Building in public without oversharing

Building in public works when you post the decision and the reasoning behind it. It goes wrong when you post the feeling and the money. Those two are the most tempting things to share and the most expensive to have shared.

Almost everything else you write is aimed at a person. A public post is aimed at nobody in particular, and nobody writes back.

It also stays up, searchable and quotable, long after the situation that produced it has resolved itself one way or the other.

The two ways it goes wrong

Public writing fails in two directions: posting nothing, and posting everything.

Posting nothing is the quiet failure. Every candidate post sounds either boastful or embarrassing, so you draft it, reread it, and close the tab. Months of real work leave no trace.

Posting everything is the loud failure, and engagement is what causes it. The post that did well was the one where you admitted something painful, so you admit more, and the admissions get more personal because the mild ones stop landing.

Both come from the same mistake. You are treating the post as a statement about you, when it works better as a statement about the work.

Post the decision, keep the feeling

The test for what to share: post the decision and the reasoning, not the feeling and not the balance sheet.

Reasoning is useful to a stranger and cheap to give away. Nobody can take your reasoning and beat you with it, and it is the only part of your week that transfers to a reader building something completely different.

Feelings are the reverse. They cost nothing to type and quite a lot to own two years later, in a screenshot, in a context you did not pick.

Here is the empty version of a post: "Big week. Shipped a lot, learned even more. Grateful for everyone on this journey."

And here is the same week written usefully: "I deleted the onboarding tour. It demoed beautifully and almost nobody finished it, so the three steps are gone and there is one line of help text at the exact place people were getting stuck."

The second post hands a stranger something to take: check whether anyone finishes your tour before you build a second one. A post nobody could disagree with is a post nobody needed.

Numbers start a series you cannot stop

Once you post a number, you have started a series, and the series ends the moment the number goes the wrong way.

The first one is easy. It is a good number, you worked for it, and it fits in one line, something like "month one: 212 signups". People remember numbers better than anything else you write, so they wait for month two.

Then a flat month arrives. The honest post is "flat, and I am not sure why", which almost nobody publishes. So you go quiet at exactly the point where writing it down would have been most useful to you.

You can say the same thing without the scoreboard. "Enough people are signing up that the help page is now the thing slowing them down, so that is what I am fixing before I add anything else." Same information, no series.

What is safe and still worth reading

The most shareable material is the stuff you would have skipped: what you changed your mind about, what took far longer than you expected, and the boring mechanics nobody writes down.

• A decision you reversed, with what you knew then and what you know now.
• A job you estimated at a day that took three weeks, and the part you did not see coming.
• The mechanics, like what is actually on your release checklist or how you handle a refund request.
• Something you tried that did not work, described clearly enough that a reader can avoid it.

None of these need a happy ending, which is what makes them safe to post while the outcome is still unknown.

The mechanics one is badly underrated. Everybody writes the strategy post. Almost nobody writes down the unglamorous procedure they worked out by hand, which is the thing a reader in the same position needs, because it is specific enough to act on.

What to hold back without going cagey

Four things stay out of public posts, and there is a way to say so that does not sound shifty.

• Anything about a specific customer, including the flattering things they said.
• Anything you would have to defend while standing next to the person it names.
• Anything about money you would not repeat to your accountant.
• Anything about a decision that is not final, because people will hold you to the draft.

The cagey version is worse than silence. "Big changes coming, cannot say more yet" gives the reader nothing and asks them to be excited about it anyway.

Naming the line works better and costs one sentence. "I do not post money numbers, so I will skip that part. Ask me anything else." People are rarely offended by a stated boundary. They are offended by hints.

Write the version you can read back after it fails

Every public post is a claim you may have to reread on the day the thing stops working.

This is the part people underweight, because posting feels like talking when it is publishing. The mood passes in an afternoon. The post sits in the search results with your name on it.

So run the test before you press post: imagine the project is over and somebody finds this. "This is going to be huge" does not hold up. "I am betting on this because the alternative takes a year and I would rather be wrong in a month" holds up even if the bet loses, because the reasoning was the point. Confidence ages badly. Reasoning ages well.

The raw and vulnerable style is mostly a performance

I think the raw-and-vulnerable school of building in public is mostly performance, and it recruits an audience that leaves the moment the work gets boring.

Feelings travel further than facts. The post about nearly quitting beats the post about your release checklist every time.

The problem is what that selects for. You find out which of your bad days performed well, and after a while you start noticing your bad days with one eye on how they would read, which is a strange thing to do to yourself.

The other side deserves its due, because the alternative is worse. The sanitized account, where every month improves on the last and every setback has become a lesson by the final paragraph, fools nobody. An honest account of a failure beats a polished one.

The line between them is whether the post carries something a reader can use. "I was scared" is a status update on your nervous system. "I was scared, so I took the safe option, and it cost me two months" is a warning somebody else can act on.

There is a second cost. An audience gathered by drama is there for a story, and most of building is uneventful. A few quiet months and the story stalls, so they drift, and you feel that drift as failure when it is an ordinary stretch of work.

Post from the note you already made

The habit that makes this sustainable is writing the post out of a note you made for yourself anyway, instead of sitting down to produce something.

Keep a running log of decisions. One line whenever you decide anything: what you picked, and what made you pick it over the other option. You want that log anyway, because you forget your own reasoning faster than you expect.

Then posting stops being a writing task. It is picking a line out of the log and expanding it, which takes minutes and kills the worst incentive in public writing: needing something to say on a day when nothing happened. Empty log, no post.

My notes are unusable as they stand. Half-sentences, and the occasional rude remark about a config file. So the post starts as that note pasted into the box in whatever tab it is going out from, and the Polished rewrite in Unvent gets me a version written for a reader rather than for me.

There is one more reader worth writing for, and almost everybody forgets them: the version of you who finds the post in two years, when the project is either dead or unrecognizable. That reader wants the reasoning, not the good news. Write for that one, and the strangers get the benefit anyway.