20 students every month? Simple. If you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? And when would it. The way I think about it is I've been working for eight to nine years.
And in that first eight years, I thought that there's only one way to build startups, which is venture bet. You always think investor, you always need to build the biggest thing. So if I can send a tweet back, I will tell the 22 years old me that is actually okay to start so small bootstrap and figure it. Step-by-step you don't need to be on tech crunch.com. The tweet would be venture back. It's not the only path always tribe was trapping. First. You'll learn a ton more about yourself.