The Case for Building in Public

Why I share what I'm building, what's working, and what's failing. Building in public isn't just marketing. It's a forcing function for better decisions.

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Key Points

  • Building in public creates accountability that improves decision-making and execution quality
  • Every update becomes content, every lesson becomes a blog post—turning your progress into a distributed moat
  • The compounding effect of transparency over time builds an audience and community that becomes your first customers

About two years ago, I made a decision that felt uncomfortable at the time: I’d start sharing everything I was building. Not the polished final product, but the messy middle. The experiments. The failures. The customer conversations. The revenue numbers. The strategic pivots.

I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea. Wouldn’t competitors steal my approach? Would people think I was just bragging? Would sharing too much damage business confidentiality?

What I’ve found is that building in public isn’t just a marketing tactic—it’s a forcing function that makes you a better builder. Here’s why.

The Accountability Multiplier

The moment you tell people you’re shipping something, the stakes change. You’re no longer building for yourself in a vacuum. You’re building in front of an audience. And that changes everything.

When I announced I was launching a feature for Openmark, suddenly I had skin in the game. I couldn’t quietly push the launch date back three times. I couldn’t half-ship something mediocre. The accountability was real. This isn’t theoretical—it directly improved the quality of what I shipped.

Austin Kleon wrote about this in Show Your Work: “The impulse to keep what you’re working on to yourself is a strong one. But it’s the people who break this rule that tend to get ahead in their fields.” The reason is simple. Accountability creates urgency. Urgency forces prioritization. Prioritization forces execution.

I’ve noticed this pattern across everything I’ve built. The projects I shared progress on regularly shipped faster and with higher quality than the ones I kept private. It’s not magic—it’s just that public commitments are harder to break than private ones.

Every Update Is Content

Here’s what most builders miss: every meaningful update you’re already making can become content. You’re going to take screenshots of your new feature anyway. You’re going to write internal updates anyway. You’re going to have customer conversations anyway. Why not package those insights for public consumption?

This fundamentally changes your content strategy. You don’t have to manufacture ideas. Your work is your content. The blog post about why you built feature X a certain way, the thread about what you learned from talking to 50 potential customers, the update about a failed experiment—these all live naturally in your building process.

Sahil Lavingia, founder of Gumroad, has been building in public for years. His transparency around Gumroad’s metrics, struggles, and strategic decisions has become one of the company’s greatest assets. Every lesson becomes shareable. Every setback becomes teachable. Over time, this creates a compounding library of insights that positions you as a thoughtful builder and strategist.

The math is straightforward: if you’re shipping something worth talking about, and you talk about it, you’re instantly multiplying the reach and impact of your work. You’re not adding extra work—you’re repackaging the work you’re already doing.

The Forcing Function for Better Decisions

This is the part that’s changed how I think strategically. When you know you’re going to have to explain a decision to an audience, you think more carefully about the decision itself.

I’ve caught myself mid-way through a project and realized: “Wait, I’m going to have to explain why we built this instead of that. Let me actually think about whether the reasoning is sound.” It forces intellectual honesty. You can’t hide behind bullshit when you know you’ll have to justify it publicly.

Naval Ravikant talks about leverage through media: “The best way to make money is to build a direct relationship with your audience through valuable content.” But beyond the financial leverage, there’s a decision-making leverage. When your decisions are documented and discussed, they’re better. You catch assumptions faster. You stress-test ideas before fully committing.

This matters especially in early-stage work where you have limited information. When I’m experimenting with a new feature or business model, I talk about it publicly. I get feedback from smart people I didn’t pay to give me that feedback. I catch flaws in my thinking before they become expensive mistakes.

But What About Competitors?

The fear is real. I had it too. If I share how I’m building Openmark, won’t someone just copy the approach?

Here’s what I’ve learned: ideas aren’t the moat. Execution is. And execution is the one thing no one can copy from you. They can read every public update you share and still fail to replicate what you built because they won’t have the context, the timing, the specific team decisions, the customer feedback loops, the rapid iteration cycles. They’ll have a blog post. You’ll have a product.

More practically, competitors aren’t actually paying that close attention. They’re too focused on their own work. And the people who are paying attention—your actual audience—are rooting for you to succeed. They’re not competitors. They’re customers, collaborators, and friends.

What You Share (And What You Don’t)

Building in public doesn’t mean sharing everything. There are clear boundaries.

Share lessons, not trade secrets. Share revenue trends, not customer data. Share your reasoning, not your pricing model. Share failures, not unfixed security vulnerabilities. Share your journey, not confidential information from partners or employees.

I share how much revenue Openmark generates monthly because it builds trust and teaches people who want to build something similar. I don’t share which customers are using it, how they’re using it, or what they’re paying, because that’s their confidential information.

I share that an experiment failed and why. I don’t share the specific technical implementation details if they’re proprietary. I share the high-level business decision. I don’t share the spreadsheet with all the numbers.

The line is: would this information hurt someone if shared? If yes, don’t share it. If no, probably should share it.

The Compounding Effect

Two years ago, when I started building in public, I had maybe 500 people reading updates. It felt like shouting into the void. There was no immediate payoff. No viral moment. No sudden influx of customers.

But compounding isn’t linear. It’s exponential. After a year, there were 2,000 people. After two years, there were 8,000. More importantly, these weren’t random followers. They were smart, engaged people who’d watched my progress over months or years. They understood my thinking. They knew what I was capable of.

When I launched something new, these people were naturally my first customers. Not because I asked them to buy, but because they’d already seen the work and believed in it. When I needed feedback or advisors, they showed up. When I wanted to collaborate, doors opened because people knew what I could do—they’d seen the receipts.

This is the compounding effect of building in public. It’s not about going viral. It’s about building trust systematically over time. Trust that converts to customers, collaborators, and opportunities.

Real Examples from My Work

I’ve watched this play out repeatedly. When I started documenting my experience building Openmark, every update led to conversations. When I wrote about what I learned from interviewing potential customers, people reached out asking to join the waitlist. When I shared the revenue numbers, other builders DM’d asking for advice.

With Ryan’s Roundup, my newsletter, I’ve been transparent about subscriber growth, what’s working in the format, and what I’m experimenting with. That transparency has actually attracted writers and sponsors because they could see the audience and engagement metrics firsthand.

This blog itself is an example. I write about lessons from building, business strategy, and what I’m learning. Some of my best opportunities have come from people who read these posts. They understood how I think, what I value, and how I work before we ever had a conversation.

I could have written a polished bio and waited for inbound. Instead, I built publicly. The work speaks for itself, and the audience helps amplify it.

The Unexpected Benefit

Here’s the thing I didn’t anticipate: building in public actually makes you happier. There’s something clarifying about having to articulate what you’re doing and why. It forces you to stay honest with yourself about whether you’re actually making progress.

When I’m struggling with a decision or hitting a wall, writing about it publicly clarifies my thinking. The act of explaining the problem to an audience forces me to understand it better. And often, I get feedback that points to a solution I hadn’t considered.

More than that, building in public connects you to people. Real feedback, real conversations, real relationships. That’s infinitely more valuable than being privately successful and unknown.

Start Small, Be Consistent

If you’re considering building in public, you don’t need a massive following or a perfect strategy. You need consistency and honesty.

Start with a newsletter. Or a Twitter thread. Or a blog post. Share what you’re working on and what you learned. Do it again next week. Do it again the week after that. The compounding happens over months and years, not days and weeks.

The barrier to entry is low. The compounding effect is high. The accountability is real. And somewhere along the way, your audience becomes your greatest asset—not because they’re selling for you, but because they genuinely believe in your work.

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