Avoiding The Build in Public Trap
Dispelling The 3 Myths of Build in Public
The problem with the current build in public scene is it’s full of bad advice.
- You’re prodded into launching ANY product early and iterating
- Paid marketing and venture capital is shunned
- And the universal goal is an unambitious $10K MRR
The siren song that pulls you into this culture is viral posts on reddit and 𝕏. MRR posts, talking head videos of charismatic founders, and sometimes just weird founder-posts on some esoteric trend.
Here’s the sad truth viral posts don’t lead to sales.
I too have been pulled into this trap and spent almost a year building in public with many viral posts under my belt. What gets sales is building relationships with people who seem like a good fit for your product. But sales is not the point of this essay.
The goal of this essay is to dispel the 3 myths about building in public:
- Launch anything (MVP) early and iterate
- Paid marketing and venture capital are the devil’s currency
- 10K MRR is a good goal
❌ Launch an MVP and iterate
✅ Launch a novel competitive advantage
The reality is no one wants to waste their time testing out a shit product.
Your entry into any market should be something minimally beautiful with a promise of a result that people are willing to risk their time, money, and a disruption to their workflow to get in on early.
In short, you must offer a competitive advantage that doesn’t exist in the market that feels good to use.
You can’t expect charity just because you spent time building a piece of shit copycat product.
❌ Paid marketing and VC are the devil’s work
✅ Pour gas on PMF
I get it. Why give up money or equity for your amazing product that should be making you rich.
You’re right to have this feeling. But there are nuances.
In the beginning you must “do things that don’t scale.” This just means you must build personal relationships with all your early customers, pre-sale through iteration, until your early customers are fully in love with the product and become evangelists.
So yes, sales is the only marketing you need in the beginning and the salesman is you (and your work is free...for now).
But once you reach product market fit, meaning a one sentence pitch can convert a cold-stranger, you’re leaving so much money on the table if you do not figure out how to blast that sentence to as many audiences as possible using paid ads.
And as for VC. VCs are investors not gamblers (the good ones). Meaning they play a game of risk. If you reach PMF and can scale with ads, you can get capital to scale faster and get access to a great support network for a piece of the company.
YOU have all the leverage in negotiation once you build a product with PMF and scaling qualities. So why not get cash to grow a team and scale faster, especially if you’re in the power position to keep control?
❌ $10k MRR is a good goal
✅ Revenue goals reveal product ambition
$10K MRR is a strange goal when you think about it.
It's not a product goal. It's a lifestyle goal dressed up as a business metric.
The problem isn't the number itself. Some products genuinely serve small audiences well. The problem is when $10K MRR is the ceiling rather than a milestone.
If your product solves a real problem, more than 1,000 people have that problem (assuming your product is $10). If only 1,000 people want what you're building, you've either picked a tiny niche or built something that isn't compelling enough to spread.
Revenue’s a result of resonance. When you set a revenue target first, you end up reverse-engineering a product to hit a number rather than building something people genuinely need.
The founders who break out don't aim for $10K MRR. They focus on what they can control—demoes, product excellence, customer obsession, building relationships, etc.
Build in public is a culture of high hopes and low standards.
The right way to build in public is to aim high, use everything at your disposal, and leverage product velocity as your core marketing vehicle.
Stop announcing what you're going to build. Start sharing what you've already built. Let your shipped feature be the content.
This works because velocity is hard to fake. Anyone can think up features. Few can ship weekly for months.
When your marketing is just documented building, you attract customers who want a product that evolves. You filter out people chasing hype and attract people betting on a trajectory.