Reframing building in public...

Building in public can feel scary and very overwhelming. You can look at others doing it and feel totally inadequate, especially in your early days. When something becomes a specialism like ‘building in public’ has, you can get lots of different opinions on how and what to you should be doing.

I love the building in public movement. I also often hate it. It brings out the best and worst of us.

The best are things like sharing our learnings as they are happening and being authentic.

The worst, for me at least, is the glorifying of it and turning it into a ‘blueprint’ product that people can ship in 30 minutes and gain 8,678 subscribers just like they did. I’m so tired of constantly being sold to.

Or, simply just wasting our time following people or stories that don’t have a positive impact on us. Our personal time matters, it is kind of all we have.

Don’t be in it to build an audience

To build in public well, do it for yourself over vanity reasons. Entrepreneurship is hard enough as it is, to feel internally satisfied triumphs any other feeling. The challenge is that seeing the value in what you create often takes years.

If there were one thing I wish I had, it would be a consistent record of my progress, on my own website, rather than social. Easier said than done, but that is my focus now.

Being able to look back at where I was at point x in time is so valuable as a personal internal processing tool. If others gain value from it too, great.

Rethink what building in public is

So instead of building in public, I like to reframe it as:

• thought processing

• learning about the world around me

• finding belonging

• building up your network

• create trust in who you are

• creating value

• making something out of nothing

• doing something you love

• creating experiments

• being open

• leaving a trail

• contributing to history

• an opportunity for people to find and connect with you

• creating community, of course ❤️

By using these words they have more meaning, to me at least. They keep me going. They help me see how vanity metrics are a distraction and that there is value in the things I put out there.

Our stories matter. They connect us. They build networks and communities.

It’s easy to get distracted with how others are sharing, take a step towards sharing your own. Connect with yourself, then with others.