You already know it's the creative spaces. Do you consider yourself a creator? That's a
great question. If you ask me that six to seven months ago, I would probably would have said no, but ever since joining on deck and getting neck deep into the startup space and noticing a lot of what I do, day-to-day involves Twitter. Sub stack and all these like creator platforms just started a podcast recently. So now I'm much more intentional and I want to spend the next five to 10 years to becoming a better creator or a more prolific creator. So, yes.
Awesome. And so you mentioned a podcast. What exactly do you.
I launched a podcast called Dylan public podcast a couple of months ago. I think I did it almost in spite of a moment. I've been getting quite a few questions that are on the team of billing and public spilling on Twitter sharing with makers and founders in general. And I went back and forth with Alex Lieberman. Co-founder of mining blue on Twitter. We, we aligned on a lot of issues, a lot of topics on building a public and believed in it.
And so I decided I wanted to double click and expand on that conversation and just make it into a deeper, long form conversation. That's called building public and we talk about mental models and different techniques and practices we practice. We use to build in public and I interview entrepreneurs, creators, and people that I look up to and admire that I can learn from just last week. I had Gary V on the show it's coming, we're still editing. It's coming out soon.
I'm interested. Do you see being a creator and making things with no code as themes that tie together? Do you think that there's a lot of no-code makers who are already creators and just don't know
it yet? Exactly. Like I was in Oakland, clutter, real good builder for about two and a half years. I started in October, 2018 with a tiny teeny project called do things that don't scale.com, which ever since I tasted the power and the magic of building and shipping and getting feedback from people iterating, they turned me into this lifelong curious builder. And so. That project. I built 11 projects just recently, as I was wrapping up my paternity leave, going back to working at on-deck.
I built a new site called extension lead.com, which is centered around Chrome extensions and the recommendations for really cool Chrome extensions. And I built that in four hours. And I did that almost as a set of needing a quick win because I'd been being this new dad that spending enough time with creators and creative things just wanted to get back in the game. And so to your point, yeah.
A lot of local makers today, whether they know it or not, if they are able to bring something into life using any of the no-code tools that are available today, I think you are on the line.
And so how do you go about building your audience up? Now?
The question I was chatting with V about this, and I was telling him how, like maybe 10 years ago he gave department like out the formula that I'm referring to is give. It's really nine times giving. And one time asking the hardest part about that is two things. One, a mental shift, like a lot of us were raised in situations, circumstances, societies, communities that were very scarcity minded, which means that if I give you my apple, I don't have any apple left.
But if you think about ideas, if you think about content, it's actually the other way around. If I have an idea, if I share that with you. We both have two ideas. So I think the scarcity mindset around, oh my God, someone's gonna steal my idea. Oh my God, someone's gonna steal my four tips about Twitter or five tweets about no code. All of that stuff is a big mental blocker. So for me, I had to work through that whole psychological limiting belief to become a much more generous giver.
That's one thing, the second thing is figuring out what should I do? What is that the people want from me, that's more of the sort of experimental thing. So you just sum it up. I want to say that you have to embody the mindset of a giver for stop. And the second step is becoming an archeologist and someone who studies patterns and things that are actually working.
So you have to put out a lot of different stuff and slowly observe which of these things are actually resonating the most with my audience. And that comes from a lot of experimentation tinkering. And at some point you will. You're like, oh my God, this is the stuff that people want more from me. Cause they'll DMU like retweet. You they'll do stuff that you didn't ask for. Then doubling down from there is to go. Was there a
thread or a tweet or a moment when you felt like you really have that fit with your audience? I can't
recall
one specific thread, but I remember, I think it was July, 2020 when I noticed that I went from, I started my journey like 300 followers and getting to the first thousand was so. So fricking hard on Twitter. I was like, oh my God. It's like, and also like, like I said, like it was also mental journey where I didn't realize that I had value to share. So I was not sharing as much as I should have got after that.
Like once I hit that one kill mark, but once you get a hang of it, you realize that, okay, this is how it works. So I think with the one to three K was where I experimented. Yeah. And I realized a lot of my obvious advice and to me, which is very obvious, functional knowledge that I already knew about building a waiting list. Like I did something called a couple last year, which was a pinnacle project. I used this technique of using a waiting list.
I learned that from one of the other examples, I think it was growth Sarah for something, and they built it out for Lincoln, a wedding lesson. So I actually brought a thread that was a screenshot by screenshot depiction of what I did in terms of that waitlist thing that he used to get to 2000 emails. Joining for a Copa and that it resonated so widely people loved it. There were so many shares we shared.
It realized that around that time, July is when I realized that, okay, if I actually put out content, that's very specific to that stuff that I did, like firsthand experience and make it a longer form content like threads, people will like that stuff. So I kept pounding on that ideal customer profile, which is founder slash creator slash indie hacker. And I kept doing it over and over again. I think after three or four times, a lot of people kept quoting me as the building public guy.
You've got to check out this building public cloud from KP. You got to check out because I was showing them. So over time, I think by August, I realized that screw it. I'm just going to be the builder public guy. I'm going to audit. I might as well just on it. And I started tweeting more about that pitch. And I looked back recently, I did a search, I think I had about 600, 700 tweets on the topic of building in public. So that puts you already in the top 1% of anybody in the top. So Johnny.
I'm interested then it doesn't sound like you really started out planning to be the build in public.
Yeah, definitely not. I actually thought I was going to be the community guy. In fact, I thought so many other things like a founder guy, or I was going to like do the wall style, like a platitude advice, the ones, the one-liners, whatever. Things. And the funny thing that joke about someone for Francis, like the wand finds the wizard, the Mitch finds the person. You don't go find the niche.
So let's say you and I were like super stoked about NFS because we were reading up about it and you and I started getting into NFTs because it's hot if we got into it, or if we said, okay, we're going to become the enough guy. It's not going to work out. You're going to fizzle out very quickly because there's no inherent curiosity. So the inherent curiosity is such a hard thing to listen to because it's usually the signal in the noise that goes on in your brain.
Right now, my brain has 15,000 channels of frequencies and whatnot about all these other things that I do. But every once in a while, when you take a break and you sit down, when you have this flow moment, the inner voice that tells you that this is the stuff that you enjoy doing. Put more of this out there. And combined with people wanting it is when you become the niche person.
How do you go about monetizing now?
So I think monetization is a tricky question to answer before you feel like. Have sufficient size and quality of audience. And so my first advice is basically get that tipping point of the size of the audience and the quality of the audience. And then you can play around a few things back into the experimentation thing we talked about. You can do paid sponsorships on your newsletter. No, you can do specific, like exclusives on particular tools or particular companies that you want to highlight.
So there's like several things you can try. I haven't explored much into modernization myself beyond the basic things that I've done, like a couple ads, but a lot of people keep telling me that I should do a community play. Like basically like what they've had has done for his market. Audience. And I could probably do one for building public audience, but I have zero bandwidth to handle another community outside of on-deck snowboard community, which actually
segues into my next question. Has your work as a creator made your current role possible at
on-deck? I wasn't present. If you saw, the way I got hired into, on deck was done very publicly. And a lot of my earlier work in Norco was documented profile that inside of on-deck I've seen some commentary before, you know, Oh, they were talking about, and there's the keeping tabs on people. By the time we got on deck, I had to think of eight or 10 projects.
And in fact, I was very active on Twitter sharing, no good projects or people talking about what trends are coming up next and also community. And I did like a bunch of community things were on deck. And so when I finally decided to join an ambitious startup, which was an inflection point in my career because I had a new obesity. And I was saying, okay, now this visa allows me to work for anybody today.
And I called that thread, the bat signal, which was essentially, it was like, I think seven or eight points about why I would be a great fit in an ambitious startup. And it came from a place of strength. And when I wrote it, it almost sounds very counter intuitive to how generally job seekers go after accompanies. Cause I had wrote it as if I was a free agent in NBA because my belief was I have the absolute clarity and what I want.
Yeah. And where I want to be, what kind of places and people that I wanna associate with and eventually want to be a founder, but I want to be at a place where it's the best pit stop that I can ever expansion. And I wanted to be surrounded by ambitious people. And then I listed all these qualities and I put my no-code projects in one of the tweets. So everything was out there. It was like proof of work, proof of visibility. So many people were with it.
And I remember, as I recall, I think I had about 16 interviews after that thread. And the last three gave me offers one of them becoming on deck. And then I accepted on that.
What's your north star metric for success? How do you know you're on the right path? It's
a great question. If I look at my day-to-day and evaluate how much of my time am I spending that is an investment as opposed to an expense. I think that's something that I think about often is building relationships and like exploring my curiosity.
Like I said, like the racket is a new avenue for me to explore my curiosity combined with if I'm interviewing people that I respect, admire that I want to learn from that also fulfills that building relationships bucket combined with doing the kind of work that I only I can do, like, or the things that I do with them. Play to me, like basically like everything that I do with it.
Or DNC, at least the knock-on fellowship is played to me because I get to be an architect of what would be the Disneyland for no corners. So I'm like, this is awesome. Cause I literally was someone who wanted something like this two years ago. So I get to really have so much of my early days of being an old quarter through the new fellows who are joining and being there for them and watching them. Very quickly and go to great places. Gives me so much joy.
What's your current goal as
a creator by current goal? I think one thing that I was thinking about all year this year, To get to a sizeable number on Twitter. And I don't know if I'm doing a great job at it. I think there's like threads and there's so many things that I could do. It's a matter of timing and priority and sitting down and actually knocking them out. But I made about 13, 14, K now definitely want to get to 20 K. And so I wonder if it is about the giving out content, like putting out content and giving value.
So it's a question of how quickly can execute. And the second yeah. Thing I have is actually one exploring into, and not necessarily, I don't have a subscriber count goal, but I want to explore it to you. But big fan of Gaddy tan, what he's doing with YouTube and only in the span of a year, he's put out an incredible content. I think the power of YouTube, I was chatting with somebody the other day and they told me this is a guy in Nigeria.
I was having an interview with him about something related to do no code. And he shared with me that he watched Gaddy Tad's video and I'm like, that's amazing. Gary Tam, the Carson video somewhere in bay area. Like he probably doesn't even know like how far the distribution breaches of YouTube. And he doesn't have like millions of people. He has sizable, but not like Casey Neistat, but someone out there in Nigeria or India are watching these videos and they're getting inspired.
They're taking action on their dreams. It's such a satisfying and fulfilling thing. This year's theme, as I'm noticing is around conversations and interviews. I think I enjoy conversations. I enjoy learning from other smart, ambitious, interesting, and kind people. So I want to leverage that skill that I've been blessed with, which is asking the right questions. Being thoughtful and then drawing interesting answers from them. And I want to explore that in all possible mediums.
So YouTube podcasts or rocket and whatnot.
If you could send a tweet back to your story. What would it be? And when would it be you get to choose the start?
Oh, that's a great question. It would be 2011 when I first moved to the U S from India and I was so naive. I was such a, I was 21 year old and I think I spent a lot of time idolizing some of these legends in Silicon valley or tech in general. Cause I always wanted it to be an entrepreneur. I wasn't monitored. Founder, but I spent so much time, maybe 2011 to all the way, maybe even 20 16, 5, 6 years idolizing them and trying to look like them on the surface.
Forgetting that what I was born with was enough. The point is not trying to be the next Steve jobs. The point is be the first KP. And for that to happen, you need to basically stand up and actually be proud of your story, your flaws, the history, your mistakes, and your limitations. And put them aside and say, okay, here's all the stuff that I can't use them in my future, but here's the stuff that I can absolutely use, which is for skills. All of us have been given some random bag of skills.
Now that skills combined with your curiosity as a torch will take you into the future forever. If you are. The link in public. The one piece of tweet that I would have given myself is that KP shut the fuck up and build in public. And what are you doing all this shit privately? Because I did so many things, not on the internet, but somebody sent me a tweet from James clear who quotes like Albert Einstein's calling out component just as the eighth wonder. And I was like, what? At the time?
But now I've fully understand that like everything that you do compound, if you don't do things that compound over time, you are royally screwed. It doesn't matter if you got better at a skill, but if you do things that compound, so building public or putting out content, podcasts, whatever, all of this actually compounds, if you have the intentionality.
So to get that down to 280 characters for
me would say that you're enough unique and valuable stop trying to be someone else be authentic and building public.