What does building in public mean?

Building in public means sharing the process behind your products openly — the decisions, the reasoning, the lessons, the things that didn't work — not just announcing launches. Instead of building in silence and revealing a finished product, you show the thinking along the way: how you chose what to build, what you cut, what you learned, what failed. For a solo builder it turns the act of building into a body of writing that attracts the right people and demonstrates the expertise the products rest on.

Why should a solo founder build in public?

Because for one person with real expertise, building in public does several jobs at once: the writing is distribution (it ranks and reaches problem-aware people), it's trust (first-hand decisions demonstrate the expertise the products are built on), it's compounding (each piece keeps working over time), and it's accountability (sharing your thinking sharpens it). Building in silence means building without distribution — a good product nobody discovers. Building in public turns the work itself into the channel that brings people to it.

What is the honest way to build in public?

Share the real decisions and the failures, not just the wins and the metrics. The version that works is genuinely useful writing about how you think and what you learned — including what didn't work — because that's what builds trust and demonstrates expertise. The version that doesn't work is performance: flexing revenue screenshots, manufacturing hype, only showing wins. Build in public by teaching what you actually know and admitting what went wrong, not by performing success.

Why I Build in Public

Everyone tells solo founders to "build in public." Almost all of them mean post your revenue and announce your launches. That's the version that gets recommended, and in my experience it's the version that does nothing. Here's the one I actually run, after shipping Delivery Sheet and Listemizde on my own: building in public means publishing the decisions — why I built the thing, what I cut, what I got wrong — because for one person with a real domain behind them, that writing is the only distribution channel I can sustain, and it doubles as the proof the products are worth trusting. This whole site is that bet, made in public.

What it actually means — and doesn't

Building in public is not a launch tweet and a Stripe screenshot. That's the performance version, and readers smell it immediately — the same way an auditor smells a control that got removed "to save clicks."

The version that works is boring by comparison. I write down how I decided what to build, where I drew the MVP line, how I chose the pricing and why Delivery Sheet ships with no free plan — the same operating system I run for every product. The finished product is the least interesting part of any of those stories. The decision is the part someone else can actually use — and the part that shows I know the territory rather than saying so.

One act, four returns

I don't write because I enjoy it. I write because, for a solo builder, one article does four jobs a funded company would hire four people to do:

Distribution. The piece ranks and reaches someone already looking for the problem I solve. I can't outspend anyone on ads; I can out-write them on the specific thing I've actually done.
Trust. A first-hand decision demonstrates expertise instead of claiming it. Eighteen years in enterprise finance is a line on an about page; the reasoning behind a real pricing call is the thing that makes the line believable.
Compounding. The article I wrote three months ago is still working today — ranking, getting cited, bringing people in. Ad spend stops the day the card declines. Writing doesn't.
Accountability. Explaining a decision in public forces me to have actually made one. More than a few of my own calls got sharper the moment I had to write the paragraph defending them — and one or two didn't survive the paragraph at all.

Build in silence and you're building without distribution: the product ships, it's good, and no one ever finds it — because the one channel a solo founder can truly own, the writing, never got made.

Why it fits an expert better than an influencer

Most build-in-public advice is written for people who need an audience and don't yet have much to say. Reverse that and the whole thing gets stronger. When you've spent eighteen years in a domain, the writing isn't marketing bolted onto the product — it is the expertise, made visible one article at a time. The piece ranks because it's genuinely first-hand; the reader trusts it because it obviously came from someone who has done the work; and the product at the bottom of the page was built by that same person. That stack is hard to fake and effective when it's real. It's the one advantage a solo founder has that no funded team can buy.

The part nobody performs: the failures

The wins are the easy thing to post. The failures are the thing that actually builds trust, which is why I write the kill decisions next to the launches. When I say an experiment didn't clear the bar and I shut it, that costs me something to admit — and that cost is exactly why it lands. It's what an expert who has genuinely done the thing sounds like: not a highlight reel, but someone telling you where the postings blew up and what they'd check first next time.

Where it goes wrong

Same failure modes, every time:

Building in silence. Ship the product, skip the writing, launch into no distribution. The most common one, and the most expensive.
Performing instead of teaching. Revenue flexes and manufactured hype in place of anything a reader can use.
Only the wins. Hiding the failures — the exact parts that build trust and teach.
Volume with no substance. Publishing filler because a thread told you to "post daily." It ranks for nothing, demonstrates nothing, and quietly tells people you don't have much to say.

Write the real decisions and the real failures as things another person can use, and building in public stops being a marketing chore and becomes the engine: the building is how people find what you built. For a solo founder with a domain behind them, it isn't a tactic bolted on afterward. It's the whole model — make the thing, and let making it be the distribution. If you're running the same model, the newsletter is where the next decisions land first.