Building in Public
When I started building Kviklet, we initially went with a more secret approach. This was partially because one of my cofounders preferred this approach but also because we were scared of showing an unfinished product. People would judge us, we would ruin our chance ot impress. And we wouldn’t be able to release a first version with a big bang effect. When I started building Kviklet, we initially went with a more secret approach. This was partially because one of my cofounders preferred this approach but also because we were scared of showing an unfinished product. People would judge us, we would ruin our chance ot impress. And we wouldn’t be able to release a first version with a big bang effect. After a while however I managed to convince my cofounders to make the project public, go live with a first website and even started sharing some things on linked and Threads.
Note, Twitter didn’t really work for us. The plattform is shrinking and it was very hard to get any initial following going. Maybe we just didn’t have the right content for it, but on Threads it was a lot easier to gain some initial traction. Ofcourse our publishing there also coincided with the launch of it in Europe so I am sure this contributed to our initial success.
Building in Public in general is the process of sharing your journey of building a product, a company, or whatever else you are currently working on. It allows you to share your progress, your learnings, and your failures. It also allows you to build a community around your product and build a brand for yourself. The idea is to gain trust and credibility by being transparent and open about your journey. And also gain early feedback and maybe even potential customers.
Did it work for us?
Since we ended up open sourcing Kviklet and not founding a company, I can’t really say that building in public worked well for us. But I still enjoyed the process and I do now have a bit of a diary of what we did on Linkedin and Threads which is still cool, and might help someone else that tries to launch something in the same space. I also believe that the small followership that I gained is valuable and could be used for something else in the future. If I start 5 more projects they wont have to start at 0 followers anymore and can build a bit ontop of each other. Although of course, now I have a lot of Devops and Security folks connected to me on LinkedIn and if I start anything else that might not be very relevant to them.
I also believe that building in public is a good way to keep yourself accountable. If you tell the world that you are going to do something, you are more likely to actually do it. And if you don’t, you will have to explain why you didn’t. This is a good way to keep yourself motivated and to keep pushing forward.
Additionally I love the transparency a public project brings. As a personal value this is very important to me. It simply feels authentic to share your struggles and successes with the world. And being alligned with your values is a good way to keep yourself happy and motivated. I’ve learned at my previous jobs that working on something that you don’t believe in hurts your mental health and attitude a lot. So I am happy that I could work on something that I believed and still believe in and even share the process with the world even if it’s just a very small group of people that is actually interested.
So would I recommend you do it?
If you believe in transparency and authenticity, building in public is a great way to live those values. If you believe your product could benefit from a community and and if you believe this might not be the last project that you try, building in public is highly valuable to you. So yes I do believe you should do it. However if you are building something that is very sensitive and you don’t want to share too much about it, or if you are building something that is very niche and you don’t believe you could build a community around it, then maybe it’s not for you. But I would still recommend you try it, you might be surprised.