Building in public
By: Reuben Noronha
Tags: Startup Life, Startup, Building, Founder Stories, Journey

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on a project called RolodexAI. The idea is help people stay connected to their networks by automating the scheduling of 1:1 virtual meetings. It’s a problem I personally face — I find it really hard to stay connected to people, but when I do connect with them, it’s amazing and almost all conversations end with “We should do this more often”.

As I embark on the journey of building this, I wanted to try this new thing I recently learnt about. It’s called “Building in public”. Here’s a little more about what it is, pros and cons and why I’ve decided to do it.

What is Building in Public?

As the name suggests, building in public means that you share the journey of building your product/company with a public audience. This audience can be your friends, family, customers or anyone else out there. You share stories, learnings and milestones and take people along with you on this journey. It’s an opportunity for you to be authentic and vulnerable and rally a community around what you’re building. Over the last few week I’ve seen may people, especially indie hackers, doing this. They talk about their product, users, revenue etc. on twitter and other forums. The objective, they claim, isn’t to show off, but to inspire others.

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Why the hell would you Build in Public?

You might be thinking that this is quite a weird thing to do. Why would you tell the world what you’re building? What if someone copies it? Why would you want to tell people, especially customers, about the challenges and short comings of your product as you’re building it? Why would anyone in their sane mind put themselves out there to be criticised by random people on a public forum? Reid Hoffman has a popular quote “An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down”. That sounds cool but now who wants to tell the passengers on that airplane that you’re figuring things out?

Pros and Cons of building in public

Like most things in life, it has it pros and cons. As long as the pros outweigh the cons, it’s probably worth it.

Pros

Pushes you to launch your “imperfect” product sooner than later Helps you gain trust of people by showing vulnerability Creates a possibility for you to get great feedback from the most unexpected sources Offers you an opportunity to tell a story. Everyone loves stories

Cons

Someone will copy what you’re working on Creates anxiety as you’re exposed to the world

Why I want to building in public

The world of startups is over glamorised. All you read in the news is about people getting funded. You hardly ever read the bad stuff (which is weird because most mainstream media is mostly bad stuff). But for anyone who’s tried to build something, the reality is that building something is hard, takes time and is far from glamorous. Unfortunately all of that isn’t cool and as a result you hardly read about it, except in books maybe. What I like most about this concept of building in public is the fact that you need to be absolutely transparent and vulnerable — which I’ve come to realise as being one of the most important attributes successful founders and leaders have. One of the best examples of this is the podcast called Start-up by Alex Blumberg about the story of Gimlet. It’s the most authentic representation of what it means to start a company and even though I’ve never met the guy, I somehow feel a part of his journey and am rooting for him. I’m sure it isn’t easy to be transparent and vulnerable (as humans, we’re not wired to enjoy being attacked, well most of us aren’t) and it takes practice to build up that muscle.

So here are my reasons for doing it. It’s mainly personal but I hope it can be valuable to someone, just as I myself have gained from the many others who are building in public

Create a sense of accountability and set a bar for progress week on week so that I push through when things get hard or I get lazy (I did this with my 30 day writing challenge and that went pretty well) Document my learnings so that I can look back and see how much ground I’ve covered. When you’re in the dumps, it’s hard to motivate yourself, but when you look back on how much you’ve progressed week on week, it gives you the fuel to keep going Muster the courage to say “I don’t know”. I’ll have my game face on most days, but it takes immense courage to admit, that on some days, I have no clue what I’m doing. Receive feedback and do a better job at listening to what people are trying to tell you Find a group of people who care about what I’m building so that I can do a better job at solving a real problem faced by them Give myself an excuse to write more (something which I’ve not done ever since I ended my writing challenge)

What next?

Every week, I’ll share a report card of RolodexAI’s progress. It’ll mainly be broken into 3 key parts.

Numbers Wins/Losses Learnings

I’m already nervous (since the last week hasn’t been a great one) but let’s give this a shot! You can find more stories of people building in public here