Building A Programming Business in Public

Content roadmap, accountability check-ins and my first attempt at creating a business flywheel.

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

Every time I have attempted to build an online business without accountability, I failed.

It always goes the same way — I create a grand strategy, I publish a few videos or write a few blog posts, some do well while others don’t, I get demotivated, I stop posting.

The few times I had told my friends to hold me accountable, it was better. However, those accountability checks stop at one point, and I am back to square one.

Hence, this time I want to do it differently.

Instead of asking my wife or a friend to hold me accountable, I will openly set expectations with my audience and document my journey through weekly and monthly check-in updates. I will call these “accountability check-ins”.

Accountability Check-ins

So, what would be some of these checkpoints?

I am still finalizing the details, but it will look something like this:

1. Weekly blog post on Medium
2. Weekly video on YouTube
3. Publicly available roadmap with upcoming content
4. Monthly recap of metrics, revenue and progress

In the past, I have consistently published at a weekly cadence. So, I am not worried about that.

The two new changes that I am most excited about is the public roadmap and monthly recap.

I hope these two changes will keep my audience more engaged throughout this journey.

Photo by Oskar Yildiz on Unsplash

The Content

Now, let’s talk about what domain I will focus on.

In the past, I have discussed a wide array of topics — productivity, programming, management, minimalism, personal finance, software development, etc.

After deep introspections, I came to the realization that my motivation goes away because I am not as passionate about some of these topics as I would like to think.

The only topic that consistently comes back is programming or software development. I enjoy tinkering or building things through code, and sharing my learnings with others.

So, that’s what my content business will be about — programming. I will follow up with more details later on in the content roadmap.

The Strategy

At this point, you might be wondering — what’s new about this? I have published videos or written about programming tutorials countless times before. How is it different now?

This time, I want to be more methodical in my approach.

Instead of blindly uploading whatever I feel like, I plan on being more surgical.

I consider myself a very analytical and nerdy person. So I hope an approach involving metrics and incentives will work better than setting up arbitrary goals.

The strategy will revolve around 4 key components:

1. YouTube Channel — Code with Irtiza
2. Medium Account — Irtiza Hafiz
3. GitHub
4. Digital Products
5. Personal Website

For every new topic that I learn or anything I build, the content will go through the following sequence:

1. Build Phase — coding or learning about a topic
2. Digital Product — creating a companion notes PDF or downloadable digital content
3. Writing — Publish a comprehensive Medium blog post
4. Filming — Publish a YouTube video on the topics
5. Aggregating — Create a reference page on my personal website for each topic and their respective digital product, blog and video.

Firstly, I hope the combination of this multimodal approach provides value to everyone, no matter your learning style. Secondly, I hope the digital products and GitHub code gives people something to take away from the time they spent watching or reading.

Finally, I hope these components create a flywheel effect to quickly grow the business.

How to Follow Along

If you are interested in programming content, you are in the right place. Go ahead and subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Medium.

If you are not interested in programming, but would like to know how this business strategy turns out, just follow my journey on Medium where I will post monthly (and sometimes weekly) business updates.

If you are totally onboard and want to stay tuned about everything I do moving forward, go ahead and join my newsletter.

Super excited to get this started! I hope at least some of you will follow along.