Building in Public
The practice of sharing your process, attracting your audience, and compounding trust.
Building in Public
"Document, don't create."
— Gary Vaynerchuk
I watched a product launch go from zero to $8,000 in monthly recurring revenue in six weeks. The product was a simple AI tool for transcribing and organizing meeting notes for real estate agents. The founder had no marketing budget. She had no PR connections. She had never launched a product before.
What she had was an audience of 3,200 followers on Twitter who had been watching her build the thing in real time for two months.
She'd posted about the problem she was trying to solve. She'd shared screenshots of the prototype, including the ugly early versions. She'd asked questions: "Would this feature be useful, or am I overthinking it?" She'd been honest about what wasn't working. When she finally launched, the people who bought on day one weren't strangers responding to an ad. They were people who felt like they'd been part of the process. Because they had been.
That's building in public, and it represents something fundamentally different from traditional marketing. It's not a promotion strategy. It's a production model.
The traditional model for building a product goes like this: have an idea, build it in secret, polish it until it's perfect, launch with a big reveal, hope people notice. The secrecy is considered strategic — you don't want competitors to see what you're doing. The polish is considered professional — you don't ship unfinished work. The big reveal is considered necessary — you only get one chance to make a first impression.
Every part of that model is wrong for an individual builder in 2026.
The secrecy is wrong because nobody is going to steal your idea. Ideas are cheap. Execution in a specific niche with specific domain knowledge is what matters, and that can't be stolen. The polish is wrong because you don't know what "finished" looks like until real users tell you. The big reveal is wrong because the launch is not the moment — the audience you've built before the launch is the moment.
Building in public inverts the model. You share the process, not just the output. You document what you're working on, what problems you're encountering, what decisions you're making. The audience gathers around the process. By the time the product exists, the market exists too — because you built them simultaneously.
There's a deeper reason why this works, and it has to do with something that the internet changed about trust.
In the old economy, trust was established through institutions. You trusted a product because it came from a company you recognized. You trusted a professional because they had credentials from institutions you respected. The institution's reputation substituted for personal knowledge.
That model is eroding, for reasons that are visible everywhere. People trust institutions less — not because institutions became worse, but because the internet gave people direct access to individuals. You can hear someone think. You can watch them work. You can see their reasoning, their mistakes, their corrections. And that transparency, over time, builds a kind of trust that institutional affiliation never provided: trust based on demonstrated competence and honest communication.
The builders who are building in public are, whether they articulate it this way or not, operating in a trust economy. Their audience trusts them because they've watched them work. They've seen the failures alongside the successes. They've heard the reasoning behind decisions. That trust converts to customers not because of a persuasive sales page, but because the sales page is redundant — the audience already knows what the product does, who built it, and why.
This is an enormous structural advantage for individuals over companies. A company can't build in public the way an individual can. The layers of approval, legal review, brand management, and stakeholder concern that large organizations operate under make genuine transparency nearly impossible. An individual can post "I tried this approach and it didn't work, here's what I learned" on a Tuesday afternoon without asking anyone's permission. That authenticity is not just endearing — it's a competitive moat.
I want to address the objection I hear most often, because it's a real one: "I don't have anything to say."
People who've been in employment for years often feel this way. They've been conditioned to associate "having something to say" with having authority — and authority, in the corporate context, is conferred by title, seniority, and institutional position. Without those markers, they feel unauthorized.
Here's what I've noticed: the builders who attract the most engaged audiences are almost never the ones with the most impressive credentials. They're the ones who describe, clearly and honestly, what they're doing and what they're learning. The audience isn't looking for a guru. They're looking for someone a few steps ahead of them on the same path, sharing what they're seeing.
If you're building a tool for veterinary clinics, you don't need to be a veterinary technology expert to have something to say. You need to be someone who's talking to veterinarians, learning about their problems, and building something to solve them. The journey itself is the content. The questions you ask are interesting. The answers you discover are interesting. The mistakes you make are interesting — more interesting, often, than the successes.
The creator economy — which crossed $254 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $820 billion by 2030 — is not powered by celebrities and influencers. It's powered by ordinary people who found something specific to be knowledgeable about and shared that knowledge with people who needed it. The barrier to entry is not fame. It's specificity plus consistency.
Let me talk about what building in public looks like practically, because the concept is simple and the execution has nuances.
The format matters less than the rhythm. Some people write long threads on Twitter. Some post short updates on LinkedIn. Some write weekly blog posts. Some record short videos. The medium is secondary. What matters is that you show up regularly, that what you share is substantive (not performative), and that there's a through-line — a problem you're solving, a product you're building, a question you're exploring.
The most common mistake I see is people treating building in public like content marketing — like it's a promotional channel. The posts become "5 Tips for Better Productivity" or "How I Grew My Business to $10K MRR." That's not building in public. That's performing in public, and audiences can tell the difference.
Building in public is: "Today I discovered that my users don't actually use the feature I spent three weeks on. They use something I built as an afterthought. That's humbling and useful." It's: "I'm stuck on this pricing decision and here's what I'm weighing." It's: "This month's revenue was $2,300, down from $2,800, and here's what I think happened."
That kind of transparency creates something that polished marketing never can: a relationship. The people who follow builders who share this way don't just follow them — they root for them. They want the product to succeed because they feel connected to the person building it. They become evangelists not because they're incentivized, but because they're invested.
There's a concept in technology that I think applies here, even though it comes from a different context. It's called "building in the open." In open-source software development, the code is public. Anyone can see it, contribute to it, critique it, or learn from it. The result, counter-intuitively, is not that competitors steal the work. The result is that a community forms around the project, contributing improvements, catching bugs, and evangelizing the software to others.
Building a business in public works similarly. The transparency doesn't create vulnerability — it creates community. The people who watch you build become participants, not just observers. They suggest features. They report bugs. They introduce you to potential customers. They share your work with their networks. The audience becomes infrastructure.
I use that word deliberately. Infrastructure. Not audience-as-marketing-channel. Audience-as-infrastructure. The audience is the distribution system, the feedback loop, the quality assurance team, and the word-of-mouth engine, all at once. Building it is not separate from building the product. It is building the product.
The timing dimension here matters, and it connects to the broader argument of this book.
Right now, in early 2026, building in public is a meaningful differentiator. Most companies can't do it. Most individuals haven't started. If you begin documenting your building process today — in your niche, for your specific audience — you are early. The same timing advantage that Shumer described in his essay applies here: the people who start building their audience now will have a structural advantage over those who start in a year.
That advantage compounds. An audience built over twelve months of consistent, honest sharing is an asset that an ad budget cannot replicate. Trust accrued over time is not something a competitor can purchase. The person who shows up, week after week, sharing what they're building and what they're learning, creates a relationship with their audience that becomes, over time, the most defensible thing in their business.
The product can be copied. The audience can't.
Next: The First 90 Days — what the first three months actually look like, without the fantasy or the formula.