For fourteen months after launching my consulting practice, my website received an average of twelve visitors per day. Twelve. Most of them were probably me, checking if the site was still working.
During those fourteen months, I published over fifty pieces of content. I refined my frameworks through real client work. I developed my voice. I made every beginner mistake in a context where almost nobody saw them. And by month fifteen, when the audience started showing up, I had a body of work worth finding.
Those fourteen months of obscurity weren’t a waiting period before the real work began. They were the real work. And I’d argue they were the most productive months of my career.
Building in obscurity is the phase that every founder goes through and almost nobody talks about. It’s the months — sometimes years — before anyone pays attention, before the audience arrives, before the reputation precedes you. It’s unglamorous, frequently discouraging, and absolutely essential. Because the work you do when nobody is watching determines the quality of what people find when they finally start looking.
Why Obscurity Is Actually an Advantage
This sounds counterintuitive, so let me explain.
When nobody is watching, you have something that visible founders don’t: permission to be terrible. Permission to experiment. Permission to change your mind, scrap ideas, and start over without anyone noticing or caring.
My first ten blog posts were, objectively, not very good. My framing was vague. My examples were generic. My voice was a poor imitation of business writers I admired. If those posts had been seen by thousands of people, they would have defined my reputation before I’d figured out what I actually wanted to say.
Instead, they were seen by twelve people, most of whom were related to me. By the time real readers showed up, those early posts had been rewritten, refined, or buried under fifty better ones. The obscurity gave me a lab — a place to develop in private before performing in public.
Ship it ugly is great advice, but it’s much easier to ship ugly when the audience is small enough that “ugly” doesn’t damage your reputation. Obscurity is the ideal time to ship ugly, learn fast, and improve before the stakes go up.
Adam Wilber and I used this principle at Vulpine. Our first product wasn’t our best. But our early audience was small enough — a few hundred magic enthusiasts — that the imperfections were forgiven and the feedback was honest. By product four or five, our quality had improved dramatically, and the audience had grown to match.
Practical application: If you’re currently in obscurity, use it as your testing ground. Try different content formats. Experiment with different service offerings. Test different pricing. Change your positioning. Make mistakes. The cost of mistakes in obscurity is near zero. The cost of mistakes in visibility is much higher. Run your experiments now.
The Psychology of Obscurity (And Why It’s Hard)
Understanding that obscurity is an advantage intellectually doesn’t make it feel like one. The emotional reality of obscurity is difficult.
You question whether the work matters. When nobody reads your content, nobody buys your product, and nobody responds to your outreach, the logical conclusion is that the work isn’t working. But that’s not quite right. The work is building skills, building a body of work, and building the foundation that will matter later. You just can’t see the returns yet because they’re delayed, not absent.
You compare yourself to people who are already visible. This is the comparison trap at its worst. You see founders with audiences, with traction, with visible success, and you feel behind. What you don’t see is that they went through their own obscurity period — they just don’t talk about it because it’s not a sexy story.
You lose motivation because the feedback loop is broken. Humans need feedback to maintain motivation. When you publish content and get likes, shares, and comments, the feedback reinforces the behavior. When you publish content and get silence, the absence of feedback slowly erodes your motivation. This is the number one reason people quit during the obscurity phase.
You start to doubt your direction. Am I building the right thing? Is this the right market? Should I pivot? These questions intensify in obscurity because you have no external signal to confirm or deny your choices. In visibility, the market tells you whether you’re on track. In obscurity, you’re flying without instruments.
Here’s what helped me survive the psychology of obscurity:
First, I created my own feedback loops. Instead of relying on external validation (likes, followers, revenue), I tracked internal metrics: articles published, frameworks developed, skills improved, conversations had. These metrics were fully within my control and provided the sense of progress that external metrics couldn’t.
Second, I set a time commitment instead of a results commitment. “I will do this for eighteen months regardless of results.” This removed the daily evaluation of whether it was “working” and replaced it with a simple question: “Am I still within my commitment period?” As long as the answer was yes, I continued.
Third, I found three other people in obscurity and we supported each other. Not a mastermind group or accountability club. Just three people who understood the experience, met biweekly, and said “keep going” to each other. That simple encouragement was disproportionately powerful.
What to Build During the Obscurity Phase
The obscurity phase is your building period. Here’s what to focus on:
Your craft. Whatever you sell — consulting, products, services, content — get better at it during obscurity. Not through courses and books. Through practice. Deliver your service to five clients and refine it each time. Build five versions of your product and improve each one. Write a hundred pieces of content and notice how your voice sharpens.
Your body of work. When people eventually find you, what will they find? Build a body of work during obscurity that demonstrates your thinking, your expertise, and your perspective. Blog posts, case studies, frameworks, templates, tools — create a library that says “this person knows what they’re talking about.”
This is exactly what I did. By the time my audience started growing, I had over fifty articles on my site. A new visitor could spend an hour reading my work and come away with a clear picture of who I am and how I think. That body of work did more selling than any pitch I ever made.
Your systems. Build your operational systems during obscurity so that when growth happens, you can absorb it. The Revenue Engine framework, the content scheduling system, the client onboarding process — build all of this before you need it. Growth without systems is chaos. Systems without growth is… well, it’s the obscurity phase. But at least you’re ready.
Your relationships. The people you connect with during obscurity often become your most valuable relationships later. Other obscure founders become successful founders. Early readers become loyal advocates. First clients become long-term references. Invest in these relationships during obscurity because they’re the ones that will grow with you.
Your patience. This is the meta-skill. The obscurity phase is where you learn whether you can sustain effort without external validation. This skill — the ability to continue working when the market isn’t responding yet — is what separates founders who make it from founders who don’t. It’s not talent or intelligence or even strategy that determines long-term success. It’s the ability to keep going during the months when nobody is watching.
The Transition Out of Obscurity
The transition from obscurity to visibility rarely happens as a single moment. It’s more like a gradual dawn — the light increases slowly until one day you realize it’s morning.
For me, the transition happened across several small moments over about three months:
- A stranger commented on one of my posts with a thoughtful question (not a like — a question)
- Someone mentioned my article in a conversation I wasn’t part of
- I received an inbound inquiry from someone I’d never met who found me through my content
- A larger account shared one of my pieces, exposing it to a new audience
- A client told me they’d been reading my work for months before reaching out
None of these was dramatic individually. Together, they signaled that the obscurity phase was ending. The compound effect of fourteen months of consistent work had reached the threshold where it became self-sustaining.
When the transition starts, two things become important:
Don’t panic about quality. Your new, larger audience is going to find your old, less polished work. That’s fine. You can update the worst pieces, but don’t waste weeks trying to make everything perfect. The authenticity of seeing someone’s growth is actually appealing to most audiences.
Increase your consistency, not your volume. The temptation during the transition is to do more — more content, more outreach, more activity. Resist this. Do the same amount you’ve been doing, but do it more consistently. The compound effect of showing up every day is what got you here. More of the same is what will keep the momentum going.
A Note to Founders Currently in Obscurity
If you’re reading this from inside the obscurity phase — if your website gets twelve visitors a day, if your posts get seven likes, if your outreach emails go unanswered — I want to tell you something specific:
You’re not doing anything wrong.
The obscurity phase is not evidence of failure. It’s evidence of beginning. Every founder you admire was where you are now. They just don’t remember it clearly, or they don’t talk about it, or the narrative has been compressed into a paragraph in their origin story.
The work you’re doing right now — the content nobody reads, the product nobody buys, the pitch nobody responds to — is building the foundation. Not metaphorically. Literally. Your skills are improving. Your thinking is sharpening. Your body of work is growing. Your networks are forming.
You can’t see this because the returns are delayed. But they’re accumulating. And when they finally become visible — and they will, if you keep going — the sudden appearance of traction will look like luck to everyone except you.
Keep building. Keep publishing. Keep reaching out. Measure your effort, not your results. Trust the process, not because someone told you to, but because the math of compound growth is real and it’s working even when you can’t see it.
The months nobody watches are the months that matter most.
Key takeaways:
- Use obscurity as a testing ground — experiment with formats, pricing, positioning, and messaging while the cost of mistakes is near zero.
- Create internal feedback loops (articles published, skills improved, conversations had) to replace the external validation that isn’t available yet.
- Set a time commitment (“18 months regardless of results”) instead of a results commitment — remove the daily evaluation and trust the timeline.
- Build four things during obscurity: your craft through practice, your body of work for future visitors, your systems for when growth arrives, and your relationships with fellow obscure founders.
- When the transition starts, increase consistency rather than volume — the compound effect that built your foundation is the same force that will sustain your growth.
