Building in public with Arvid Kahl

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;23;09

Ben Hillman

Privacy is extremely important. Each of us has our own scale of what we consider sacred. You may be listening to this and feel comfortable with sharing your home address with me. You shouldn't be awesome. Might be the kind of person that wouldn't even tell me what you had for breakfast. On the surface, you'd think that operating a SaaS business isn't personal, right?

00;00;23;15 - 00;00;29;17

Ben Hillman

We all have perfect work life balance and never feel either side of the scale tipped towards one another.

00;00;32;20 - 00;00;57;09

Ben Hillman

While in reality, operating a SaaS business is completely personal. It's something that Patrick Campbell has talked extensively about, especially with the recent acquisition of Profit well by Paddle. Today's guest is Arvid Karl. He's an entrepreneur and writer extraordinaire who has a lot to share in the realm of what vulnerability based marketing means. Fortunately, he didn't keep his conversation with Percy private.

00;00;57;28 - 00;01;23;27

Ben Hillman

We are thrilled to give you actionable advice on the best practices for working in public. Coming up next from Paddle is Protect the Hustle, where we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode panel, CSO Patrick Campbell interviews Arvid Koller about building in public. We talk about the intangible rewards of selling a company.

00;01;24;01 - 00;01;49;18

Ben Hillman

Coping with Grief after Exit. The Fundamentals of Building and Public. Why Losses resonate more than wins and how authenticity scales. Timestamps for each section are listed in the show notes below. And after you finish the episode, check out the in-depth field guide that will help you work in public. Just like Arvid.

00;01;50;10 - 00;02;08;04

Patrick Campbell

What's up, man? I'm excited to chat, mainly because we were just talking about you and I feel like we're friends. Even though we have never had a voice conversation. I even know what your voice while I watch some of your video stuff. So I know what your voice sounded like. But I'm excited. Seven. But I'm glowing already. So who are you?

00;02;08;04 - 00;02;09;13

Patrick Campbell

What do you do? Introduce yourself.

00;02;09;21 - 00;02;27;13

Arvid Kahl

Oh, man, it's really nice talking to you. And it's funny that you open up with essentially, like, a parasocial relationship thing, which is that that is a problem that people in virtual communities have all the time, right? Like, you think you know somebody you built this kind of Twitter relationship, but then you figure out, oh, I actually don't know them at all.

00;02;27;24 - 00;02;46;13

Arvid Kahl

So yeah, who am I? Good question. I'm going to try and be quick about this. My name is Arvid. I apparently people like me on Twitter and I've been being an entrepreneur for a long time. I've been a software engineer for a longer time, and now I'm a writer, too. I just love doing this. Apparently so. Sold a business.

00;02;46;13 - 00;03;07;25

Arvid Kahl

Turned out that was one of the best things I ever did because it opened up a whole world to me in terms of being able to teach people, to engage with people, to help them build businesses, sell businesses and I just hang out on Twitter for like I guess 24 hours a day, apparently. And it's a blast over the last couple of years, just establishing my own little media business that I have.

00;03;07;25 - 00;03;14;27

Arvid Kahl

But I've been in building like software enabled businesses for must have been 15, 20 years. At this point.

00;03;15;02 - 00;03;18;11

Patrick Campbell

I'm to younger than you're older than you look. That's what you're basically.

00;03;18;11 - 00;03;22;22

Arvid Kahl

Saying, I think. Yeah, I think I'm 37, so I've been doing this for a whole lot of all.

00;03;23;00 - 00;03;26;24

Patrick Campbell

As a very German answer for you, I gave you an out and you were like, no specificity.

00;03;26;26 - 00;03;29;29

Arvid Kahl

That has to be data to value.

00;03;29;29 - 00;03;49;05

Patrick Campbell

So for for folks who don't know you, so so I found you through Twitter, I read your book, those sorts of things like give us give us a little breakdown. You started getting into it, but what you're doing right now, like you have a chorus book. Like, tell us a little bit about that. And then the last couple or last SaaS business that you ended up selling because most of the audience is SaaS.

00;03;49;05 - 00;03;55;13

Patrick Campbell

And so I don't want them to think, Oh, who's this media guy I brought on? I want them to know that you got some SaaS chops they're.

00;03;55;22 - 00;04;14;04

Arvid Kahl

Building a media empire. Turns out funny enough, this is very close to building fast. Something that I've been doing for, I think since 2010 ish or something. I've been in built building software my whole life. Kind of when I was a kid, I already went to like a special school that would teach us coding when I was like 11 or 12.

00;04;14;04 - 00;04;30;28

Arvid Kahl

It was awesome. I just always loved the computer. First time I saw one and I saw what it could do. I was like, I'm going to do this. I really knew that software, the capacity of telling a machine what to do once I figured out the computers allowed me to do that and not just play games like Prince of Persia, I one of the best games I ever done.

00;04;31;09 - 00;04;54;22

Arvid Kahl

And once I understood that I always been spending my time on this and I went to university for computer science, I failed horribly. I went to university for philosophy and political science failed horribly again. It was great. I learned a lot of things. I just never got a degree. But in not having a degree, I needed to, you know, find a job, went to build websites for people, and at some point somebody talk to me, Hey, you want to work for us?

00;04;54;22 - 00;05;26;16

Arvid Kahl

We're a Silicon Valley business. We you seem to use the same technology and you get a page that we use in our product. You want to come come over and work. That was a chair. Why not? Because every quarter would want to do that, right? So I worked for a VC funded SaaS business for a while, came back to Germany where I'm from, did a couple little projects on the side, started several SaaS businesses back in 20 1415 with friends and colleagues from the prior VC experience, and all of them went somewhere and that flopped.

00;05;26;16 - 00;05;47;10

Arvid Kahl

So that was great. Learned a lot about what not to do in building SaaS. Then I became an actual employee at a business because I thought, I'm going to experience like German software engineering, which you can probably imagine to be quite different from like, you know, California Silicon Valley style of, of software building or building tools. So that was cool.

00;05;47;16 - 00;06;05;12

Arvid Kahl

And while I was doing that, I was living in Berlin. I was commuting a lot to Hamburg in Germany, which is like a two and a half hour train commute. I read all the books on entrepreneurship. I listen to all the podcasts on. There are indie hackers and all that kind of stuff. I learned a lot and I thought maybe it's time to look into opportunities here.

00;06;05;20 - 00;06;28;21

Arvid Kahl

And at the time my my girlfriend was living with in Berlin. She wasn't on an English teacher and she had problems with her online English teaching. We talked. She had an idea. I built it for her. Mostly we figured out, Huh, this could be something for other people too. And being a software engineer, having built SaaS businesses for the last decade of my life, at that point was just like, okay, let's build it as a classroom and see if people need it.

00;06;28;21 - 00;06;47;11

Arvid Kahl

We went into the communities, talked to people, figured out what they needed, built that for them into the prototype and released it. And there was fitA Panda, our teacher online English teacher productivity tool, which kind of helped them do administrative stuff, condense two works, 2 hours of work into 5 minutes of work in a day, which is substantial.

00;06;47;11 - 00;07;17;02

Arvid Kahl

They paid us a monthly monthly fee. Obviously we use that defined tool profit. Well, to translate, yeah, we really absolutely. Like, we really raised the bar. Yeah, it was really nice. It was. That's why I'm here right now. It was quite useful to. To understand, to already know what SaaS businesses were about building one. So my, my experience in building all these failed businesses, where did all the wrong things and didn't track the right things kind of that helped me get to the point where feedback bang, I could be a success.

00;07;17;02 - 00;07;30;16

Arvid Kahl

We bootstrapped the whole thing from start to finish. We sold it. We got acquired just before we hit the two year mark. At that point, we had $55,000 a month of recurring revenue, which you could probably cross-check because you know.

00;07;31;09 - 00;07;33;20

Patrick Campbell

No, only with permission only right?

00;07;33;20 - 00;07;56;15

Arvid Kahl

It gives you express permission to look back into that time because obviously we don't own it anymore. Right. The software is not owned by a by Cerberus Capital, a private equity company. They took it over. They still are running it. It's still doing good. So I'm glad to see the business still be out there. And after that, I fell into the void of despair, because selling your business is amazing.

00;07;56;15 - 00;08;15;13

Arvid Kahl

As you can probably attest. I think what happened to you over the last couple of months probably changed your life in ways that you never imagined because it's certainly and a smaller scale did the same for us. Although at that point, does it matter? Right? Like it's a life changing event doesn't matter how many zeros are involved at that point.

00;08;15;26 - 00;08;37;02

Arvid Kahl

What does matter is that our purpose and passion that we both had for the not the business. The business was a vehicle for helping and empowering people that actually needed our help, the teachers, online teachers. And that went away. It all went away like we sold a business like the Champaign courts, like shot up in the air. The bank account, you know, exploded.

00;08;37;02 - 00;08;58;14

Arvid Kahl

And then we noticed nothing changed, but we just lost something significant at our the source, the engine of our purpose. And we both struggled with that in both our ways. Like both Daniel and I had different ways of coping with that. For me, my way of coping was writing about it. I've never was a writer before. Like German is my first language, English as a second language.

00;08;58;14 - 00;09;20;26

Arvid Kahl

Just always just kind of, you know, you don't want to write in a language you don't know, but I thought, I know so much now, from my experience of decade of doing these things, I have to kind of share it. I have to give other people the opportunity because people who were there like you and on podcasts and in your writing and the things you've been doing while I was learning were doing this in their free time while they were running businesses.

00;09;21;00 - 00;09;40;26

Arvid Kahl

So now it was my time to do the same, to be that person, to help other people get to where I was already. And I started writing, started the blog, people told me, Hey, this is cool. Can you turn us into a book? Maybe? And I said, Sure. And I turned it into a series of sold. And then people talk to me, Hey, this part of the book, can you talk about this chart that I wrote, The Embedded Entrepreneur, which is my second book?

00;09;40;26 - 00;09;54;10

Arvid Kahl

Then people told me, Hey, this is actually mostly a Twitter course. Can you do Twitter courses at? Sure. And now find your following. And it's honestly, I'm just doing whatever I want and people tell me what they like and I keep doing this. That's kind of what I'm doing right now. That's my media business in quotation marks.

00;09;54;10 - 00;10;02;25

Patrick Campbell

So basically, if you would like Arvid to go research something and to do deep, deep writing on it, just just ask him. That's what I'm hearing.

00;10;03;24 - 00;10;30;02

Arvid Kahl

Honestly. Yeah, that's what I do every week. Every week. That's a topic that comes from the community because I'm very active on Twitter. Just earlier today, I broke like 80,000 followers or something, which is mind blowing. But those people I follow, I think 14,000 at this point of them and the conversations that happen, that's where I source the things that I talk about because I know that the community cares about it and I want.

00;10;30;02 - 00;10;31;09

Patrick Campbell

They're giving you that feedback. Yeah.

00;10;31;16 - 00;10;54;04

Arvid Kahl

Yeah. It's it's an ongoing feedback loop. It's something that I really, really like. And we can keep talking about this if you want to, but like having this kind of public conversation that is both surrounding you and you're participating in it, that is for a media business, which is what I consider the thing I'm doing is substantial. Every week thing that I talk about is relevant to the ongoing conversation.

00;10;54;10 - 00;11;04;02

Arvid Kahl

It's influenced by it. It's not controlled by it, but because I still make the choice. But it's always useful and I hope that it in some way gives back to the community in some capacity.

00;11;04;15 - 00;11;19;19

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, and I want to I want to get deep into build in public because I think that there's part of it I kind of get, but it's kind of like it always reminds me build public, reminds me of one of those things that when it first comes out, if you don't understand it, you think it's just this really flimsy thing.

00;11;19;19 - 00;11;37;06

Patrick Campbell

Like, remember when Snapchat came out, everyone was like, This is so kids can send naked pictures to one another. And like all of us, old people just didn't understand. Right. And then, you know, it's obviously grown and it's so much bigger than we thought. But with that weird metaphor out of the way before we get there, you mentioned something about purpose.

00;11;37;18 - 00;12;05;03

Patrick Campbell

Can you describe what losing that purpose felt like? And to give context, I think that a lot of people, the end is selling, the end is IPO or, you know, going down in flames. You know, there's always that end. And that's just built into the experience, right? Yes, There's cash flowing, bootstrap businesses, those types of things. But like, you know, there's always an end, you know, even in those even if it's 50 years from now that you're envisioning tells about what that end felt like.

00;12;05;13 - 00;12;28;01

Arvid Kahl

It was both one of the most culminating moments of my career as as a rather new entrepreneur, because we've been as much as I've been considering myself an entrepreneur in the past, I was kind of more one two preneur, like somebody who was trying to build businesses, but with people. I find that actually wasn't an honest effort, like something that where we really put our jobs and we went full time, right?

00;12;28;01 - 00;12;47;16

Arvid Kahl

That's never happened before. It was always just and I, I loved the idea of like having a lot of side projects, which is great. You could see which ones work and which ones don't, but that one wasn't. That one was a real thing, and it turned into a real thing from being a side project. And it felt like this the success of that actually happening, that was what I always dreamt of.

00;12;47;23 - 00;13;10;18

Arvid Kahl

Oh yeah, I make millions, right? That's kind of the that's as far as I thought in terms of goals. I it's, it didn't even resonate with me that that was a possibility for me in the past because I come from meager means. Family has always been just like workers and there's it's no capital, no no real like ownership of anything or wealth in the family, just like regular dudes and do.

00;13;10;18 - 00;13;34;25

Arvid Kahl

That's right. Doing the thing. And as a person being raised in that environment, I never thought that this would even be a possibility for me. That was for other people. So when it happened, when it was a possibility, when Kevin from Sean Swift reached out to us and talked about numbers that I could not fathom in a potential acquisition targets, I was like, okay, while this is happening and when did that happen?

00;13;35;02 - 00;13;53;02

Arvid Kahl

It was a mind blowing thing like cycle. So now what do I do? Right? Because you don't really know how to deal with this as a person that is not taught at any point how to a do it or then deal with the consequences, like how to deal with money, invest money, all these things, it's it's it's a problem.

00;13;53;10 - 00;14;09;26

Arvid Kahl

But that's the good part. And then there was the part where it was like, okay, now I give up all of this to somebody else, and then what do I do? And that's the part that I talk about most because most founders focus on the, you know, the money part, which is great, and it comes with its own set of problems.

00;14;09;26 - 00;14;36;07

Arvid Kahl

But that can be solved. But funny enough with money, you know, but the other part, the part where the meaning of your work comes not from the goal, it's in the journey. It's this whole thing. It's like journey before destination, right? Which is so adequately. And I guess I'm very verbose. Ali expressed in the fantasy novels by Brandon Sanderson, which I highly recommend for anybody to read The Way of Kings and that stuff.

00;14;36;07 - 00;14;53;19

Arvid Kahl

A recurring theme in these books is that the journey is way more important than the destination, because the destination goals that you set, you reach them and then what? Right? But if the journey is the thing you care about, the end, the process, the ongoing practice of doing something, then you have something to hold on to at whatever happens, right?

00;14;53;19 - 00;15;17;17

Arvid Kahl

In any kind of situation. And I noticed that I had always just thought about the goals, always just thought about the potential exit. We better built a sellable business. The idea was to make it as sellable as possible and then never sell it, because a sellable business is a business that runs well, that's highly automated, well-documented, and you can essentially delegate all of your tasks that you have as a solopreneur to somebody else, because that's what makes it sellable, right?

00;15;17;17 - 00;15;34;11

Arvid Kahl

Because the moment you have a manual for your business, you could just hand that over to somebody else. They can buy the whole thing and then you sell it. They buy it. So a business that is structured like this, particularly in the in the hacker world, is extremely valuable for that particular purpose. We built it like that, and that was always the goal.

00;15;34;11 - 00;15;57;02

Arvid Kahl

But we noticed that the joy came not from having a sellable business. The joy came from having these conversations with these online English teachers who told us, Hey, I've been using your tool for two months and I get to spend way more time with my kids now. I actually know what they do in their afternoons or now I get to have conversations with my partner that I never had the time for or even the mindspace for before.

00;15;57;10 - 00;16;06;10

Arvid Kahl

That was the impact that we had, and that was also the thing that was gone when we sold the business. Knowing that we did that and that we kept doing that.

00;16;06;27 - 00;16;26;03

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, you don't realize that impact at the time like you do objectively. You see it, but you're so focused on there's this fire, this optimization, this documentation, etc.. I, you know, I've recently gone through this as well, and it's kind of funny. It's like wisdom has to be learned. It can't be taught right? So maybe this is a useless conversation.

00;16;26;04 - 00;16;51;07

Patrick Campbell

Yes, people aren't going to know it. But no, no, but I think for me, it was it was a very hard and I had to do a little bit because I talked to about 30 other founders before selling who had sold and 15 of them, they basically said they wouldn't have done it again. They all have the money, so who knows how honest that is.

00;16;51;07 - 00;17;09;02

Patrick Campbell

And then of those 15 seven just gave over the keys, like they were just like, see out here you go. All of them are miserable. They were the most miserable group. And three of them actually became drug addicts or alcoholics, which they're all good now. But it was it was pretty bad. And I think that we don't think about this journey as purpose.

00;17;09;02 - 00;17;25;07

Patrick Campbell

We think of it as, you know, I got to catch the car and then we catch the car and we don't know what to do with our lives, which is, you know, it's a champagne problem, like, you know, almost literally. And so, yeah, I wanted to ask you mostly because of my own therapy here. This is my my therapy is my podcast, basically.

00;17;25;07 - 00;17;46;07

Arvid Kahl

But I love that. I love being able to just give you give you a data point here. Honestly, I remember you talking about this on the In the Hackers podcast with Courtland and Channing, I guess too, right? So it was when you said that I was like, I totally understand this because fortunately Danielle and I, not just business partners, also life.

00;17;46;07 - 00;17;46;26

Patrick Campbell

Partners, we.

00;17;46;26 - 00;18;09;04

Arvid Kahl

Each had the opportunity to. What do you feel okay, I feel like this. Yes, I resonate with that. So it's not just me, right? So we had we could deal with it together and it took us different approaches and a different amount of time to get over it because it is it is morning. Like if you give up something completely, I hesitate to make the comparison to a child because it's not.

00;18;09;04 - 00;18;30;19

Arvid Kahl

It's a business right? It may be incorporated, but it is incorporeal. It doesn't have a body, but it is a it's a thing that you build an emotional attachment to. It's a it's a project. It's call it that. It's a very involved, emotionally involved project of any business. And I bet you know that because that if there is one phone, it is involved in their business.

00;18;30;19 - 00;18;55;18

Arvid Kahl

I would think it's you looking for better influence. Well, exactly. And that's the problem, right? Is it comes with so much joy and so much self-realization, but it also comes with jealousy of other people who now have it or it comes with with loss, with grief, with mourning, because you don't have it anymore. It was maybe never yours to have, but you built this emotional connection with it.

00;18;55;18 - 00;19;09;18

Arvid Kahl

Right. And that is something that, just like you said, has to be experienced, can only be learned. It cannot be taught. And I noticed that because anything I'm saying right now, I've heard on so many podcasts like the Built to Sell podcast by Warren Lowe, Right.

00;19;09;19 - 00;19;15;02

Patrick Campbell

And you might have thought you might have thought like, Hey, that's not true. That's not going to happen to me. Like, that's that's what I always do with that.

00;19;15;03 - 00;19;41;08

Arvid Kahl

I know what I'm doing and I know I know what I'm going to do next because in my very, very simple mind at that point, I was like, Hey, I'm going to sell the business and then I'm going to play World of Warcraft for a year. Like I've this is what I thought would bring me joy. And then I noticed a week into that this is not what it used to be, because I had I had leveled up my my understanding of what actually helping or actually doing meaningful work was.

00;19;41;19 - 00;20;05;04

Arvid Kahl

But back in 2006 or whatever, when I was playing World of Warcraft, very much so much that I dropped out of university twice. Now you see kind of the things connecting here. It was great that the purpose like that came from gaming, from the community within the game. It kind of allowed me to, as a German, learn how to speak English fluently in a in a context of actually accomplishing something, even though it was just killing a dragon in a game.

00;20;05;09 - 00;20;29;29

Arvid Kahl

You know, it is a it was a teaching tool for me as well. But I tried to go back to this. It was just so virtual, just so sort of abstract that it was not the thing that I craved anymore. I had found it again with writing and with communicating with people, but it just I kind of pulled the rug on the end of myself, like from under myself at that point because I thought I knew what my mind was doing.

00;20;29;29 - 00;20;42;02

Arvid Kahl

But I did not. I was not aware of the depth of connection that I had with the project. How's that for you? How are you dealing with this right now? Because I know you're still in this and for a while, but it's probably different, right?

00;20;42;13 - 00;21;01;21

Patrick Campbell

I'll be honest. Not well, but for I think all of the reasons I didn't suspect. I think that what's really funny is I don't know how was it for you? But. But everyone thinks about it. Everyone who's not in the chair or hasn't been in the chair before, the founder chair, not necessarily a CEO chair, but like a founder chair.

00;21;01;21 - 00;21;28;00

Patrick Campbell

They think it's all about control. Like I get a lot of people. Oh, is it hard not having control? Is it hard not having and it's kind of like, well, I don't feel like I had control before because we had a team and the team like FOK, who ran product and Peter ran sales and I ran this part and, you know, I was working my way out of running that part and like, you know, like, like they think it's like a control and you know, that's, that's where the joy comes from.

00;21;28;00 - 00;21;51;11

Patrick Campbell

And it's more around not second guessing the decision because it was the right decision. And I'm actually very happy. But it's this weird, like it's now something else and I haven't adjusted to it being something else because it went like that, right? Because your head's down and diligence, you're doing all these things and then all of a sudden it's like you wake up and you're like, Great, now we have to fix this problem and like, you're in, it's almost like you.

00;21;51;20 - 00;22;06;22

Patrick Campbell

You enter into the company halfway through it, right? Like, is your company like, I paddle? Is my company just as much as it's, you know, the rest of the exact team and all that kind of stuff. And that's that's the role I want it, right? That's why we didn't sell to, you know, much larger companies or those types of things because we wanted we wanted that ownership.

00;22;06;27 - 00;22;26;13

Patrick Campbell

FOK was running product, all these other things. And I think it was a lot easier for Saku because it was, Hey, you're running product, It's very defined, right? And Peter, it's like you're basically running the sales teams and then some that you were already were right very defined marketing team. You're going to move under the greater marketing team but you're there's not there wasn't a lot of crossover where it was like well these two people are doing the same thing.

00;22;26;28 - 00;22;48;06

Patrick Campbell

But for me, I moved into this chief strategy officer role, which is a great role because it's kind of how you define it and how you want it to be defined and how the team needs it to be defined. But that's the downside to is it's not really defined, right? And so, you know, we didn't really define it at first and then we defined it then it's like that definition sort of works, but part of it doesn't work anymore.

00;22;48;06 - 00;23;07;05

Patrick Campbell

And so there's a lot of like this storming and norming as they talk about. And I think when you layer on top of that, all of a sudden you've reached the car like like we talked about. And it's almost as if you have those existential conversations and thoughts that you were talking about. But I have a distraction, right?

00;23;07;05 - 00;23;33;23

Patrick Campbell

Your distraction was World of Warcraft, which has, you know, as much as part. And I also, Max, I think it's funny, I haven't played in a long time. And then within the last four months, I maxed out a character and was like, All right, I'm done. Like, I totally like. I also went there, which is kind of funny, but it's one of those things to make a long story short, where I'm sitting here and I'm like, I'm going through the existential crisis that I think every founder does, whether it's a great exit, whether it's a bad exit, and this is a phenomenal exit in so many different ways.

00;23;33;23 - 00;23;55;04

Patrick Campbell

It's a phenomenal partnership we've had on so many different ways. And it's, you know, we're going through integration woes, but all of those integration woes are a product and the vision is just peanut butter and jelly. The you know, there's not a lot of redundancy of any redundancy like, like and it's all the natural like, while neither of us have thought about this, what should we do as a joint group or we thought about this or you've thought about this and we have it, or vice versa.

00;23;55;04 - 00;24;17;11

Patrick Campbell

Like what should we decide? Is the joint thing, right? And so that that's taxing, but it's like a distraction from the existential piece. And so my emotions, I went from like this, like I worked so hard to get so level and neutral, like my emotional reactions to now it's like all over the place right? I'm dealing with it and it's a again, it's a champagne problem, but it's also a problem, you know?

00;24;17;11 - 00;24;29;10

Patrick Campbell

And so I'm honestly having conversations. I've been going to a couple of founder events and stuff and like, that's great because I'm like, Oh, we're all dealing with like, you know, I'm not lonely and, you know, that type of thing. But thanks for asking. That's kind of.

00;24;29;10 - 00;24;45;03

Arvid Kahl

How I'm thinking about. Thanks. Thanks for sharing this. I mean, I see now and it's not surprising, but that you use this as a as a therapy session. And I'm glad to to be first. I would like to really mean it to be part of this, because I know how hard it is to find people to talk to about this.

00;24;45;21 - 00;24;54;24

Arvid Kahl

The people you want to talk to about this may not be accessible like particularly ahead of the actual sale. And even after the sale, everybody's busy and nobody really wants to talk about emotional.

00;24;54;24 - 00;25;05;02

Patrick Campbell

For a while. The sale is going on. It doesn't even doesn't feel real, right? So you're like, why would I talk about it? Like it's not it's not done until it's done. That's what everyone says and what you should believe. And so you don't even think to think about this.

00;25;05;03 - 00;25;13;12

Arvid Kahl

Yeah, you deprioritized your own mental health again, right? But as a founder, you often do this because there's a higher goal, a higher thing for you as.

00;25;13;12 - 00;25;15;01

Patrick Campbell

A member of something.

00;25;15;01 - 00;25;31;14

Arvid Kahl

Yeah, I want to say one thing about the way you say like champagne problem. I know what that means and I know that it's that it's usually a kind of self derogatory phrase, but I would like to to give you and say permission. But your problems are your problems like everybody has problems on the level that they're at.

00;25;31;16 - 00;26;01;05

Arvid Kahl

Like 20 years ago, your problems were just as real right to you at that point. And they were just as much in the way of you growing and overcoming obstacles as they are right now. I know compared to other people's problems, these aren't problems, but they are right in the context of your just allow your your mind. It's kind of what I would suggest to your brain is to allow your mind to see your problems as just as meaningful as they were when you were a kid and you know, not being able to ride a bike was a problem.

00;26;01;05 - 00;26;09;20

Arvid Kahl

You know, like they may be like irrelevant in the greater context, but you are your own context. So just wanted to say this and.

00;26;09;20 - 00;26;15;28

Patrick Campbell

I've gotten permission everyone, it's public. I've gotten permission. I'm allowed to avoid to have my problem.

00;26;15;28 - 00;26;36;28

Arvid Kahl

What I really like is that you publicly talk about these things. That is that is maybe why I'm so adamant about talking about this right now is that I see too few founders talk about this and I see too many founders need to know more about this, which is why I speak out about this whenever I can. So sorry about barraging you about these topics right now.

00;26;36;28 - 00;26;55;15

Patrick Campbell

No, it's super, but I think it I think it's really important. And we're going to talk about building public in a second because I think that's a huge advantage of it. But to round this out, I think it's a lot of fear. Right? So, you know, I can obviously be fired, but also I, I don't have like a lock up period or anything like that.

00;26;55;15 - 00;27;11;02

Patrick Campbell

Right. So it's a very like like I'm at battle because I want to be there. Right. And I think that the reason I say that is because there's always a fear of like, I can't talk about this because I either look dumb or I feel like someone's going to take the like someone's going to be like, Oh, the transition's having trouble.

00;27;11;02 - 00;27;40;17

Patrick Campbell

Oh, my God. Everything's I mean, and it's like, no, like every integration is bad. This is white. People tell you not bad, but like, it takes work as everyone tells you, integration is really hard. And, you know, again, kind of like wisdom. You don't believe it until you're in it. Right. And I think there's also, like I have found every time, maybe not on like a public podcast, but like every time I talk about something that, like, makes me insecure about building a company, like messing this thing up or that I all of a sudden have like, Oh, yeah, that happened to me.

00;27;40;17 - 00;27;53;29

Patrick Campbell

Or, Oh yeah, it happens all the time. And you're like, Oh, I'm not alone. And I think I think that's a big thing of why I talk about it is because it gives me some catharsis. And also like, like there's going to be someone who's going to text me who's had an exit and is like, Yeah, this sucks.

00;27;54;10 - 00;28;17;16

Patrick Campbell

This is really bad for me. Here's what I did and I can go, Oh great. Like, I'm going to try that or, Oh, that's not for me. But that made me think of this. So I think it's you. What is building public right first and then I'd like to get into like the why? I'm not a skeptic. I'm a little bit of a skeptic, let's put it that way.

00;28;17;23 - 00;28;32;00

Patrick Campbell

But like I am one who does this, but also as a strategy like kind of question some of it. And I'll talk about the why and it's the natural whys or the skepticism that I'm sure you've heard many times before. But what is building public and why should people build.

00;28;32;00 - 00;29;00;19

Arvid Kahl

A public So the most compressed definition that I can give is it's just sharing the journey of building your business in front of an audience of your peers. You found a peers and your prospective customers, your existing customers and your ex customers. Really everybody who you would think as an audience, as a term that is not defined in time, but by scope, really, I think your audience is everybody who might want to know more about you, who does know enough about you or who knew you back then.

00;29;00;27 - 00;29;20;25

Arvid Kahl

That's your audience and that's what building public is. Your act in front of these people. Sometimes that's in the same format, which I feel like sell software to people. It's on Twitter in front of your phone, appears so on Twitter and your software customers who are on Twitter sometimes is half here, half there in front of you find the peers and then maybe on LinkedIn for all your recruitments or recruiter customers or whatever.

00;29;20;25 - 00;29;50;25

Arvid Kahl

But it doesn't have to be done the same platform. The idea is to share your journey in a public way that is not just highlighting your not showing your highlight reel, but actually sharing the steps to decisions, the ups, the downs, the experiments that wins, the losses along the way. It's very vulnerability based and I guess that's how we can relate this to the prior conversation we had, because it's about opening up, sharing things that you that might, in a more traditional sense be risky to admit.

00;29;51;08 - 00;30;13;16

Arvid Kahl

Admitting failure, admitting experiments going wrong. But that is the stuff that actually builds meaningful trust based long term relationships. And that's what building public is about. It's not a marketing gag. It's not a marketing kind of activity where you get so and so many more potential leads for your business because they now follow you not just for the business, but for the journey is not that.

00;30;13;16 - 00;30;33;06

Arvid Kahl

It can be just that if you only do it on the surface, but what it is, what I've experienced it to be for myself is building relationships. That's kind of the difference between a finite game and an infinite game. I think one of the most recent episodes, Unsworth Gordon's Akimbo podcast, which I highly recommend for everybody to listen to, was about this.

00;30;33;06 - 00;30;53;20

Arvid Kahl

But the difference between games, finite games and infinite games games that you keep playing to be part of them, right? You can't win them. You can just stay in them and building a business. Just becoming better at being an entrepreneur is an infinite game while running a flash sale. That's a finite game. That's a short thing, right? You can either win it or lose it depending on how many people buy.

00;30;53;29 - 00;31;23;22

Arvid Kahl

But making relationships happen that over time will present you with opportunities and partnerships and potential sales, but also maybe somebody just talking about your business to other people who then amplify it to their own peers, you never know. And building public lives, these traces of your ambition in your community of both the founder part and the potential customer part for other people to find and connect back to you and then be genuinely curious about the person that shared so much about their ambition to help them.

00;31;24;04 - 00;31;35;08

Arvid Kahl

It's about like, you know, building building a relationship that is there. It's very clear that you're trying to serve and empower somebody else, not just enrich yourself. So sorry I tried to be short, but a cat.

00;31;35;11 - 00;31;56;14

Patrick Campbell

No, no, I guess. No, no, of course. And that was that was a really good explanation, I guess. I guess my question is, so let me maybe clarify. So building in public is basically it's not strictly content marketing, but it is content that you share, I'm sure blog post, podcasts, tweets, whatever it is on the journey, and it's the good, the bad, the learnings.

00;31;56;15 - 00;32;19;03

Patrick Campbell

You're trying to be helpful and yeah, it's just the good, the bad old things. And the, the reason we do this is the transparency leads to more learnings and the transparency leads to more people connecting with you. Thereby it is good for business and it is also good for you and your development. Is that like a good a good like high definition or what and why?

00;32;19;10 - 00;32;38;22

Arvid Kahl

One Yes, absolutely. One thing that makes a bit more clearer is like bringing those things together and the form and the shape of feedback cycles. If you are constant, like sharing things, if you are constantly explaining yourself or just explaining your decision making process or showing what you've been doing, then you get feedback much faster than if you just do it in private.

00;32;38;22 - 00;33;03;25

Arvid Kahl

And then a half a year later release the thing and it just fizzles out. Right? So most of building in public is really about establishing first brittle and then later more solid feedback cycles with the people that surround you. And for an entrepreneur, that's why it's it's happening in front of two audiences at the same time, which is something that often confuses people because they see it as a thing that you do towards your customers because you want to get more customers, you want to get more sales happening and stuff.

00;33;03;25 - 00;33;27;06

Arvid Kahl

But that's not the only thing. Because if you build in public in front of the founder peers and your prospective customers, you get different feedback from different mindsets on the same stuff. And while your customers may love a thing, free trials are always a big hit, right? You'll find a peers who've been through this and who've had their businesses implode under them just thinking about like bare metrics with their attempts, right?

00;33;27;06 - 00;33;47;06

Arvid Kahl

That was a thing like when when they implemented free free accounts and stuff, you get information that comes back immediately. Like if I were to build a SaaS business today in front of my audience and I would tell them, Hey, I'm going to implement a free tier, I would argue that within 15 minutes somebody would link to me to Josh Pickford's blog post about how it almost killed their business.

00;33;47;06 - 00;34;05;07

Arvid Kahl

And that is a feedback cycle that you can nourish because you share interesting stuff. The people around you do what you're interested in. They know you're great source of expert content, either by writing it yourself, talking about it, or getting it from from the outside and bringing it into their their field of view. And then they give you back as well because they know what resonates with you.

00;34;05;11 - 00;34;16;20

Arvid Kahl

It's relationship building at scale in public and feedback cycles are at the core of all of this.

00;34;16;20 - 00;34;35;07

Patrick Campbell

So it seems really obvious for like a founder, I would argue bootstrapped or not, like just someone building a business or let's say building something. What about someone who works somewhere? What about VP, that company or something of that sort? Like what do you think of like, is this for everybody or is this just for works best for certain people?

00;34;35;18 - 00;34;43;02

Arvid Kahl

I think anything you can be an expert in which in our day and age is everything right, Beanie Baby.

00;34;43;10 - 00;34;44;03

Patrick Campbell

Anything? Yeah.

00;34;44;14 - 00;35;15;23

Arvid Kahl

That the thing is, like everything you do, you can become better at it, right? You can always learn to be better at something. And the process of learning something you can share. I just write this book and understand this concept. Or here's a resource I found today researching this particular thing. Maybe you can find it too, that the core principle of building in public is to know that somebody else out there is trying to do the exact same thing you're doing and the different industry, hopefully, and they are two weeks behind and anything you can help them with that you just learned within the last two weeks is worth sharing because those people can then

00;35;15;23 - 00;35;20;07

Arvid Kahl

get to whatever they want to do faster. That's the idea of building in public and it can be.

00;35;20;13 - 00;35;34;03

Patrick Campbell

Anything I hate. Transparency to an audience leads to feedback cycles and spread because other people want to learn the thing that you feel like you've learned and then you there and learn and spread even further.

00;35;34;21 - 00;35;57;24

Arvid Kahl

To learn, teach, cycle. You do teach what you what you just learned. People learn it, come back to you with the potentially different perspective or clarification questions. They make you look into this again, learn more about it, teach more about it. And you know, that's the cycle, too. And that's that's something that is both very selfish because it's obviously about yourself building a brand, building reputation as an expert and following or whatever that might be.

00;35;58;02 - 00;36;16;13

Arvid Kahl

But it's also super selfless because you are literally teaching not for yourself, but for the people who are in the space, either potential customers who want to learn more about their market or your founder peers who want to build similar businesses and want you as one of their partners or potential, you know, like operators in the future, whatever it might be.

00;36;16;20 - 00;36;28;24

Arvid Kahl

It's a it's kind of a balance between this very selfish, salesy marketing thing where you tell people that they really need to buy your thing. And this is very selfless. I share everything in the hopes that it will help somebody else.

00;36;29;08 - 00;36;50;04

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, so that help sells concept too, which I think is great. Before I get into some skeptical questions, the how like I know you have a course on like, you know, basically like you talked a lot about embedded entrepreneurship, these types of things, like what's the how is it as simple as just like because I think that I've seen a lot of people build in public and some of them it's like a stream.

00;36;50;04 - 00;37;06;11

Patrick Campbell

It's like every thought, like there's no curation. And then others, it seems to always be the positive stuff and or it seems to always be one, like all about marketing or whatever, which is fine because maybe that's the thing you're struggling with and learning. But I guess like what's, what's the how? Like how do you build in public?

00;37;06;11 - 00;37;09;03

Patrick Campbell

Or maybe it doesn't matter. It's just share as much as you think.

00;37;09;17 - 00;37;29;27

Arvid Kahl

While you are answering your own question. I'm quite glad about this because the how is so uniquely different depending on who you are, how you communicate and how you communicate. Well as a person, right. Some people like me can write thousands of words on a particular issue and still not run out of ideas. Other people want it to be as dense as possible because they have no time for that.

00;37;30;08 - 00;37;44;07

Arvid Kahl

It's a it's a personal choice and how you communicate, but also who you communicate with. Like if you have a group of people that is that is willing to spend a lot of time just reading and listening to whatever people have to say, then if you have this kind of ten things a day kind of cadence, that's fine.

00;37;44;15 - 00;38;00;26

Arvid Kahl

If you're your audience, the people you want to talk to are super busy, you might want to make it count. It really depends on who you're intentionally talking to. So knowing that that's the start, that's where how it starts, how starts with understanding who your potential audience is. Like, you see, you're still.

00;38;00;27 - 00;38;07;20

Patrick Campbell

Finding an audience. You're not just screaming into the void. You still are defined in ICP or Yes, or a segment or something.

00;38;07;20 - 00;38;34;19

Arvid Kahl

And it's a very niche specific thing. At least that's my experience with it, because you can probably build a very generic general kind of audience, but it's always it's always much harder to speak to different kinds of people about the same thing than it is to speak to a very homogenous, goal oriented, very aligned group of people. And that's what most founders do in the indie space, at least in the VC space, I guess, to be in their particular niche, right?

00;38;34;26 - 00;38;53;24

Arvid Kahl

The niche you have that the people want to serve and empower. That's where it starts. That's the how, the how is mostly who like who am I going to help? And then the how comes from that because first of there's probably people who are already doing it so you can get inspired by them or you can figure out how can I try and translate what other people do in other industries into this one?

00;38;54;07 - 00;39;18;09

Arvid Kahl

And honestly, the easiest way to build in public is just to share any kind of experiment you run. Anything, anything you try that's new new feature, new landing page, new I don't know, new developer that you hired, that anything that is that is new to your process. Then once you figured out how to communicate these things, you start talking about the decisions behind them.

00;39;18;09 - 00;39;41;11

Arvid Kahl

Like today I'm pondering. I often do this like in my writing. What should I write about this? This topic more interesting with this one or this seems to be a problem. What do you think of this that get people's feelings on where decisions go and share the process of you thinking through that? Like my second book that I wrote is now called The Embedded Entrepreneur because, well, we'll get to that.

00;39;41;18 - 00;40;01;03

Arvid Kahl

It started out being called audience first and people read that and told me, What did you write in the first couple of chapters that you released? Because I wrote it in public, right? Because it's nice. Does not matched a title audience. First is not this. I understand it to be something different. That was a Twitter conversation and then people said, I would recommend renaming the book.

00;40;01;03 - 00;40;20;26

Arvid Kahl

The content is great. It's just the wrong name for it. And then over a day, I conversed with hundreds of people on Twitter until somebody suggested the embedded entrepreneur. The book title that I got came from a Twitter conversation. And it's so much better because it defines what it is, not just what I thought it might be about before I wrote the book.

00;40;21;12 - 00;40;46;24

Arvid Kahl

And that's a feedback cycle. That's the kind of a deliberation in public of something as important as the title of your business or your product. Really, that first off, it creates a better right because obviously the outcome is already pre validated through this conversation that you're having. It creates a bond between the person, the people involved in the conversation because now they are invested in the process, right?

00;40;46;24 - 00;41;09;11

Arvid Kahl

They are part of the product and it then also shows a collective gain of expertise because we all got smarter in the process and that is something that projects outward. People are attracted by conversations like this and people who smartly and kindly and friendly communicate with each other about meaningful things. So that's kind of that's how building and public works.

00;41;09;11 - 00;41;40;21

Arvid Kahl

Just any experiment, any thoughts you have, any success or failure? That's the next part. I tried this didn't work like I occasionally I talk about these things as well because I feel it's very important to kind of go around our notion of not talking about losses and failure because it's embarrassing or something like that. I forced myself to talk about things that didn't go the way that I wanted them because, A, it allows me to get an outside perspective, which is, again, therapy, because you're always embarrassed by these things.

00;41;40;21 - 00;42;03;21

Arvid Kahl

You don't want things to not work. So having somebody else actually that happened to me too, and like a couple of years later, it doesn't matter anymore. Great. Right? Talk to them that it shows that you are actually true, truthful, right. Your your genuine person that has ups and downs. Nobody has ups only. Right. Anybody who only talks about their highlight reel, their ups, they're keeping something from on purpose.

00;42;03;21 - 00;42;20;05

Arvid Kahl

There's some some kind of lying in not sharing the negative stuff. And people people know that like anybody we want to build a relationship with like we want it to be based on trust. We don't want it to be based on, you know, just knowing that that great that like them being a hero. Well, you don't that's the thing.

00;42;20;05 - 00;42;37;11

Arvid Kahl

You don't really trust the hero. You know that there's something going on, right? Most narratives that you find in books, there's always kind of a something negative there that they try to hide. So people think you hide something, too. And if you don't hide it well, then you're just a much more relatable person. And I like talking about this.

00;42;37;11 - 00;42;57;16

Arvid Kahl

It forces me to be honest with myself, Right? Didn't work out. I got to deal with this. And in public, it also gives people a very accurate understanding of what you're doing and how the journey actually works. If I share, I tried to build a feature, it completely flopped. Then a couple, hopefully a couple dozen, if not one.

00;42;57;19 - 00;43;15;16

Arvid Kahl

A couple hundred of founders have understood that even somebody who's been doing this for a long time tries things that fail and then still keeps going. If that alone is worth doing this for me.

00;43;15;16 - 00;43;36;09

Patrick Campbell

So along the how here, do you find like the wins feel easier to to share? Obviously. Absolutely. You structure like are you treating this kind of like a content plan and your strategy, your mindset is building public so that you each week you're like planning your tweets and you're not being as reactionary or you're planning your blog post, that type of thing.

00;43;36;23 - 00;43;50;23

Patrick Campbell

And it probably ebbs and flows a little bit. But is there a is there a structure to this or is it literally just like keep remembering, Oh, I've only heard positive stuff, Use the negative thing, like try to give me a little bit of a framework on the house a little bit too, because I think that'll be useful for folks.

00;43;50;28 - 00;44;12;18

Arvid Kahl

Yeah, I tried initially to, to do it without any kind of structure and that felt like kind of just like floating along. Then I try to have a lot of structure and that didn't work because that's just not how I work. I hate structure, which is the whole reason I became an entrepreneur, so I didn't have to work to somebody else's structure that was going to one of the points, which I only noticed in retrospect, of course.

00;44;12;18 - 00;44;30;24

Arvid Kahl

But you know, that is I didn't like that either. Now it's it's mostly a mix erring on the side of being too loose because I don't want to over structure things. But when I just kind of a 3 to 1 situation, like three great things that I kind of internally force myself to pay more attention to the negative stuff.

00;44;31;05 - 00;44;55;10

Arvid Kahl

I think one of the most important things in and being able to build in public is to train yourself to see sound so bland. But content opportunity is in everything you do, like anything you do could be something that you could potentially share. And the more you train yourself to not omit the negative stuff, even in record anything, that it could be content, the more it just jumps up into your field of vision and then you can pick it when you when you feel like it.

00;44;55;10 - 00;45;09;20

Arvid Kahl

But yeah, if you need a number or if anybody needs a number, I think 3 to 1 is a pretty sizable amount of negative stuff compared to the, you know, 100 to 0 that other people use in terms of how good things are, nothing negative.

00;45;09;26 - 00;45;30;27

Patrick Campbell

And that's kind of where my my skepticism comes in. Right. Because there's this natural when you try to scale authenticity, it can be really hard, right? Like and you're trying to be authentic. And so I guess to skeptical questions. Right. And I'll try to almost steelman them myself or strumming them myself here like one people who have 100 to 0 ratio.

00;45;31;10 - 00;45;46;00

Patrick Campbell

It just doesn't work as well because people don't see the bad is not the idea like so the people who are kind of using this like it's only marketing stuff. It's only for money, it's only for pushing stuff, it's only positive. Like people end up seeing through the authenticity. Is that the argument against like why that stuff doesn't work?

00;45;46;05 - 00;46;09;01

Arvid Kahl

Yeah, people see that this is an intentional filter, that people apply to the content that they share and they then they start wondering what is the intention behind the filter. So authenticity, it's it's easy to question somebody's honesty if you think they're lying, you know, and so many people see marketing as just lying to them to get them to buy stuff.

00;46;09;08 - 00;46;33;14

Arvid Kahl

So when they see something similar to that in their personal brand communication, they just project their negative feelings from one to the other. So being honest, being truthful and sharing negative stuff, which is not necessarily the same, but one is the the consequence of the other that just elevates the the fear of being tricked, which I think people just call trust, you know?

00;46;33;24 - 00;47;09;12

Patrick Campbell

Yeah. Increases trust. Yeah, that's interesting. And then my other my, my most skeptical question is like, I guess if you broaden the definition to the learning in public or because like if you're, if your expertise is on beanie babies and you're you're like the Beanie Baby guy or gal and you're talking about Beanie Babies and like, I don't exactly know what the negative of that is, but maybe like, Oh, I made a bad sale on my Beanie Baby trading or whatever, then maybe my question doesn't make sense, but in the sense of like a founder or an exac or someone building in public, why don't I see big companies doing this?

00;47;09;23 - 00;47;27;27

Patrick Campbell

Why isn't there like a $50 million company doing it? And maybe there is. I just don't know it. But it's normally very indie hackery, which is not a bad thing, but I'm just kind of curious like, is it just not for them? They have other strategies. They have more money to invest so they don't need to like and they're not interested in like, what's your, what's your take on that?

00;47;28;03 - 00;47;49;07

Arvid Kahl

So, so what immediately comes to mind is that there is a certain kind of distance between a big company and their customers and an indie business and their customers. So when I think about my podcast, for example, right, my podcast hosting is done by Transistor Transistor FM that's just in Jackson on Boda. I know these people communicate with these people.

00;47;49;14 - 00;48;11;21

Arvid Kahl

If and if I have a problem, I reach out to them, knock through some widget on their website. But on Twitter I just messaged it. They follow me, right? That's that's the kind of there's this I'm very close to them. So I, I care about them not just as a provider, as a sort of a service. I care about them as a participant in the community, of which I'm also part and most huge businesses.

00;48;11;21 - 00;48;37;02

Arvid Kahl

At some point they just kind of navigate towards the more corporate enterprise thinking or even presentation of themselves, which means that there's a clear line in dissent between the business and its customers. Barely do I see them in the same community. Even MailChimp has this problem right? Like they're getting bigger and bigger. And then all of a sudden what used to be like a small little indie or at least used a lot by indie people at all, becomes so much more enterprising thing.

00;48;37;02 - 00;49;08;17

Arvid Kahl

And with that comes pricing changes and you know, it has, it has an impact on the distance that people feel, the perceived distance between themselves and the brand. And then building in public just feels inauthentic because it's it is inauthentic because there is no person that is the brand anymore or that has like kind of a the that the same feeling that I guess that the best comparison in a huge company that I could make would be a Tesla and Elon Musk where he feels like he is the company.

00;49;08;17 - 00;49;29;01

Arvid Kahl

Obviously there is so much I don't even want to get into this, but that's like as far as I would project like a personal brand and a professional brand intersecting there, that the thing about building in public that I really like is that if you as a founder built build, built in public, no matter what happens to your business, your personal brand is always going to grow if your business flops.

00;49;29;07 - 00;49;49;07

Arvid Kahl

That itself is a built in public event. You can talk about how your business failed. You can share the lessons you learned from how you did everything wrong. And you know, people learn from that and they make their own mistakes, but at least they know where the potential risks are from that. So you get a boost in your expertise.

00;49;49;07 - 00;50;14;06

Arvid Kahl

Even as a failed founder, the feeling is catapulting you up into the next kind of founder level echelon somewhere. So that to me is that makes building public so interesting for individual founders or small groups of founders. The moment it becomes a gigantic business with divisions and, you know, all kinds of things, the the personal doesn't reflect the business anymore.

00;50;14;06 - 00;50;30;24

Arvid Kahl

And it becomes hard to to see it as the same thing. Then it gets into what you said earlier when people start talking about their own jobs in the company, you can be a product manager and talk about your journey of becoming a better product manager. Like what have you been working on in the past? What kind of projects have you been?

00;50;30;24 - 00;50;56;13

Arvid Kahl

If you're allowed to say this and this is kind of where the problem comes in from the other side, the legal department, right? If you if you're allowed to share insider knowledge from inside your business, I think building in public the way it exists right. Is so young as a as an activity and so undefined that the legal framework around it to a to have it be allowed in larger businesses where you are not the owner of the business.

00;50;56;13 - 00;51;04;07

Arvid Kahl

Right. And we talked about ownership makes this kind of fuzzy enough to ignore it to to be more of a risk than it as a potential reward.

00;51;04;28 - 00;51;26;07

Patrick Campbell

So but I think what's interesting is, like Ellen is a really good example, like a MailChimp, you know, not to give an attention or make assumptions, but it's going to speak to it. It's like, like the scale changes, right? Like the scale changes and the customer ICP changes because it's not the early adopters anymore who are very different than the core company or customer.

00;51;26;25 - 00;51;48;09

Patrick Campbell

But I think Ellen is, is really like it's, it is a built in public framework, whether he would call it that or not. And he does share failures, he does share ridiculous things, he does share successes. And I really like it. And I'm always like, I hate to be that skeptic, but I really like this because I just think that that authenticity can scale.

00;51;48;24 - 00;52;04;08

Patrick Campbell

And I do think that those cycles work. And it might be like building for 100 million. Our company just kind of looks different. But then those who try, it's always it looks like for authenticity, but it just might be something different that we haven't thought of yet. We haven't developed there, but yeah, all things with time, my friend.

00;52;04;08 - 00;52;04;23

Patrick Campbell

I think.

00;52;04;23 - 00;52;17;18

Arvid Kahl

So. I think it's really a process that we I mean, we're at the start of it really. I mean people, people have been building in public since 2008. That's like the earliest that I found the kind of phrase. Got it. And if you look at.

00;52;18;02 - 00;52;18;21

Patrick Campbell

We need to know.

00;52;18;29 - 00;52;26;14

Arvid Kahl

That that is like yeah, that that even 20 years that in terms of businesses adapting to change that is nothing.

00;52;27;00 - 00;52;33;23

Patrick Campbell

So we'll see. I look forward to billionaire Arvid Building in public one day, but obviously.

00;52;33;24 - 00;52;41;09

Arvid Kahl

That's not my goal. I can tell you that I want to be in my basement doing what I want to do write books and hang out with my dog. That's my goal.

00;52;41;09 - 00;52;52;06

Patrick Campbell

No, that's great. That's great. Well, I look forward to a billionaire who built in public. I think that'd be really fascinating, but I appreciate it. Man. Where can people find you anything you want? A plug, anything like that? No.

00;52;52;08 - 00;52;57;04

Arvid Kahl

I spend way too much time on Twitter so people will find me their avatar. Arviat. Okay, you are.

00;52;57;04 - 00;53;01;28

Patrick Campbell

Good. You are a good one to follow. You're very good. Wonderful. I learn a lot from your stuff, so that's really sweet.

00;53;02;03 - 00;53;11;20

Arvid Kahl

Yeah. My DMS are open, so just reach out to me. Whatever. And also for you, if you want to talk about anything that bothers you, you're always welcome to chat with me.

00;53;11;20 - 00;53;20;21

Patrick Campbell

Honestly, I appreciate that, man. Yeah, I'm glad our friendship went to the next level. Yeah, actually, you know one another, which is people. Awesome. Appreciate it.

00;53;21;03 - 00;53;23;20

Arvid Kahl

Thanks so much.

00;53;23;20 - 00;53;44;10

Ben Hillman

A huge shout out to Arvid Call for doing this podcast. Now you have what it takes to build in public. Today we talked about the intangible rewards of selling a company coping with grief after an exit. The fundamentals of building in public why losses resonate more than wins and how authenticity scales. If you want to support panel and the show, we really appreciate it.

00;53;44;10 - 00;53;57;12

Ben Hillman

If you let a five star review of this podcast or the equivalent rating wherever you listen or watch, thank you so much for listening. Make sure you subscribe and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, A podcast from Battle.