What is Buildspace? 📲

Buildspace is a school for building out your ideas over a 6 week period. What idea? Well, it can be anything, you just have to be committed to the idea through the entirety of the 6 weeks and ship every week. It might seem simple on paper, but many participants don’t make it to the 3rd week, let alone 6th week. Besides building cool stuff, the program is super fun and encouraging, with people all around the world helping each other out by providing feedback and testing out each other’s product or services. Buildspace is backed by YC and a16z.

Our idea ✨

Me and my roomate decided to apply for the 5th season of Buildspace with the idea of a tech newsletter. Our project’s name was Inboxbyte We only had a briefly informative substack going on so far. There was tons of room for improvement, which we hoped to find through the Buildspace program.

Acceptance 📧

When we got accepted, me and my roomate were so hyped, take it in this was in the middle of our co-op job search, so there were a lot of rejections coming in, we were glad to see an acceptance this time. We knew straight away we had to lock in and work on our idea. Farza (founder of buildspace), gave us a schedule of the next few days within the program. We realized that this wasn’t a program where you did a course and get a certificate. It was really a community with lectures and labs that consisted of learning materials, which helped you launch and iterate on your product. The video demonstrations were livestreamed on youtube, and the chat was hype. Anyways, that is after the acceptance, which is the next section.

Week 1 - onboarding 🎮

The first week consisted of building out your one liner for your project and a 2-3 sentence (max) description of what it does. The emphasis is that people should understand what it is and what you’re doing based off the one liner + the description. Additionally, we onboarded onto the Sage dashboard, which is where you can find other builders and share your weekly status updates. After all of this, we officially launched our product “idea” as a LinkedIn post. Our first post on substack was also in the same week.

Week 2 - data points 📊

We collected data from the first post that pinpointed exactly what they wanted to see from the next editions of the newsletter. Me and my roomate decided on including three sections in our newsletter. The sections were split into internships, resources, and events. Our second post on substack.

Week 3 - product launch 1 🚀

Week 3 is the halfway point of the program. Around 1/2 or 3/4 of participants reach the third week. This is when things being to ramp up, and the Buildspace team really promoted the idea of launching iteratively with a new “feature” per launch. So, we came up with this post on LinkedIn. The post received 4000+ impressions, and led to an ~20% increase in newsletter subscribers.

Week 4 - product launch 2 📱

The main focus of week 4 is to continue product launching, but trying out different medias this time. So, platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and etc. We decided to launch or first video on Instagram. This was our substack post for week 4.

Week 5 - new post 📚

The fifth week is where we continued on with adding new features to our product and also continued launching. As you might have noticed, this is the overall pattern, and it worked! We were gaining many subscribers using this framework.

Week 6 - finish line 🏁

Week 6 had a lot of deliverables, including a recorded audio or YouTube product launch. This will be featured on the Sage platform where people can see your final product after the completion of the program. It was great to see people come up with fantastic projects ranging from different domains in art, tech, science, and etc.

Final thoughts 🛣️

Partaking in season 5 was eventful and fun. The lectures, labs, and community support throughout the 6 weeks led to improvement with both product launch and feature iteration.