Building in public has become a thing. There’s a whole genre of it — daily updates, follower counts, revenue milestones posted like scoreboards, the journey from zero to whatever.
I’ve watched a lot of it. Some of it is useful. A lot of it is a content format that uses building as its subject matter.
I want something different. I want the practice without the performance.
What the Practice Is
The actual reason to build in public — stripped of audience-building — is that it forces you to articulate what you’re doing.
Articulation is different from thinking. You can have a fuzzy idea in your head that feels clear until someone asks you to explain it. Writing is that someone. It surfaces the places where your understanding is thinner than you thought.
That’s why I started this site. Not to document success, not to attract users, not to build a following. To make myself explain things.
What Gets Lost in the Performance Version
In the performance version, you only post when things are going well or when failure is safely in the past. The process gets edited into a narrative.
That narrative is less useful to me than the mess. The moment when you realize the architecture you’ve been building toward doesn’t work. The week you make no progress because you were solving the wrong problem. The decision you made three months ago that you’re now unwinding.
That’s the actual experience of building. It’s also the stuff with the most signal.
What I’m Trying to Do Here
Write about things as they’re happening, not after they’ve resolved. Accept that not every post will have a conclusion. Say “I don’t know yet” and then come back and update.
I’m building Dior HQ. I’ll write about it here, including the parts that don’t make good LinkedIn content.
That’s the plan.