Building in Public: My Journey and Why it Works

The fear of hitting "Post" on a project update is far more intense than defending a system architecture to a CTO or handling a production outage during a massive traffic spike. I spent forty minutes rewriting a single tweet about my AI automation tool, feeling genuine nausea over an audience of eighty followers. The reality? I got two likes and a bot reply. The world didn't end, and that's exactly why building in public is a superpower—the risk is entirely imaginary, but the reward is actual human connection.

The Strategy of Vulnerability

Most people treat "building in public" as a marketing channel, but it's actually a trust-building exercise. I found that polishing everything into a perfect landing page actually creates a barrier between the builder and the user. When I started sharing the "ugly" parts—zero user counts, embarrassing bugs, and wasted development cycles—the quality of my network shifted.

Instead of generic praise, I started getting DMs from people dealing with the same specific technical headaches. For example, when I posted about my struggles with webhook reliability, I didn't get "great job!" comments; I got actual peers sharing how they handled retry logic and idempotency in their own stacks.

Accountability and the "Messy Middle"

Public commitment acts as a forcing function. I implemented a strict "one feature per week" public pledge. In the past, I'd hit 80% completion on a feature and then drift toward a new idea. Knowing that a small group of people were tracking my progress created just enough social pressure to push me through the final 20% of the grunt work.

To make this work without burning out, I had to establish a data-sharing framework. I don't share everything, but I share specific, verifiable metrics.

My Public Sharing Framework:

• Revenue: Actual dollars, not percentage growth (which is a vanity metric).
• Tech Stack: Why I chose specific libraries and where they failed me.
• The "Flatline": The weeks where the GitHub contribution graph is empty because I'm stuck on a bug.
• Hard Boundaries: No PII (Personally Identifiable Information), no proprietary employer code, and no "raw" emotional vents that lack a lesson.

The Cost of Entry

This isn't a "growth hack" for people looking for an overnight viral hit. It is slow and uncomfortable. However, if you are already documenting your AI workflow or keeping a dev log, the marginal cost of making that log public is near zero, while the potential for serendipitous networking is massive.

If you're struggling with a specific deployment or a prompt engineering hurdle, posting the actual error message and your failed attempts to fix it is often the fastest way to get a solution. People love to help solve a concrete puzzle more than they love praising a finished product.

For those interested in the actual build process, I track my updates and technical hurdles at xundao.xin.