Field note
Building in public, without oversharing
Building in public is how the audience gets built while the product still is. Done well it compounds; done badly it either reads as a highlight reel nobody connects with, or exposes things you cannot take back. This is the line between the two.
More than five years in personal branding. Runs atharvsankpal.com and works with founders and businesses in the US on their digital presence. Previously produced AI video for brands.
Published 2026-08-15
Written from our own client work and the research linked below, drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed and approved by the named author. How we write · About the author
Building in public means sharing the work as you do it — the decisions, the progress, the lessons — so an audience accumulates before you launch instead of after. It is the practical form of building distribution in parallel with the product. The two ways it goes wrong are sharing too little (a sanitised highlight reel nobody connects with) and sharing too much (numbers, conflicts or roadmap that help a competitor or hurt your team). The line between them is honesty with purpose: share what you learned and why it is useful to the people following along, and keep back anything whose only effect is exposure.
- Share the process, not just the polished product.
- Green zone: decisions, lessons, mistakes, how feedback changed the product.
- Red zone: exact numbers, internal conflict, anything a competitor could use.
- The test: does sharing this teach the reader, or only expose you?
On this page
What building in public actually is
Building in public is sharing the process of making your product openly, as it happens, rather than going quiet until launch day. It is the concrete, day-to-day form of a bigger idea: building your distribution in parallel with the product instead of after it. Two things come out of doing it. An audience accumulates while you build, so there is warm demand at launch instead of a cold start. And you get a live read on what the market actually wants while you can still change the code.
What this looks like in practice
In one engagement with a manufacturing-software founder, the product was still in pilots and testing while we published the work in parallel — and he was selling demos off that public output before the build was finished. The audience and the deals came from doing it in the open, not from waiting until it was done. Anonymised at the client’s preference.
None of this requires the product to be finished, or even good yet. It requires that you talk about the work honestly while it is becoming so. Which raises the only hard question: what, exactly, do you share?
What to share — the green zone
The material that works is the real process, told so a reader learns something. Concretely:
- Decisions and their trade-offs — what you chose and what you gave up.
- Milestones and lessons, including the mistakes; the mistakes are the most connective part.
- How customer feedback changed the product — a feature request or bug that actually moved you.
- Demos of what works now.
- Momentum as trends or rounded figures — growth percentages, not raw internals.
- Your genuine perspective on the problem you are solving.
- Exact revenue, customer counts or burn — hard to unsay, and useful to a competitor.
- Internal conflict — team or partner disputes belong inside, never on the feed.
- Unreleased roadmap or anything that hands a rival a head start.
- Anything sensitive about a customer without their explicit say-so.
- Anything whose only effect is exposure, not teaching.
The pattern across the green column is that every item teaches the reader something. The pattern across the red column is that every item only reveals — it hands out risk without giving the audience anything they can use.
What to keep back — the red zone, and the simple test
Most oversharing is not dramatic; it is a founder being caught up in momentum and posting a number, a frustration, or a plan that they would not have shared on reflection. A single test catches almost all of it:
Would sharing this help a competitor, or hurt your team? If yes, it stays in.
Exact numbers are the most common trap. They feel like proof, but they are the thing you can least take back and the thing a competitor most wants. Trends and percentages give the same sense of momentum with none of the exposure — and there is a whole discipline to reading whether distribution is working that does not require you to broadcast your internals. Internal conflict is the other one: airing team or partner friction reads as drama and does lasting damage, whatever the temporary engagement.
The line: honesty with purpose
The two failure modes sit on either side of the same line. Share too little and it becomes a highlight reel — polished, safe, and impossible to connect with, which is the same reason company-account content underperforms. Share too much and it becomes venting or exposure, which damages the business the practice was meant to help.
The line between them is honesty with purpose. You are not performing a success story and you are not confessing. You are sharing what you learned and why it is useful to the people following along. If a post teaches the reader something true about the work, it belongs. If its only job is to reveal, it does not.
How to actually run it
The practice is sustainable only if it is small. Here is the version a founder still building the product can actually keep up.
- Roughly weekly, on one real thing. A decision, a demo, a lesson from the week. Consistency matters far more than volume — think in ninety-day stretches, not daily performance.
- An hour a week of your input, production handled. A voice note or rough take becomes a week of output once editing, formatting and posting are done around it. Our method is in turning one hour into a week of content.
- Use video without filming everything. An AI avatar built from your likeness can carry the cadence, so building in public does not mean being on camera every day.
- Publish where your people are. Reshape one update for each surface, with LinkedIn as the anchor, so the same work reaches buyers, hires and press.
- Run the green-zone check before you post. Ten seconds: does this teach, or only expose?
The full workflow, written so you can run it without us, is in doing it yourself, and if self-promotion itself is the sticking point, that is handled in personal branding when you hate self-promotion.
Questions people actually ask
Should I share my revenue and customer numbers?
You do not have to, and there is a real case against it: exact numbers can help a competitor and unsettle customers, and you cannot take them back. Trends and rounded percentages give momentum without the exposure. Some founders share raw numbers and it works for them — treat it as a deliberate choice, not the default.
Isn’t building in public just marketing?
No. Marketing is polished output about a finished thing. Building in public is sharing the real process as it happens, including decisions and mistakes, which is what an audience connects with and what a company account cannot do.
What if a competitor copies what I share?
Keep genuinely sensitive things back — unreleased roadmap, anything a competitor could act on. But the audience and trust you build by sharing openly are the actual moat, and those cannot be copied.
How often should I post?
Roughly weekly is enough. Consistency matters more than volume, and about an hour a week of your own input, with production handled around it, is a sustainable pace while you are still building.
Sources
- Failory. How to build in public as a founder — on what founders share and why.
- The Bootstrapped Founder. How to build in public without revealing too much — the red-zone case.
- Mercury. Build in public or private? — on the trade-offs of sharing numbers.
- The parallel-build framing and the manufacturing-software-founder example are practitioner reports from our own client engagements, labelled as such.
How this was made: written from our own client work and the research linked above, drafted with AI assistance, then reviewed and approved by the named author before publication. The example is anonymised at the client’s preference. Our editorial standards.
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