Building in public
This note is about an on-going project that I’m documenting here in the spirit of building in public. I’m currently running a pilot cohort and figuring it out as we go.
Stagefright is a peer community program for people interested in improving their craft of public speaking. It’s a form of Communities of Practice.
The Pilot
I’m experimenting with a pilot program that:
- has a 5 people group with varied experience and activity in public speaking
- runs 5 sessions over the summer of 2026, 2 hrs each
I’m running it to figure out how to turn it into a repeatable program to help more people become more confident and comfortable presenting in front of other people: whether it’s business presentations at work or to clients or getting on a stage to talk about what they are interested in.
It takes place over 15-week timespan with one session roughly ever 3 weeks based on availability of people.
Each session consists of a shared exercise and a slot reserved for one person to do a presentation and getting feedback.
Session 1
Exercise: Introduce yourself
In our first exercise, I invited everyone to craft a 5-minute talk introducing themselves to other members of the group. Instructions were to aim as close to five minutes as possible rather than treating it as a maximum length.
As an exercise, it’s a combination of crafting a new presentation, getting practice in presenting and helping everyone to learn about the group they are in. Learning more about each other also creates psychological safety, making public speaking in the group less intimidating.
Talk: I presented one of my talks that I’ve done for years and am booked to do again in the fall and got really nice feedback.
Post-workshop: The venue where we did our workshops is next door from a nice pub so we went to bond and continue discussions there afterwards.
Session 2
Exercise: Wikipedia X (improvisation)
One of my favourite public speaking exercises is Wikipedia X. It’s an impro practice where you roll for a random article in Wikipedia until you find one that’s non-trivial and the person presenting is given just the title, has 30 seconds to think and needs to talk for 2 or 3 minutes about the topic.
The idea is to improvise, not to attempt to be factual. The more obscure the topic is, the better.
We did two rounds: one for 2 minutes with a random topic and another for 3 minutes where we rolled for random person name.
The exercise helps you become more comfortable with being on stage when you don’t know what to say: maybe you forgot something you planned to say or someone asks a question that you don’t have an answer to. Improvisation is an excellent exercise for making yourself experience those moments more and build a natural response to it so you can keep on going.
Talk: One of the participants presented a sales pitch of theirs.
Post-workshop: Like with the first session, we ended up enjoying summer evening in the pub.
Session 3
Exercise: Poetry
Coincidentally our third session happened on Day of Summer and Poetry and our exercise was poetry. I invited everyone to bring 3 of their favourite poems to practice with.
Poetry is a good exercise because you can choose relatively short pieces and focus on the form of presenting instead of the content of it.
I was initially bit worried if doing a few short poems would fill the time well enough but it ended up being both excellent timing-wise — we spent over an hour reading 2 rounds of poems and discussing the experience and providing feedback to each other.
Talk: One of the participants presented an investor presentation for their business.
No post-workshop beers this session.
Initial marketing message
I launched the pilot program with this LinkedIn message and got the group together faster than I had time to build a website or share elsewhere.
Do you do public speaking and would like to get good and comfortable in that? I’m looking to start an experiment: a small peer group of speakers and speakers-to-be who during the summer, meet in Turku area every 3 weeks or so to practice public speaking and crafting high quality presentations.
You’ll get actual practice in front of a small supportive group and feedback on the things you are looking to improve. The goal is that the next time you’ll do a presentation — whether it’s on a conference stage, in a meetup, in a client meeting or pitching to clients, you’ll be confident and will charm your audience.
Who am I looking for to join the group? You do some amount of presentations and want to get better at it. What you talk about doesn’t matter: corporate presentations, tech talks, startup pitching or something completely different. Commitment to the in-person meetings during the summer is a high priority but we’ll find the best compromise for when to meet once we have the group together.
What happens after the summer will depend on how the experiment goes: either we continue with the same group, expand, shift around or stop.
To start, I’m looking for up to 4 other people to keep the group size small so that everyone gets enough practice and focus.
Future plans
After the pilot, I’m planning to take what I’ve learned and the feedback from participants. Then I want to craft a program that I can run repeatedly with different groups in the future. Potentially, I want to start an on-going community for everyone who has gone through the program with the idea of providing continuation and occasional one-off events for alumni who want to keep practicing after the program.