There’s a temptation when building anything to wait until it’s done before showing it. To polish every edge, handle every edge case, and only then let people in.
That instinct is wrong.
The myth of the finished thing
Nothing is ever really finished. Software gets deprecated. Designs go stale. Essays accrue footnotes. The gap between “done enough to ship” and “actually done” is infinite—and filling it is often the thing that stops work from ever reaching anyone.
When you build in public, you opt out of that trap.
What building in public actually means
It doesn’t mean tweeting every keystroke or posting daily updates that nobody asked for. It means:
- Sharing work at the 70% mark — when it’s useful but still shapeable.
- Writing about problems before you’ve solved them — which forces clearer thinking.
- Being honest about what you don’t know — which attracts collaborators who do.
The thing you’re afraid to share is usually exactly the thing someone else needs to see.
The feedback loop you can’t manufacture
The only way to know if an idea is good is to expose it to reality. Imagined feedback is worse than useless — it’s noise that feels like signal.
Real feedback, even uncomfortable feedback, grounds you. It shortens the distance between what you think you’re building and what you’re actually building.
idea → build → share → feedback → better idea
The only dangerous step is the one where “share” gets replaced by “polish forever.”
Start with one post
You don’t need an audience to start. You need a habit. Write the post you wished existed when you were stuck. Publish it somewhere—anywhere. See what happens.
Most of the time: nothing. Occasionally: someone finds it years later exactly when they needed it, and it saves them three hours.
That’s enough.