Build In Public: what is it and who is it for?

A powerful framework that can be used as a marketing tool, and a part of a product development process. Find out if it fits your product.

Let’s start with a story

Rob the builder was the greatest up and coming gizmo maker in the world. He was the smartest inventor and the most brilliant designer his professors at Gizmo Academy had ever seen.

After finishing his certificate in gizmo design, Rob knew it was time to make his mark on the world and got straight to work building the next great thing.

Ten short years later, it was done. The most perfect gizmo ever built. Everyone in the world needed it and it solved every problem such a device could solve.

Rob flung open the door to his workshop shouting Eureka!

The response? Crickets.

After ten years of building, Rob had an amazing product and no-one to show it to. To be frank, no one gave a poo, and no one knew they needed what Rob was selling.

He might have been the best gizmo maker there ever was, but without a marketing plan he was still at step one. Even worse, most people who could use a gizmo already had one that worked pretty well.

This thinly-veiled allegory is a far too common story in the real world.

What is Build In Public

How can you avoid building something, something great, that no one pays attention too? How can you make the world take notice?

First of all, don’t wait until after you “launch” to start building an audience. One of the best ways to build an audience from your earliest days is by building in public.

Building in public means that a founder or a team is open about the process of building their business with the public — from ideation and building a product — to validating and customer acquisition.

Making the most of your time

Building in public is a way of gaining extra leverage for your time.

You have to do the work to ideate, design, and experiment either way, so you might as well get the most you can out of it.

Founders who build in public are building an audience even before they’ve launched…