What people misunderstand about building in public

I'm a huge believer in building in public, especially right now.

Our timelines are flooded with AI-generated slop, and people are craving the opposite: the actual human behind the product. They want to see your face, your thinking, the choices you agonized over. In a feed full of generated content, being a real, alive person is the thing that stands out.

And yet most people I talk to are still hesitant to do it. So let me address the 3 most common misconceptions:

But first, let me show you what good building in public actually looks like.

Here's Tibo, the head of Codex at OpenAI, asking users on X what they dislike about the Codex product:

https://x.com/i/status/2068736857312198928

Here's Lindy sharing their process of switching their product's model from Claude to DeepSeek and what they learned along the way:

https://x.com/i/status/2070214403576959008

Here's the designer at The Browser Company sharing how they arrived at their design for their Artifact feature:

https://x.com/i/status/2065070625970946175

1. "If I share my secrets, people will copy me"

First of all, you absolutely do not need to share any proprietary information. You can share zero sensitive information and still create great content. Look at the examples above. None of them gave anything away, and they still landed.

People want to learn what you learned. If you openly share your learnings, it doesn't make you less defensible. On the contrary, you establish yourself as the thought leader in the field, which brings you credibility, connections, reputation, and trust.

And honestly, if posting a few tweets means people can copy your business, then your business was probably not defensible in the first place.

Secondly, we need to rethink what a "moat" even is in the age of AI. Technology used to be an important moat. But now everybody is building on top of the same AI models and similar underlying tech. So what makes you stand out? I personally believe brand, trust, community, and owning your own distribution will be the new moat.

Having proprietary access to a group of users who trust you and want to hear from you is something no competitor can copy overnight. Instead of relying on outside forces (influencers, PR, ad spend), you OWN your distribution. You OWN the narrative.

Community is the moat. Brand is the moat. Trust is the moat.

2. "I don't have time, building in public will distract me from the real work"

Marketing and storytelling IS the real work. Arguably more important than the building.

https://x.com/i/status/1982476318639079784

At the end of the day, remember you're building this for people. If people don't know about your product, they're not going to use your product. It's that simple.

People are not going to magically find out about your product and start telling all their friends about it. Storytelling takes time and effort, and it's worth your time. AI has made building easier and distribution harder. Code is cheap, attention is expensive.

Staying close to the voice of the customer also helps you make the product better. Have you ever wanted to do user interviews but realized you had to go through expensive recruiting channels to get them, or found that most people just aren't willing to talk to you?

Since I started building in public, I basically no longer need to do any cold outreach, because people come to me. And even when I do proactively reach out, it's not cold anymore. It's warm, because that person has already seen my content or appreciates my work, so the likelihood they'll reply is 10x higher.

3. "Building in public means posting my features"

Nobody wants to read your change log.

A mundane report of "here's what I shipped today" reads like exactly that, and nobody cares.

What people love is the behind-the-scenes story of how you built it. They want to put a face to a product. They want to see the human, the builder, the person who put their soul and their thoughtfulness into a piece of software.

Here are some topics to get you started:

A simple trick: imagine your target audience as yourself, 6 months ago. What do you wish you'd known back then to avoid the pitfalls you fell into?

Code is cheap. Attention is expensive. The good news is that being yourself, out loud, is still completely free.