Insights / Why Building In Public Is Awful (and the Version That Isn't)
Why Building In Public Is Awful (and the Version That Isn't)
On performing the work and doing the work at the same time.
Alice B
Building in public is the practice of sharing your company's progress in real time with an audience. It turns awful when it quietly becomes the opposite of building: it asks you to perform the work and do the work at the same time, and those two things pull in opposite directions.
If you've felt this and assumed it was a you-problem, it isn't. The founders who build in public well are mostly the ones who quietly hate it, and they hate it for structural reasons rather than character ones. Name the structure and you can stop blaming yourself for finding it exhausting.
Why does building in public feel so awful?
What performs is not what's true. Revenue screenshots, the "I almost quit, but" arc, the contrarian one-liner built to be quote-tweeted: the genre rewards one narrow emotional register, and most of it is theatre dressed as vulnerability. The strange part is internal. You start reverse-engineering your own week into a narrative beat, deciding on Tuesday how Thursday's post will frame a thing you haven't done yet.
It's also a treadmill with no off switch. The audience wants the next update, so a week of deep, unglamorous progress reads as a quiet week, and a quiet week reads as failure, even when it was your best week. The feed has no column for "rewrote the part nobody sees yet," so you start optimizing for postability over progress without noticing the tax.
Not sure which commercial lever to pull first?
The free self-assessment maps where your commercial layer is dormant in about ten minutes.
Take the self-assessmentWhat's the real risk of building in public too early?
You show half-formed things to people who respond to half-formed things, and you get one of two bad outcomes. Either you're flattered into a local maximum, polishing the version that got likes instead of the version that was right, or you get knocked off something good before it cohered. Both run on feedback from people with no skin in your outcome. A reply costs them nothing; acting on it can cost you a quarter.
The honest version vs the awful version of building in public
| The honest version | The awful version | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Telling true things about what you're learning | Treating your company as ongoing content |
| When you post | When you actually have something true to say | On a schedule the audience sets |
| What it optimizes | The work | Postability |
| Feedback source | People with skin in your outcome | Anyone with a free reply |
| Can you go quiet? | Yes, for weeks, and nothing breaks | No, silence reads as failure |
How do you build in public without hating it?
The fix isn't to quit posting, and it isn't to post more. It's a single question you ask before the compose box is even open: am I about to tell a true thing, or feed the machine? If it's a true thing, say it plainly and go back to work. If it's content, the silence is the stronger play. One true post a week beats five performed ones, because the true ones build trust that survives you logging off for a fortnight.
The methodology: The true-thing-or-content test
Before you post, decide whether you're about to tell a true thing or feed the machine. True things get said plainly and briefly, then you go back to work; everything else is content, and for content the silence is the stronger play. Building in public is one tactic inside distribution, which is one of twenty-two commercial levers, not a way of life you have to adopt wholesale.
How do you know if you've crossed the line?
The tell is simple. Founders who've made building in public work can go quiet for two weeks without their world ending. The ones who can't have usually stopped building the company and started running a publication about it. The work you do in the quiet is what you'll have to show a year from now; the feed will have forgotten the clever demo by Friday.
Frequently asked questions
Why does building in public feel so exhausting?
Because it asks you to perform the work and do the work at the same time, and those pull in opposite directions. The hours that move things forward are quiet and unphotogenic, so you end up narrating the thin slice that's legible to an audience rather than the slice that matters.
Is it bad to build in public?
No. The honest version - telling true things about what you're learning when you have something true to say, and staying quiet otherwise - is a useful distribution tactic. The awful version is treating your company as ongoing content, and the line between the two is thinner than most people admit.
Should I stop building in public?
Not necessarily. Before each post, ask whether you're telling a true thing or feeding the machine. If you can't go quiet for two weeks without it feeling like failure, you've probably crossed from building a company into running a publication about one.
