The Honest Version of 'Build in Public'
The phrase has been claimed so thoroughly by growth marketers that it barely means anything anymore.
“Build in public” used to describe something specific: sharing the actual process of making something, including the parts that are embarrassing, uncertain, or wrong.
Now it mostly means: post your wins with humility-flavored language and call it transparency.
What it’s become
Most “build in public” content follows a predictable format. Launch a product. Hit a milestone. Post the MRR screenshot with “wow, can’t believe we hit $10k — here’s everything I learned.” Watch the retweets.
The learning section is always: don’t give up, focus on distribution, listen to your customers. The actual hard part — the three weeks where you didn’t know if you had product-market fit, the call that made you realize you’d built the wrong thing, the moment you almost quit — that gets compressed into a subplot of the success story.
That’s not building in public. That’s a victory lap with a modest caption.
Why the real version is harder
The honest version of “build in public” is mostly boring. It’s posting about a feature you’re not sure you should build. Sharing that you ran ten sales calls this week and nine went nowhere. Writing about a hypothesis that turned out to be completely wrong, and you still don’t fully understand why.
None of that performs. It doesn’t get the engagement that milestone screenshots get. It doesn’t build an audience of people waiting to buy something from you.
But it does something more useful: it forces you to actually look at what’s happening instead of narrating a highlight reel.
The one person it’s actually for
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: the most valuable version of building in public isn’t for your audience. It’s for you.
Writing about what you’re actually doing — the uncertain, messy, not-yet-figured-out stuff — is a thinking tool. You can’t narrate ambiguity without confronting it. The act of writing “I’m not sure if this is working and here’s why” is usually how you figure out what to do next.
If it also helps someone else who’s in a similar fog, that’s a bonus. But the moment you filter for what will perform, you’ve stopped being honest about what’s happening. You’re publishing PR instead of process.
The metrics posts get traction because they make people feel like the path is legible — like if you follow the same steps, you’ll get the same outcome. That’s why they spread. It’s also why they’re often useless.
The version of “build in public” that actually works looks less like a content strategy and more like a working journal you share sometimes.
It’s not optimized for followers. It’s optimized for not lying to yourself about how the thing is going.
That version is slower, less rewarding short-term, and almost impossible to turn into a growth tactic. It’s also the only version I trust when someone shares it.