Create Every Day, Teach Everything, Work in Public
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- —
Nathan’s three-part audience-building framework turns ordinary learning and execution into public assets. First, create every day so useful work and ideas accumulate. Second, teach what you are learning rather than waiting to earn an expert label; teaching itself causes others to perceive expertise. Third, work in public by documenting decisions, results, mistakes, and behind-the-scenes processes. The mechanism is cumulative trust: regular creation supplies material, teaching makes it useful to others, and transparency gives audiences a journey they can follow. Public documentation can also attract customers, referrals, expert assistance, and future team members while preserving knowledge that would otherwise remain tied to the creator’s memory and time.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Create every day
Develop a consistent practice of making useful material, products, experiments, or observations.
Pro tip Prioritize repeatable creation before optimizing advanced distribution strategy.
Watch out Irregular bursts make it difficult for ideas and audience trust to compound.
- 2
Teach everything you know
Explain what you have recently learned, including beginner-level discoveries that can help someone a few steps behind you.
Pro tip Teach from the beginner’s perspective while the roadblocks and solutions are still fresh.
Watch out Waiting until you feel like an expert reverses the way authority is often built.
- 3
Work in public
Share how the work was done, what happened, the relevant numbers, and the lessons produced by the process.
Pro tip After completing a difficult project, document it while the details are still available.
Watch out Finishing the project without documenting it leaves much of its marketing and educational value unused.
In the wild
After launching The App Design Handbook, Nathan wrote a public breakdown of its approximately $12,000 first-day sales, launch sequence, and traffic sources. The project itself served designers, while the transparent recap reached people interested in self-publishing.
→ The recap drove additional sales and expanded his audience into a second topic.
Nathan publicly committed to building a customer-funded software company with $5,000 of his own money and reaching $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue within six months. He published weekly updates on naming, hiring, pre-sales, copywriting, and other problems.
→ The public journey attracted attention, prospective customers, and experienced founders offering help.
Common mistakes
Waiting to become an expert
People can provide valuable instruction while learning, especially to audiences only a few steps behind them.
Hiding the process
Only publishing the finished product wastes the decisions, obstacles, and results that could become useful content.
Optimizing before creating
Advanced funnels and flywheels cannot compensate for the absence of a consistent creation habit.
From the transcript
“create every day teach everything you know and work in public”
“people don't teach because they're experts we perceive them as experts because they teach”
“doing the thing was way harder than explaining how you did the thing and how it went”
From the episode
How Writing Online Will Make You A Millionaire - Nathan Barry (Founder of Convertkit)
Nathan Barry (Founder of Convertkit)