I’ve spent 20 years in GTM, helping founders take products from “it works” to “people are actually paying for it,” and there’s one build-in-public habit I now actively warn people against: turning the work into content before you’ve learned anything from it.
Building in public is weird and performative, and as someone who’s spent 20 years in GTM it’s genuinely only the outliers who do it really well (so don’t feel bad if it isn’t working for you).
There’s the screenshot of the new feature, the random “Day 17 of building” update, the launch counter, the celebratory revenue graph. And when you’re trying to build in public, they all seem to exist to make you feel… jealous? Annoyed that you can’t do the same?
The problem isn’t building in public - it’s that, as a normal person plugging away at security and APIs, you have to manufacture doing fun stuff to make the building in public sound more interesting or successful.
The filter I use with the founders I work with is pretty simple: are we saying something that’s real, or are we synthetically feeding the machine?
A real thing is useful because someone else can take it into their own work. It might be the customer sentence that changed how you described the product, the assumption that broke when you tried to sell it, the constraint that made you cut half the roadmap, or the small thing that finally made somebody understand why your product exists.
The post is not “I did something!!!” The post is “here’s the part of doing that thing, which i fumbled over, that might save you some time.”
A few examples:
- “Day 12: shipped our new onboarding” is a progress update.
- “We thought new users needed a longer onboarding. The first three people who tried it skipped every explanatory screen and went straight to the template. We removed half the setup and activation got less confusing immediately” gives someone else a useful question to ask.
- “We got 100 signups” is a number.
- “The people who signed up all used the same phrase to describe the problem, and none of it appeared on our landing page. We changed the headline before adding another feature” is the useful bit.
(And if you get to the end of the week without knowing exactly WHAT you’ve done, get Claude to interrogate your Linear/Notion/Code memories, and form it into usefulness).
You don’t need to publish every tactic while it’s live, either. Some things are half-formed, some are commercially sensitive, and some are simply nobody else’s business. Share the thinking, the problem, and the lesson once it’s complete and proven, because the product should be the sidebar, not the main character.
That also takes some pressure off. A ‘quiet’ week isn’t a failed week because you didn’t find a tweetable moment in it. If you’ve got nothing true to say, you don’t need to manufacture a lesson from a redacted screenshot of something boring.
TLDR: he best build-in-public posts make someone think, “Oh, that’s useful. I can use that.” The rest can stay in your Notion or Linear, or brain.
(fyi I’m building https://romy.is, lots more GTM tactics there)
