Why I'm Building in Public

There's a default instinct when you're working on something new: keep it quiet until it's ready. Don't show anyone until it's polished. Don't talk about it until you're sure it's going to work. That instinct is wrong. The best things I've built came from sharing early and often, even when what I had to show was rough. Sometimes especially when it was rough.

You learn more from getting an embarrassing feature in front of someone than from trying to perfect it in isolation. I really believe that. The feedback you get when something is 30% done is almost always more valuable than the feedback you get after launch. At that early stage, you can actually change direction. After launch, you're mostly defending decisions you've already made.

Building in public doesn't mean livestreaming every commit or turning your work into a performance. It means being willing to share your progress, your reasoning, and your mistakes while the work is still in motion. It means writing about a project before you have answers, because articulating the questions helps you find them.

There's a compounding effect, too. When you share what you're working on, people start to associate you with that problem space. They send you relevant links, introduce you to people who've solved similar problems, and sometimes they just tell you that your idea already exists, which saves you months. The network effects of working in the open are hard to see at first, but they build over time in ways that staying quiet never does.

I'll be honest: it's uncomfortable. Putting unfinished work in front of people means accepting that it won't be impressive yet. But the discomfort is the point. It keeps you honest about what you've actually built versus what you imagine you'll build someday. It creates accountability. And it stops you from letting great be the enemy of good, one of the easiest traps to fall into when you're building something you care about.