Building in Public with Growth Marketer Steph Smith

Hello! Today you’re joining 17,106 other founders, CEOs, and marketers that are curious about using a personal brand to build an online voice and establish credibility. If you want content like this sent straight to your inbox, subscribe here. There are also some sponsorship spots available in August; send me an email ([email protected]) if you want to learn more.

The Setup:

?????Get to know Steph Smith: growth marketer, writer, and indie maker.

???Learn the tactics Steph used to make $100k on an ebook

?? Practice differentiating your brand voice while curating the topics you care about

Steph Smith is a Canadian writer, marketer, and maker. She currently works for The Hustle newsletter, leading Trends, a community for entrepreneurial ideas which does millions in ARR and has 15000+ paying subscribers. Her ebook, Doing Content Right, has over 3000 copies sold (one of them to me, and I can confirm it’s jam-packed with research and knowledge??).

Her blog, where she writes about remote work, women in tech, learning to code, and technology, has had over 500k+ readers. She also launched a podcast, Sh** You Don’t Learn in School, which got thousands of listens in its first month. Steph’s had multiple projects go to #1 on Product Hunt, win awards for inclusion, and was even nominated for Maker of the Year!

She’s also an avid traveller, having explored 52 countries.???

I’m so grateful that she agreed to share her experience with us!

JH: What’s the best personal branding advice you’ve ever heard?

SS: From my perspective, branding is packaging, right?

You're packaging what your product is—whether it's yourself or a physical product or an information product—in a specific way so that people want to engage with it.

Think of some of the best companies in the world. Apple, for example. Apple created a great computer, but Apple also created a great brand around that computer, right?

When it comes to the iPhone (or any of their products), you might say that it's premium, it's beautiful, or it's sleek. Those would be the words that you’d use to describe the brand.?

Just like this, there are terms that you can associate with any particular brand. This term is often their differentiator: how they are framing their product in a way that's different from other people.

Both the product and the packaging have to be differentiated: it’s twofold. Apple could never be a premium brand if it didn't have a great computer, but it also couldn’t be premium without impeccable packaging.

That’s why determining your brand is so important.

What's one adjective that someone could use to describe a brand?

If you don't have a clear adjective that someone appends to your personal brand or whatever your product is, then I would say that you're not really differentiated.

And if you can't identify that, then it's going to be even harder for anyone else to identify it.?

Even when I was thinking about my personal brand, it took me a while to really parse what my thing is: transparency.?

I openly share my metrics. I tell people how I build things. I show them how I build things. Anytime I learn something practical, I share it on my blog to share that knowledge with other people.

While I’m not the most transparent person in the world, compared to most, my brand tends to be more transparent.

Here’s a final example of the importance of packaging a brand: Costco.

A lot of people try to be kind of good at everything, but the problem with that is it really just cheapens your brand because people don’t know: Are you premium? Are you fast? Are you for the everyday individual? What are you?

What's important is that brands do not try to be the average of everything, but instead try to be really excellent at one thing.

So, consider Costco. Costco entered a very competitive landscape, which is general retail. And what they did is they decided not to be the average of everything. Instead, they decided to be the absolute best at one thing: cost.?

Costco decided to brand themselves as the cheapest option. To do this, they had to trade away a lot of things, like individual items or lots of customer assistance. They’re hard to get to because of the large factory style outlet, and you can't have them on every single corner.

All these things laddered up to the absolute cheapest products for their customers: 99 cent hot dogs, cheap gas, and $6 rotisserie chickens.

When you think about Costco, that's what you think of, right??

They made a very clear brand. People know what they're getting and they can actually parse that into an adjective, which is important: when I think of Costco, I think of cheaper.

In summary, the best personal branding advice I've ever heard, in my opinion, is if you can't parse your brand into an adjective that describes how you are different, then I would say your brand isn't clear enough?

JH: Can you break down the steps you took to earn $100K on an ebook??

SS: Really what I did for my book is a pre-sale.

It was really important to see if there was enough demand for it to justify whether I should create it. As I thought about the kind of effort that it would take to create the book, I started asking, “If I'm going to create this, would you buy it?”

Lots of people said yes. And in fact, lots of people said, “Charge more; I'll pay more.”?

I threw together a presale page within an hour of asking for people’s opinion. There was over a thousand dollars worth of sales.

Throughout the next 49 days it took me to get everything together and launch, I kept everyone updated.

I would share when I was working on it, how it was going, when I was making the imagery, or the emails that were going out to pre-sales; things like that. I was really transparent. I shared a lot of my data, like how many sales I was getting.

When I launched, I already had people there to support me, which led to a successful launch (instead of hoping the launch itself would be successful). I think that's a really important differentiator and what led to a lot of success from affiliates.

Of course, a precursor to affiliates working is that people like the products: you have to create a great product, lowering the friction to consume.

JH note: You can read more about Steph’s tiered pricing strategy, how to help people help you, and setting up the stages of a launch in her Indie Hackers article.

JH: How do you balance your side hustle while working for The Hustle?

SS: The simple answer here is that I really love what I do.

When I say I love what I do, I love my side projects. I also like my job, but I love my side projects.

A lot of the time, if people love something, they try to make it their financial dependence.

For example, you're great at singing. You say, I need to become a singer. That can work, but it can be incredibly hard because a lot of the things that you love, other people equally love; all the singers are trying to become singers.

It's not that you shouldn't chase that passion, but I've managed to find something that's quite lucrative (working for The Hustle) that I enjoy. And that's wonderful. Is it the perfect job that I would create if I was creating a job from scratch? No, but that's okay. And then instead, my side projects can be whatever I want to create on a given day.

That's why I probably spend more time on the computer and more time working than the average person, but it's because in that extra time, while other people are doing whatever they love to do, I'm creating side hustles on the internet. ??

JH: Do you believe in building in public??

SS: Absolutely.?

There's a lot of reasons to build in the open. There's a lot of ways to build in the open. A lot of people think it's just about sharing your numbers.?

But it’s way more important than that. It's about opening your roadmap. It's about pre-selling your product to see if people would actually want to share in your story.?

For example, if your car breaks down, people are more likely to help you push your car if you're already pushing it.

If you really believe that ideas are worth almost nothing, like Derek Sivers when he talks about ideas vs execution (which I agree with), then it's all about execution, and therefore sharing your ideas cannot hurt you. I believe there's limited harm that can be done when you share your projects in the open.

So I started with one project: NomadHubb. When I launched it, I was really excited to share it.?What was interesting is that a lot of people didn't care about NomadHubb. But when I tweeted about it, I had shared that I had learned to code, and a lot of people were more interested in that. I realized a lot of people were more interested in behind the scenes versus just the final shipped product. ??

After that I started doing 24 hour start-ups where I'm streaming while I'm coding something. With every product I was creating, I was involving people early on and showing them exactly what I was doing.

It just increased from there. Now I share everything from my goals, revenue, exercise logs, and what I’m reading.?

JH: How did you start and grow your blog to 500,000 readers??

SS: I was really surprised with how quickly my blog grew.

I started building up my following a little bit before that on Twitter, but it was still quite small. I had around 1-2k followers.?

What mattered is when I launched, I had this differentiator of being transparent.

My financial success was not tied to my writing success, and therefore I could be completely honest, transparent, and write about things in a way where I had no other agenda. This was really important because a lot of these articles did end up trending on places like Hacker News because it wasn't some vague content marketing.

This also meant I could take as long as I needed to write my articles. However, if you're running a business, sometimes you're more constrained by how long you've spent on a particular article.

JH: You write about women in tech, indie hacking, coding, etc. Why did you choose those and how do they fit your personal brand and vision?

SS: My blog is not for commercial purposes. It ended up being more commercial than I thought because I built a following, when people have bought the book and things like that, but that was never the intention.

The topics I chose were strictly things that I found interesting... things that I would want to wake up and write about.

Often when you write about things that you are truly experienced in and excited about, you can actually write better and be more successful.?

In choosing these topics, I asked myself, what do I know more than 95 or 99% of the population? (I don't need to be the only one that knows about that thing, but what do I truly know more than the average person?)

JH: What’s something you wish your community knew about you?

SS: Interesting question.

Maybe in some of the things that I share online, I seem really serious or ultra productive or always creating things. I’ve been told that I must be like a machine that's able to create all these things.?

In reality, I spend a lot of time screwing around and not being productive.

I also think there's so much merit to having fun and not doing things. What's important is figuring out what you truly enjoy and making sure you spend time doing that.

Just to make sure that you have fun with it. I think people online forget to have fun with what they're doing. They're trying to make money or they're trying to build a following. And if you're not having fun along the way, you're more likely to lose.

JH note: To stay up to date on Steph’s projects, follow her on Twitter.

?? ACTION BYTES?

• What’s the one adjective you would want someone to use when they’re talking about your brand?
• What do you know better than most people? If you’re not already, how can you start building that topic into your personal brand?

?? JOB BOARD?

In honor of Steph working for The Hustle, which was acquired by HubSpot, this week I wanted to highlight HubSpot’s open roles, including a Brand Strategist, Director of Creative Operations, Growth Marketing Manager, and more!

Have a job you want to feature? Email [email protected] for details.

??RIFF OF THE DAY

Like I mentioned, Steph’s book is incredible. It is the guide for creating content online in our digital age. When I first read it, I took pages of notes on how I was going to level-up my content game. Doing Content Right will reduce the angst in your content creation process and will give you a clear roadmap on how to do things right, the first time!

(P.S. Be the first to know; Steph’s new book is on pre-sale!)

Special thanks to Steph for joining us today, and thanks to you for sticking around until the end.?

If you have any ideas that sparked, drop me a note here! If you liked the newsletter, share it with a friend.

Stay outta’ trouble and catch you next week.?

??? Joel

?? Website | Twitter | LinkedIn | Courses