8. Growing your LinkedIn and newsletter audience | John Crickett

John Crickett is the creator of Coding Challenges, a newsletter for engineers that has over 54k subscribers. John’s LinkedIn profile grew from 3k to 150k+ followers in a year. In this episode, we dive into the process and mindset that allowed John’s following to grow so quickly.

Chapters

• 00:58 - Introduction
• 03:18 - Spending a million Euros and a year on an MVP
• 05:54 - Coding Challenges
• 08:15 - MVP for an info product vs. software
• 13:51 - Growth on LinkedIn
• 17:32 - Post structure
• 19:48 - Comments on posts
• 21:48 - Twitter/X
• 25:15 - Coding Challenges newsletter
• 27:12 - Building a personal brand
• 34:09 - Nicheing on LinkedIn
• 41:50 - Selling B2B vs. B2C
• 47:18 - Tangent on car salesmen
• 50:13 - Book recommendations

Where to find John

• John’s LinkedIn
• Coding Challenges
• Coding Challenges newsletter
• Coding Chats podcast
• 30 Day LinkedIn Personal Branding Challenge for Software Engineers (starts on May 20, 2024!)

Links 

• Advent of Code
• Carrd website builder
• AirChat

Podcasts

• My First Million (Jason Cohen episode)

Books

• Stop Asking Questions by Andrew Warner
• Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

Listen to this podcast on our app!

• Metacast, a podcast app with transcripts: metacast.app
• Builders Gonna Build on Metacast
• Metacast: Behind the Scenes on Metacast

Get in touch!

• Send us an email at hello@buildersgonnabuild.com
• Ilya's LinkedIn
• Arnab's LinkedIn