2 builders who never spoke to each other

Know when to stop building in public

Public sharing is a business tool with diminishing returns, so change gears when it starts pulling in competitors rather than customers, and shut it down while the business is on fire because exposure then becomes spectacle. Traffic that arrives because you build in public also skews toward the merely curious, so it should not be read as demand, and the people whose numbers turned tend to stop posting, which quietly biases everything you see.

The method

1. 01

   Do not share everything while your business is on fire. Public exposure at that point turns into spectacle rather than teaching, and it costs you attention you need elsewhere.

2. 02

   Stop building in public when it starts drawing competitors instead of customers. It is a business tool with diminishing returns, so change gears when the trade stops paying.

3. 03

   Traffic that arrives because you build in public skews toward the curious, so do not read it as demand and do not rely on one channel.

4. 04

   Building in public has a survivorship bias built in, because the same person who publishes the growth quietly stops publishing when the numbers turn and going back to contract work feels like an admission of failure.

What it returned

• $145k

  Zue stopped sharing revenue figures publicly after $145k and did not announce either the decline or the part-time contracting job he took at a San Francisco startup

• He put most MDX.one visitors down to Twitter and building in public, read them as people checking what the product was, and decided to look for other channels.

Sources

• July 2021: Retrospective & Income ReportBhanu Teja · bhanuteja.dev · What happened in July · undated
• Building in Public: How Radical Transparency Hurts Founders – The Bootstrapped FounderArvid Kahl · thebootstrappedfounder.com · Building in Public: How Radical Transparency Hurts Founders · 2021-12-02
• When the line stops going upCory Zue · coryzue.com · 2025-12-30