I Was Building in Public Wrong for Almost a Year

For a long time, I thought I understood what building in public meant. I'd seen enough people do it successfully — the founders with the engaged followings, the newsletters that seemed to grow on their own, the Twitter threads that got shared far beyond their original audience — and I thought I'd identified the pattern. They were documenting their journey. They were being open and consistent and present. So that's what I did.

I posted constantly. Updates, reflections, behind-the-scenes moments, wins, setbacks, random observations at 11pm when I was still at my desk. I was transparent to the point of oversharing. I treated my timeline like a public diary and told myself the audience would come because I was being genuine.

The audience didn't really come. And after months of that, I finally had to sit down and ask myself why.

The Misunderstanding I'd Been Building On

The answer, when I found it, was uncomfortable in the way that obvious things tend to be once you see them clearly.

I had confused documentation with value. I thought that showing up consistently and being honest about the experience was enough — that the act of building in public was itself the thing people wanted to follow. What I hadn't asked, not seriously, was what any of it was giving to the person reading it.

That question reframed everything.

Building in public isn't content creation. It's distribution. It's a mechanism for getting ideas and lessons in front of people who can use them — and it only works if the ideas and lessons are genuinely worth something to someone other than you. The journey isn't the product. The insight extracted from the journey is.

Once I understood that, I had to go back and look honestly at almost everything I'd been posting. Most of it was activity reporting. It told people what I was doing without telling them anything they could do with that information. It was a log, not a lesson.

What the Shift Actually Looked Like

The change I made was small on the surface and significant in practice. I stopped asking what happened today that I could post about and started asking what did I learn recently that would genuinely help someone else?

The difference shows up clearly in a before and after. The old version of a post might say something like: Spent most of today reworking the onboarding flow. Tiring but necessary. That's a diary entry. It tells the reader that I exist and am doing things, and nothing more.

The new version of the same experience became something like: Three onboarding mistakes we made that dropped our activation rate by 18% — and what we changed. Same source material. Completely different value to the person reading it. One asks the audience to care about my day. The other gives them something they can think about, apply, or share with someone on their own team.

The response to the second kind of post wasn't just better in terms of numbers, though it was. It was better in terms of who responded and how. People were engaging with the substance, not just acknowledging that I'd shown up. That's a different thing entirely.

The Founders Who Do This Well

Most founders who build in public share activities. The ones who build real audiences share insights.

This sounds like a small distinction until you think about what each type of post is actually asking of the reader. Activity posts ask for empathy — they're implicitly saying here's what my life is like, I hope you find it interesting. Insight posts offer a trade — here's something I figured out the hard way, take it if it's useful to you.

Readers are generous with attention when there's a fair exchange involved. They're not obligated to care about your process just because you're documenting it. But give them something they can genuinely use — a framework, a mistake, a counterintuitive finding, a number that surprises them — and you've created a reason to come back that has nothing to do with loyalty and everything to do with value.

Nobody shares a post that says fixed bugs for six hours today. People share posts that say here's what six hours of debugging taught me about the assumption I'd been wrong about for months.

Why Consistency Beats Virality

There's a temptation, especially early on, to chase the big moment. The post that takes off. The thread that gets reshared by someone with a large following. The piece of content that shortcuts the slow work of building an audience over time.

I understand that temptation and I've mostly stopped listening to it.

Viral posts are largely unpredictable. They happen occasionally, they feel good, and they produce a spike that usually fades faster than you'd expect. What actually builds an audience — the kind that compounds, that generates real opportunities, that turns into something durable — is repeated exposure over time to content that's consistently worth reading.

One useful post every day does more over the course of a year than one viral post every six months. Not because of any single day, but because of what accumulates. People start to recognize your name. They associate it with something specific. They begin to look for your posts rather than stumbling across them. That's the foundation you're building toward, and it only gets built one useful thing at a time.

The Filter I Use Now

Before I publish anything, I ask myself one question: If someone else had written this, would I save it?

Not like it, not scroll past and feel vaguely positive about — actually save it, return to it, share it with someone. That's a higher bar than it sounds. Most content, including most of my own early work, doesn't clear it.

If the answer is no, I don't post it. Not because I'm precious about volume or waiting for perfection, but because posting something that doesn't clear that bar doesn't just fail to help — it slowly trains your audience to expect less from you. Every mediocre post is a small withdrawal from the same account that good posts build up.

The question keeps me honest. It forces me to ask whether I'm posting for myself — for the comfort of having shown up, of having been consistent in the most superficial sense — or whether I'm posting for the person on the other side of it.

That shift in orientation, more than anything else, is what changed how building in public worked for me.

Show up for your reader. The audience follows from that.