Why I Build in Public (And Why You Should Too)

When I told people I was going to stream every coding session while building a social media app, the reaction was mostly skeptical. "Won't competitors copy you?" "Isn't it distracting?" "What if you fail publicly?"

Six months in, here's what I've actually found.

The most underrated benefit of building in public is accountability. When you know 200 people are watching you work on Thursday night, you actually work on Thursday night. The social contract of "I said I'd stream" is more powerful than any productivity system I've tried.

I've shipped more consistently in the last six months than in any previous project. Not because I'm more disciplined — because I have an audience that expects me to show up.

I've made better decisions because of my audience than I would have made alone. The backend architecture decision (stream #3), the navigation library choice (stream #1), the monetization model — all of these were shaped by real-time feedback from people who've shipped products before.

This is the thing that surprises people most: the audience isn't just watching, they're contributing. The chat is full of experienced developers who've solved the exact problems I'm working through. It's like having a distributed team of advisors who show up for free.

Here's the part that's easy to miss: building in public is a marketing strategy. Every stream is a piece of content. Every build log is a blog post. Every decision I make publicly is a reason for someone to care about the product.

By the time the app launches, I'll have an audience of people who've watched it get built from scratch. They're not just potential users — they're invested. They've seen the struggles, the breakthroughs, the bad decisions and the good ones. That's a level of product-market connection you can't buy with ads.

"What if you fail publicly?" is the question I get most. My answer: failing publicly is better than failing privately.

If this doesn't work, I'll have documented exactly why. That documentation is valuable — to me, to other builders, to anyone who wants to learn from it. A public failure is a learning resource. A private failure is just a loss.

And honestly? The public accountability makes failure less likely. I'm not going to quit on a project that 12,000 people are following.

If you're building something and you're not building in public, I'd encourage you to try it. Start small — a weekly tweet about what you're working on, a short video of a feature you shipped. See if the accountability and feedback loop changes how you work.

It changed how I work. Completely.

If you want to follow the journey, subscribe to the newsletter or watch the streams. New session every week. And if you want the practical breakdown of how building in public translates into actual audience growth, How I Grew to 12K Subscribers Without Paid Ads is the companion piece — the philosophy here, the mechanics there.