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timecodes
0:00 - waiting room
12:10 - how to get others to care
15:22 - i want to start w/ a story
24:17 - do you choose to bring others along for the ride?
27:45 - there are 3 ways for people to care
30:55 - you choose
1:10:50 - remember why you're here
1:14:55 - important details
1:17:35 - ending

ooh, yeah Me too And I love You You You You you You

I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I'm going to do some teaching on this or something but I guess first let's just all write down how we feel out of 10.

All right, write down in chat how do you feel out of 10?

Slept 8 hours, made this slide deck early this time.

That's why we're starting 5 minutes late only, not 10 minutes late.

We're starting, this is an early day today.

Looks like chat's not working on the, on the, on the thing here, but it's okay.

It's just always funny to see the numbers change throughout the season.

Everybody starts out all excited, all hyped, like I'm going to work on my idea, but then they realize that it's actually hard and then they give up.

So let's talk today about, I think I was reading the chat earlier.

Someone in the chat said that they're excited about this session because this is where things generally get hard or things get a little more difficult, right?

And I think that whoever that person was, it's definitely true.

This is actually where things get, I would say, more difficult.

I think week 1, everyone's all excited, everyone's all hyped, you know, they got their idea down.

But then week 2, you're actually told to go do something.

You're actually go told to go build something.

And that's actually where things get a little more difficult.

And now week 3, I think is where it gets the most difficult.

Week 3 is where, you actually are now trying to get others to care about your idea.

Which I do believe is, I do truly believe is difficult.

1 second, I'm on the wrong side, I'm on the wrong part of my deck here.

Our computer literally died right before the stream started, so that was nice.

So I'm just a little messed up here almost there

Let me just get started here All right, we're good.

Sorry everybody so I want to start today with a story.

You know, the, the, the deck today, you know, the presentation today is called how to get others to care.

And, you know, I think the first question is why the fuck should you care about other people caring?

I think that's the first question for you.

And to kind of answer that, I think a lot of some people in your, some people in the chat may have that question.

And it's, and, And maybe you don't have that question, but you never thought about it.

Like you, you all are working on this idea.

Why should you care about other people caring?

And you know, I looked up 2017 and this is what was happening.

The shape of you is number 1 on the billboards post Malone Just dropped congratulations, you know Quavo imagine dragons.

Everyone's this is 2017 The top movie of 2017 was Star Wars the last Jedi Kind of a trash movie if you ask me, but hey, still entertaining.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Wonder Woman, it was Marvel's year.

Everything Despicable Me 3, 2017 was poppin'.

This was WWDC in 2017, back when I actually used to watch the live streams and back when they had a crowd.

And I remember at WWDC 2017, Apple releases ARKit.

Now, If you don't know what ARKit is, ARKit is, what's the best way to describe it?

It's a tool they added to iOS for developers to create augmented reality apps.

So it's like a really simple tool that Apple released to do that.

Because Before that, it was kind of tough to do augmented reality.

It was the first time, you know, anyone could now develop augmented reality apps.

And you know, 21, I'm 21 years old at the time, and I'm just watching with excitement 6 years ago, or I'm just so excited.

And, you know, I ended up having this idea.

What if you could see a restaurant's food in augmented reality?

Wouldn't that be better than a normal menu?

You know, just like many of you who are sitting here with your ideas, my idea 6 years ago also started very simply like, Hey, I want to build an augmented reality menu app.

I was like, oh my God, imagine you just go up, go into a restaurant and you know, you got your phone and you could point your phone at the table and food would pop up there in 3D.

And then you could actually order the food directly from your phone by actually seeing the food, right?

I was like, you know, I hated going to restaurants and looking at the menus and the bad pictures.

And I was like, man, this would be so much better.

Evan was 1 of the fellows I worked on the project with.

I lived, you can see this is actually my room.

And my wall was this random wall I bought from Amazon because I was living in a living room because I had no money.

Alec, another fellow I had recruited to help me work on the app, which is pretty crazy.

And now Alec also is working with me at BuildSpace, so pretty cool.

And you know, we started building and we keep building and we keep building and we we keep building and after 12 months 12 fucking months we're finally done we're finally finished right And let me show you the final product.

You would, after 12 months, you could now point your phone at a table.

And we had created technology that would let us capture the food of the restaurant in 3d.

And then we would display that for the user on the app.

You can also order directly from the app.

So you can also go through different dishes, right?

Every, we had every on average restaurants had like 20 dishes.

So we made sure to build the app with all that in mind.

And again, this is like a 12 month thing that we embarked upon.

And we were so fucking excited about this.

Can anybody tell me what happens next in the story?

Maybe some of you already can detect where this is going.

But Can anybody tell me what happens next in the story?

detect where this is going, but can anybody tell me what happens next in the story?

We were, we were so excited by our own demo, but this is our demo, by the way, we don't have users yet.

We just have 1 demo and we were so excited by the demo.

We were like, yo, we got to add more things.

Photogrammetry is the software we use to create augmented reality models of the food.

So we've made better photogrammetry techniques so the food would be more realistic.

We added better compression of 3d models I stayed up like for 3 months straight and I figured out how to better compress 3d models written in native C++ Fucking crazy and then we better improved our table detection algorithm because you know, it was hard to detect certain surfaces so we made it better and we spent another couple of months working on this and you know I even got to show it to Paul Graham I remember I showed up to a YC meeting 1 day and I showed it to Paul Graham it was great and time to show the world we launch and we launched and we we essentially print out these little cards.

We go door to door to restaurant for weeks and everyone just thinks it's useless.

The people who download the app are like, I think a menu is fine.

They're like, why would we ever pay for this?

I truly, I remember I was just truly, truly sad.

Like imagine you put 12, almost a year of your life thinking about this and nobody cares, right?

But I want to make it clear, In reality, we had the first version of the idea done in the week.

I had the really, really stupid toy version of the app ready to go.

We waited 12 months to show people out of some flawed idea of perfection.

And I think that's so important for you all to like, listen to me, or not listen to me in the sense of like, listen to my story.

And just I hope you listen to my story and don't follow in my footsteps.

Now, at BuildSpace, we're obsessed with getting you to talk about your idea and get it out there.

It's because I, and a lot of the team have gone through so much bullshit And we want to save you from that bullshit.

And today I want to talk to you about why getting others to care is so important and why and how to actually get them to care.

That's kind of my quick story I want to tell you.

Honestly, I'm kind of sad even, I'm actually sad right now just remembering that time when I was like 22 and I was so, so sad, like going door to door and everyone just thinking it was trash.

Now, again, what could have saved me is just by building my toy and having showed people in the first week.

Like we would have figured out so quickly if the idea was good or bad or if like how to improve the idea, right?

At the end of the day, when ideas start, most of them are so like kind of early, right?

They're not that, they're not that interesting, but ideas are meant to be something you build upon.

So like, imagine if we just took a couple of weeks to build the app and then maybe even a week, remember I had the toy version ready in a week.

And had just shown it to a couple of people, a couple of restaurants, a couple of foodies and have gotten their feedback so I could continue making the idea better.

So what's cool right now is all of you have an idea and a toy.

You all are extremely powerful right now.

I don't know if you feel the power, but I feel your power at the very least.

You all are very powerful right now, even if you don't know it yet.

Do you choose to bring others along for the ride or do you remain?

Who you spend 12 months making it, hoping to get something perfect and then nobody cares or maybe somebody cares.

My story could have gone very differently.

Maybe after 12 months I go viral, but hey, that didn't happen because I gave myself 1 shot to succeed.

Like, do you choose to bring others along for the ride?

Or do you choose to keep building by yourself?

In reality, I think perfection is extremely difficult to find.

And I'll say this right now, perfection is actually best found with the help of other people.

Other people can help you make the thing perfect.

I think you don't, if you're making a song, an app, a video, like just know that it's not just you that's gonna get yourself there, you know?

It's gonna be you alongside people giving you feedback on the thing and making it better.

The world's best filmmakers, musicians, developers, founders, et cetera, had brought other people along for the ride.

Very few people figure it out completely by themselves.

And I think 1 kind of lesson I want to give you is I want you to see other people as allies that improve your idea.

I don't want you, I don't want you to see people as people, or I don't want you to see others as people that you need to impress.

I think this is a mentality that I had for a long time when I was building my apps, my videos, my whatever.

I was always trying to impress people, but in reality, I should have just seen them as my allies and people that are going to improve my idea.

And I think all of you are working on such different things.

And we have a word we use here at BuildSpace that I want to introduce to you called people.

Some of all, some of us call our people, subscribers, listeners, customers, Watchers, players, et cetera.

All of you have people that you want to bring along with your idea.

But again, all your people are just different.

I mean, some of you may think you, some of you may call your people users, right?

I think a lot of you are working on technical projects in the tech startup world.

The word users is very popular in the content world.

The word subscribers is very popular in the music world.

Listeners is very popular, but again, these are all the same thing.

And I think just to define it for you, people, PPL are people who care about your project.

I don't want you all to complicate this any further.

There's 3 ways for people to care about your project.

What does it mean for people to care about your project?

Can anyone tell me in the chat, like what they think, like what are, what are, what's 1 way that people care about your project that show that they care?

Yes, they spend money they give you they use it.

Yeah, I think you all already kind of understand what it means for people to care about your project There are 3 ways for people to care, trust, usage, and money.

And I want to break these 3 down for you.

Trust is people subscribing to YouTube channel, signing up on your apps, waitlist, subscribing to your research newsletter, following you on Spotify.

Trust is the person showing you that they're interested in what you are doing and have, and take some action on their interest.

The person uses your app, the person watches your video, the person listens to your song, the person downloaded and uses your SDK, et cetera.

These usage is where people actually go and do something.

They watch your video, they listen to your song, you know, they use your app.

This is where people give you money for what you are doing.

Maybe they give you money for a pre-order.

They, so maybe in the chat real quick, which 1 do you all kind of want to work on?

Do you want more people using your product, trusting you to use your product, or getting money for your product?

It depends all on what you're working on.

This is a very important part of what I'm trying to get outside.

Bro, what the fuck is wrong with YouTube?

So again, there are 3 things, trust usage and money.

These are the 3 ways that people care about what you're working on.

And sorry, just, just to make sure, I didn't miss anybody.

Dur- dur- dur- dur- during, during the lag there.

This is trust Just to go through it very quickly 1 more time.

It's people subscribing to your waitlist, to your YouTube channel, to your newsletter, whatever.

It's people showing that they trust what you're doing.

For example, let's say you're a researcher working on a new way to like, you know, mine gold, the best way for you to gain trust is by getting people to like, maybe sign up for your newsletter where you share your, where you're, where you share your findings to other scientists around better ways to mine gold, right?

The usage, this is the most straightforward 1.

It's just people doing the thing and using your project.

They listen to your song, they use your app, et cetera.

These are just, it's, it's very straightforward, right?

It's just people give you money for a pre-order.

They sign up for your subscription, et cetera.

And honestly, how this works is you all choose.

I think some people are saying that the stream is breaking for them.

Press 1 if the stream is good for you, press 2 if it's bad for you.

If people have problems, just no need to cry about it in the chat.

Yeah, If audio issues, just refresh or just watch the recording.

I'm not sure what's going on with YouTube, but I'm just going to ignore all the messages about lag then.

Cause at the end of the day, you choose like there's no right option, right?

If you're like a developer, maybe you want to build trust and grow a wait list.

Maybe you want to actually get them people to use your products.

Maybe you actually want people to not pay for your product.

It actually all depends on what you're comfortable with.

And honestly, my favorite is usage or money, of course, because You said your money is like the most straightforward way to know if what you're doing is interesting or if what you're doing is something other people like, you know, trust is a little tough to build, but I think trust is fine.

If you're really early or if you don't have anything to show or use or have people pay for you.

And you know, we all want people, musicians, want people, engineers, want people to use their app.

Researchers want people to read their research and give them feedback, right?

It's because people give you feedback, people give you motivation, and people give you momentum.

And these are all things that you need right now.

You need motivation, feedback, and momentum.

Now, a lot of you here are not going to be around in the following 6 weeks, in the following 3 weeks, rather.

And the people who do stick around that I've seen in the past are people that have figured out how to get this, how to get motivation, feedback, and momentum from other people.

And, you know, even if you're just someone making stuff for fun, I promise you, you're going to want people along for your journey.

Cause honestly, it's no fun making stuff alone.

Why does build space make you share your work?

It's because otherwise, like, why the fuck do I care about you submitting your work to me?

Like, I'd rather you submit your work to the world and have the world decide what you're doing is interesting or not, you know?

That's much more interesting to you, hopefully.

Like, imagine if all I had you do was like, hey everyone, submit your update to BuildSpace and submit the form.

People are what make nights and weekends magical and are gonna be the biggest unlock for the people who understand how to bring others along for the ride.

And you know, some of you are already seeing this on socials.

Press 1 if you've seen someone pop off on Twitter from BuildSpace recently and like you see them like getting a lot of likes or you see them getting a lot of replies and you just see that happening.

Yeah I see a lot of it happening it's pretty awesome actually.

I was trying to find 1 Twitter account yesterday, I forgot her name, her name was Kat, and she posted a snippet of her song, and she had like 30 followers, but her song ended up getting like 100 likes.

And it just goes to show like you don't need a lot of like following to begin with to make magic.

But if I find her at the end, feel free, maybe someone can DM it to me.

Maybe Jeffrey if you got me in discord just DM Josh and I'll pull it up.

And you know some of you may be saying you know I don't care if people oh I think Phil's got the link there.

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lecture #3 -- how to get others to care about ur idea