There’s a phrase I’ve seen a lot lately: build in public. The idea is appealing — share your process, document your thinking, bring an audience along for the journey. Accountability, community, distribution, all at once.
I’ve tried it. I have thoughts.
What Building in Public Gets Right
The honest version of building in public — sharing failures alongside wins, asking for help, learning from strangers on the internet — is genuinely valuable. It breaks down the mythology of effortless genius. It creates connection. It can accelerate the feedback loops that make products better.
I’ve benefited from other people’s public building. Some of the best technical writing I’ve read was written in real time by someone solving a problem they didn’t fully understand yet.
What It Gets Wrong
But there’s a version of building in public that’s really just performing progress. Daily updates. Thread breakdowns. Screenshots of dashboards. The metrics climbing, always climbing.
The problem is that the most important thinking — the kind that actually changes direction — doesn’t look like progress. It looks like silence. It looks like starting over. It looks like a week where you don’t tweet because you spent four days realizing you were building the wrong thing.
That week? That’s usually the most valuable week.
The Ideas That Need Dark to Grow
Some ideas need silence to develop. Premature exposure — before the idea is sturdy enough to withstand skepticism — can kill it. You explain it, someone asks a reasonable question you can’t yet answer, and suddenly you doubt whether it was ever worth pursuing.
The best ideas I’ve had needed weeks of private marination before I could articulate them. If I’d shared them before they were ready, I’m not sure they’d exist.
A Different Model
What I’ve settled on: be transparent about outcomes and process, but protective of germination.
Share what you made. Share how it went. But keep the weird, half-baked, doesn’t-quite-make-sense-yet ideas close for a while. Let them breathe. Let them become themselves.
Build in public. But think in private.