When I was building Vulpine Creations, nobody knew. Not intentionally — I’m not secretive by nature. But we were building a physical product company from Graz, Austria, selling into markets where nobody had heard of us, and the idea of posting our daily progress on Twitter felt absurd. We had no audience. No following. No platform. We had a kitchen table, a prototype, and a manufacturing partner who wasn’t entirely sure we knew what we were doing.
Vulpine exited in 2024 — we wound down production and sold the rights and inventory to established magic companies — with twelve products, a 4.9-star rating, and distribution across two continents. We built it almost entirely in private.
Now I’m building something new — books, a platform, a body of work — and I’m doing it in public. Different strategy. Different context. Same person.
The internet will tell you that building in public is always the right move. The internet is wrong. Both approaches work. The question is which one works for your specific situation right now.
The Case for Building in Public
Building in public means sharing your process — the wins, the losses, the numbers, the decisions — as they happen. It means letting your audience watch the building while it’s still under construction.
The advantages are real and well-documented.
Audience before product. When you share your building process, you attract people who are interested in what you’re building before it exists. By the time you launch, you have an email list, a social following, a group of people who feel invested in your success because they watched you create it. This is building an email list from zero on easy mode — the content creates itself because the content is the work.
Accountability through visibility. When you tell 500 followers that you’re launching on Friday, you launch on Friday. The social pressure functions like an accountability partner at scale. Every public commitment is a deadline that carries reputational weight.
Feedback in real time. When you share a design concept and 200 people tell you the color is wrong, you save yourself from launching a product in the wrong color. Public building turns your audience into a distributed research team that works for free.
Trust through transparency. In a world where every company claims to be authentic, actually showing your process is the strongest form of proof. When customers see the testing, the iterations, the failures, and the fixes, their trust in the final product is qualitatively different from trust built through marketing.
I’ve seen this work spectacularly well for solo founders building software products, content businesses, and service companies. The founder’s personality becomes the brand, and the building process becomes the marketing. At Startup Burgenland, the startups that built in public consistently had lower customer acquisition costs and higher early-stage engagement than the ones that launched cold.
The Case for Building in Private
But here’s what the build-in-public crowd rarely acknowledges: transparency has costs. Significant ones.
Premature feedback kills good ideas. Not all feedback is useful, and early-stage feedback is often the worst kind. When you share a half-formed concept, the responses you get are based on the half-formed version, not the finished one. I’ve watched founders abandon promising directions because twenty strangers on Twitter didn’t immediately get it. The problem wasn’t the direction. The problem was that the idea needed more development before it could be evaluated.
Performance anxiety corrupts the work. When you know people are watching, you optimize for watchability. The product decisions that make good content aren’t always the product decisions that make a good product. You pick the interesting design choice over the effective one. You chase the launch date you announced instead of the launch date the product needs. The audience becomes the client, and your actual customers become secondary.
Competitors get a free education. In some markets, sharing your process is sharing your playbook. When we were building Vulpine, our manufacturing methods, supplier relationships, and pricing strategies were genuine competitive advantages. Posting about them publicly would have been handing our competitors exactly the information they’d need to copy us.
Time spent performing is time not spent building. Creating content about building takes time. Responding to comments takes time. Managing a community takes time. For a solo founder with limited hours, every hour spent on “the meta” is an hour not spent on the work. The 70/30 rule already pushes founders toward spending more time selling than building. Adding a public-building content strategy can tip the ratio past the point of productivity.
The Decision Framework
Here’s how I decide which mode to operate in. Three questions.
Question one: Is your competitive advantage in your process or your execution? If your edge comes from how you do things — a unique manufacturing method, a proprietary algorithm, a novel approach to customer service — building in public means broadcasting your advantage. Build privately, ship publicly. If your edge comes from who you are — your expertise, your perspective, your network — building in public amplifies that advantage. Your process can’t be copied because it’s inseparable from you.
Question two: Is your audience a feedback source or a distraction? Some audiences are sophisticated enough to give useful feedback on work in progress. Others respond to whatever is in front of them without the context to evaluate it properly. If your potential customers can meaningfully improve your product through early feedback, build publicly. If they’re likely to react to surface-level impressions that don’t reflect the final product, build privately and show them the finished version.
Question three: Does your personality thrive on visibility or wilt under it? This is the question nobody asks, and it might be the most important one. Some founders genuinely do better work when people are watching. The attention energizes them. The comments fuel them. The accountability sharpens them. Other founders — and I’m one of them, most of the time — do better work in silence. The protection of creative energy matters more to my output than any amount of social validation.
The Hybrid Approach
The binary framing — public vs. private — is actually false. The best approach for most founders is a hybrid.
Build privately during the messy early stages when the idea is fragile and the execution is rough. This is the period where premature feedback does the most damage and where the founder’s focus matters most. Let the work develop without external input until it’s sturdy enough to withstand opinion.
Then shift to public as the product approaches readiness. Share the story of how you built it. Share the decisions you made and why. Share the failures and iterations. But share them as a crafted narrative, not a real-time broadcast. The effect is the same — transparency, trust, audience engagement — but you control the timing and the framing.
At Vulpine, we were private for the first eighteen months. Nobody saw the failed prototypes, the supplier negotiations, the testing marathons. Then, as we launched, we told the story. The story was true. It was transparent. It included the struggles. But it was told from a position of confidence rather than vulnerability, and it landed harder because of it.
For my current work — the books, the articles, this platform — I’m more public from the start. Because the competitive advantage isn’t in the process. It’s in the perspective. Nobody can copy my twenty years of experience by reading my build log. So sharing the process costs me nothing and gains me everything the build-in-public model promises.
The Vanity Metrics Trap
One more warning about building in public: the metrics lie.
Followers, likes, comments, shares — these are not business metrics. They’re vanity metrics that feel like validation but don’t correlate reliably with revenue. I’ve seen founders with 50,000 followers struggle to sell a $20 product, and founders with 200 followers build six-figure businesses.
If you build in public, measure the things that matter: email subscribers (people who gave you permission to contact them directly), pre-orders, waitlist signups, direct messages asking about pricing. These are buying signals. Everything else is applause, and applause doesn’t pay invoices.
Track revenue daily. Not followers. Not engagement. Revenue. The public-building content should serve the revenue, not the other way around.
My Current Setup
For full transparency — appropriate, given the topic — here’s what I do now.
Writing process: entirely private. Nobody sees a draft until it’s finished. The editing happens in silence. The thinking happens on walks, in showers, in the diffuse-thinking gaps I protect fiercely.
Publishing: public. Once something is finished, I share it widely. I explain the thinking behind it. I’m open about what worked and what didn’t.
Business metrics: selectively public. I share patterns and percentages, not raw numbers. Enough to be useful to other founders, not enough to give competitors a roadmap.
Failures: public, after the fact. I’ll tell you about the five business failures that shaped my frameworks. But I tell you about them from the other side, when the lessons are clear and the sting has faded. I don’t live-stream my suffering for content.
This hybrid gives me the benefits of both modes: the creative protection of private building and the audience-building power of public sharing. It’s not the only right approach. But it’s the one that matches my personality, my market, and my goals.
Choose the one that matches yours.
