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:
1. If I share my secrets, people will copy me
1. I don't have time
1. I'll just post about my features
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:
Here's Lindy sharing their process of switching their product's model from Claude to DeepSeek and what they learned along the way:
Here's the designer at The Browser Company sharing how they arrived at their design for their Artifact feature:
## 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.
Generated by Thread Navigator
Press ⌘ + S to quick-export