Building in Public Is Work Nobody Budgets For

Building in public sounds like a distribution strategy. It's actually a second job. Nobody tells you that when they recommend it.

Here's the answer up front: "build in public" is good advice that comes with a hidden assumption — that you have bandwidth to do it well. The builders you see with large audiences and consistent engagement aren't sharing their work as a side effect of building. They are working at sharing their work. That's a different thing.

If you treat building in public as a consequence of building — "I'll post when I have something worth posting" — you'll post inconsistently, build an inconsistent audience, and eventually stop because the effort doesn't seem to be working. Not because the strategy is wrong, but because you didn't actually execute the strategy.

what "building in public" actually requires

It requires deciding what to share before you build, not after.

It requires writing about what you're doing in a way that's useful to someone who isn't you — which is a different skill from building itself.

It requires consistency, because audiences don't accumulate from sporadic posts. They accumulate from the expectation that you'll show up again.

It requires handling the silence — the posts that land with no engagement, the ideas that don't resonate, the weeks where the numbers don't move. And doing it again the next week anyway.

None of that is what most people imagine when they hear "just share your work."

why the builder temperament works against it

Most builders — and I include myself here — have a strong preference for shipping over talking about shipping. The thing feels fake if you're writing about something that isn't done yet. The work itself is more interesting than describing the work. The ratio of time spent building to time spent talking about building feels like it should be heavily weighted toward building.

That instinct isn't wrong. But it produces a situation where you have excellent products and no audience, which is a dead end.

The uncomfortable truth: the builder who ships twice as much as you but talks about it consistently will reach more people than you, convert more customers, and build more opportunities. Not because their work is better. Because their surface area is larger.

Building in silence is not a virtue. It's a habit that limits how far your work can go.

the version that actually works

The version of building in public that works isn't posting every thought and every commit. That's noise.

It's picking one or two communication surfaces and being consistent on them. A weekly update. A thread when something interesting happens. A post when you ship something. Writing that documents the actual thing you learned, not just "I'm building something."

The posts that build audiences are the ones that transfer knowledge, not just signal activity. "I built a thing" doesn't stick. "Here's the thing I got wrong about RAG retrieval before I fixed it" does, because it gives the reader something useful regardless of whether they care about your product.

From my own bench

I have shipped more in the past year than any previous year. I have also communicated about it less consistently than I should have. And the direct consequence is that products I'm genuinely proud of have thin audiences that could be larger if I'd been more intentional.

I'm writing this partly as accountability to myself. The posts I'm publishing now — this one included — are me trying to fix that. Treating the communication as actual work that gets scheduled, not something I do when I feel like it.

The goal isn't to perform progress. It's to be in conversation with the people who might care about what I'm building — so that when something is ready, there are people who already know me well enough to trust it.

Try it today

Step	What you do	Why it pays off
1. Pick one format and stick to it	Blog posts, threads, short-form video, newsletters — pick one surface and commit to a cadence you can actually keep	Consistency beats quality at first. An audience accumulates from showing up, not from the best individual post.
2. Write about what you got wrong	For your current project, write one post about a wrong assumption you had that turned out to be wrong	This is the highest-value building-in-public format. People share it. People remember it. It teaches.
3. Separate creation from distribution	Block time for writing/sharing that isn't the same time block as building	If you only share when you're done building, you'll never share. The blocks need to be separate.

Where people get burned

• Only posting wins. An audience of "look what I shipped" posts is shallow and doesn't convert to real relationships. Fix: post the lessons, the failures, the things that surprised you. That's the content people actually value.
• Stopping when engagement is low early on. Early audiences are small because you haven't earned the reach yet. Fix: consistency is the only path through low-engagement early stages. It doesn't feel productive. Do it anyway.
• Treating it as a full marketing function. You don't need a content strategy with a 14-pillar framework. Fix: one surface, one cadence, one honest voice. Start simple.
• Sharing only the work, never the person. Products are more interesting when you know who built them and why. Fix: let the builder be visible. Not everything needs to be educational — some of it can just be honest.

The bottom line

Building in public is a job. It's a different job than building, and it requires budget — time budget, energy budget, creative budget. If you treat it as overflow from your real work, it won't accumulate into anything.

Decide what you're going to say. Decide when you're going to say it. Do it consistently, for longer than you think it will take to work.

— Dru Edwards