Building in Public

Whenever you walk past a construction site in a large city you tend to see a large fence surrounding the worksite. The days of building something in private have gone the way of landlines, i.e. it no longer exists. The fact is that whenever you begin to make something, our human nature to share takes over and we begin to want to brag about our progress.

Over the past few years there has perhaps been about two or so articles written by fairly well respected individuals about building startups in public. Building in public has been touted to increase the hype or the general media outreach for when you launch, and to also shorten the feedback loop between potential customers and the developers.

I haven’t ever really been so gung-ho about showing off what I am working on with others in public. The main reason why was because I feared that some other developer would take the idea and build the product faster than I could. And to be honest they probably could build it better than I could also!

However after joining a few really cool slack chat communities, I have realized that its probably worth building in public, even if your idea gets taken by a rogue developer you can prove you were working on the idea before they were.

The content that finally spurred me to write this I found on the #startup slack chat inside the #humblebrag channel. Gijs Nelissen decided to share his next product’s development in public through Medium. (Here is the first post, all of them are worth reading: https://medium.com/startup-journey-liveslack/startup-journey-day-1-ecc37c0c8334). Through these posts Gijs discusses basically every step that he is taking to create this product, from ideation, to validation, to development.

So in the coming days I will be putting together a post to start showing off my latest project online. I invite anyone who reads this to reply with comments about building in public, if it has worked out for you or if you have had troubles with this strategy in the past.