Bearly Fit - Building In Public On LinkedIn
It's always important to publicly expose yourself online
Pssst!
It’s time for the next instalment of
“me explaining my poor life choices to the internet”… I mean Bearly Fit.
I’m going to share my experience Building in public on LinkedIn.
So grab a coffee! this is going to be long and boring!
Read the last instalment - Bearly Fit - My Story
Download the app - For Android
Support me + my work - Buy Me A Coffee
How did we get here?
First a quick recap in to why I started building Bearly Fit publicly in the first place.
Until I was 22, I was in reasonable health.
I looked after myself and exercised regularly, but then I started a business and lost control.
After COVID struck and working 70+ hours a week at a high stakes job my physical and mental health were left in tatters.
At the end of 2021 - I was almost on the verge of another breakdown.
(Yes I said another)
I tried to take back control, but was still very broken and needed to take more time to focus on my mental health before I could really focus on my physical health.
In 2023 after about 1,000 hours of therapy (grinding out achievements in Dead By Daylight)
I decided it was time for a change, my health needed to be a long term investment, not just a quick win.
Sharing My Journey
I decided the best way to hold myself accountable was by sharing my progress pictures online.
We all deal with accountability in different ways and for me when it comes to my health sometimes… I’ll just pretend things didn’t happen…
For example, say I decided I’m going to gorge my face with cake.
Yeh - It didn’t happen.
Not to say gorging yourself with cake is bad it’s fine to indulge occasionally but it also important to do that with consideration and control.
I wanted to catch myself before I lose control and having a public record with pictures seemed like a sensible way to achieve that.
Because it’s hard to hide from pictures.
It wasn’t long before I was compiling stats and sharing them with everyone at the end of every month.
Weight
Fat & Lean Mass
Total Lifted
Calories burned
Lift time
Cardio time
Nutrition
I exported this data from a few different health apps and manually created the graphics in photoshop.
It took a few hours each month on top of collecting the data and apps made it difficult to get your data in a usable format
It was frustrating.
So eventually I built tools to help me, going as far as to build spreadsheets, a Google Drive integration and a React application to compile the images.
But it was still a lot of work and it felt like this should be just a button in an app.
Why am I spending so much time and effort on admin?
It was another potential blocker another reason “not to do it”
So I decided to take control and start building Bearly Fit
Why LinkedIn?
LinkedIn has always had a bit of an identity crisis.
It’s not sure if it’s a professional network or a network for professionals.
A combination of narcissism, corporate gaslighting, memes and games (??)
I’m very vocal about my hatred for Corporate culture so genuinely it was surprising that even in the early days - my content resonated with people.
Over the years, I had grown a small and loyal following, people enjoyed what I shared and many were invested in my health journey.
So it seemed like the perfect place to share my work.
And in August 2023 I started to share what I was building and getting feedback every week or two.
Making sure I didn’t over do it and make Bearly Fit my entire identity on the platform.
My Growth
I don’t think people realise how much my audience has grown since I started this journey.
My content hasn’t always gotten good reach, in fact a lot of the time it’s been very hit and miss.
Today, I stand at 20,755 followers but when I started building Bearly Fit in 2023, I only had 8,000 followers on LinkedIn.
A lot people also don’t know that during those same 2 years through poor moderation and platform quirks, I have been banned 5 times.
Twice almost entirely losing everything.
Despite all that, I think it’s an interesting place to grow such an unlikely brand.
And the juxtaposition of a sassy teddy bear against the cold corporate background is why it has done so well.
It took a while to build traction around the idea after all why Bearly Fit? A question I got asked regularly. It was “yet another health app”.
Sometimes it felt like my posts just weren’t being seen, like the algorithm was punishing me.
Maybe that’s true.
But I’ve learned that turning up and getting involved can be just as important as the content itself.
It takes time to build things.
The Page’s Growth
Similar to my own page, Bearly Fit’s Page took a while for it’s content to actually reach people.
I think the algorithm treats company pages as if they are people
As a person the way best way to grow on LinkedIn is by:
Engaging in other people’s posts
Connecting with active, relevant people
Creating a combination of inclusive and exclusive content
But as a company page, you can’t connect with people and commenting is often seen as spammy.
So getting visibility on your brand or content can be a little more difficult and doesn’t happen organically.
So I decided to take a mixed approach by
Selectively creating posts on my own profile and then tagging Bearly Fit
Having Bearly Fit React and share certain posts
The same as 1 and 2, but have Bearly Fit create the posts too
I tried to be smart about it and didn’t engage with or share everything.
Making sure that both pages had a variety of unique content so people had a reason to follow both.
LinkedIn do offer the ability to invite people from your connections.
But with over 10,000 connections, not everyone connected with me is following me, my journey or interested in Bearly Fit.
The Content
I wanted to focus mostly on visual content.
Things like pictures and videos, story posts and polls are important…
But when you’re doom scrolling corporate nonsense, a bright, ridiculous teddy bear will always stand out.
I also made sure that Bearly Fit has a clear visual identity to help it stand out from other Health Apps and especially on LinkedIn
(I’ll discuss Branding in a future post)
Finally, I tried to keep a good variety between informative, entertaining and technical posts.
Health is important to everyone.
So it’s important that my content appeals to a broad and diverse audience, not just the weirdo’s lurking in my bush because I am incredible developer and lover.
An Unlikely Brand On a Unlikely platform
“That sounds great James but did it actually work?” - You probably
Well, despite being an unlikely brand on an unlikely platform…
All of the effort that went in to building a community, having a clear visual language and building in public on LinkedIn has paid off.
The launch post:
66,000 impression
974 Reactions
198 Comments
27 Reports
And despite being an over saturated market, where apps are released almost daily - all that converted.
In just the first 24 hours on Android:
215 installs
9 Paying subscribers
8 - 5* reviews
Hundreds of new followers across different socials,
Although I should say, that I don’t think it was necessarily successful because I did all this on LinkedIn.
That was just where I had a small audience and following which helped amplify what I was sharing.
I think the most important things were
Building something that solved a problem
Showing integrity, vulnerability and honesty whilst building
Building a community
Listening to and engaging with feedback
Patience
These are things that transcend the platform and can be applied anywhere.
Thanks for reading!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this deep dive in to Building in public on LinkedIn.
I still have a lot to share in this journey
Building in Public with LinkedIn (You are here)
Building in Public with Twitch (next post)
Branding
Tech Deep Dive
Where I want to take this
Got a question or something else you’d like me to cover?
Drop me a comment below or e-mail me at james@bearly.fit
Love ya!
James