Building in Public Mistakes I Made and What I'd Do Differently

If I were starting building in public today — with what I know now — I'd do five things differently. Not vague things. Specific, actionable things that I got wrong and paid for in lost time and missed opportunities.

Here they are.

Mistake 1: Waiting Too Long to Start

I spent about four months "getting ready" to build in public before I posted anything. I wanted the business to be more established. I wanted to have better numbers to share. I wanted the product to be more polished. I wanted to feel like I knew what I was doing.

None of those things happened in time to justify the wait. What actually happened: I delayed building an audience by four months. The people who found me at month five instead of month one are just as valuable — but there are fewer of them, and they're four months later.

The perfectionism reframes itself as prudence. It's not. It's fear wearing a practical mask.

The real cost of waiting: audience building compounds over time. Every month you delay is a month of compound growth you don't get back. The imperfect post you publish today is worth more than the perfect post you publish six months from now, because the audience it starts building will have six more months to grow.

If I were starting today: I'd post the same week I started the business. Not a polished manifesto — just an honest description of what I was building and why, published on whatever channel felt natural.

Mistake 2: Sharing Without Teaching

For the first few months, I was reporting, not teaching. I'd post milestones — "just published my first product," "made my first sale," "hit X email subscribers" — without explaining what I'd done or what someone could take away from it.

Those posts get a little engagement, usually from people who are being polite. They don't build audience. They don't generate trust. And they train your readers to expect a stream of announcements rather than a stream of usefulness.

The fix is simple: every post should leave the reader with something they can do, consider, or avoid. If it doesn't, it's just a status update, and nobody builds a loyal audience on status updates.

When I switched to teaching through my experience — treating every milestone as a case study rather than an announcement — the engagement quality changed noticeably. Not just the volume of responses, but the depth. People asked follow-up questions. They shared the posts. They came back.

Mistake 3: Inconsistency

I went through multiple cycles of posting intensely for two or three weeks and then going silent for two weeks because I was busy, or uninspired, or just didn't feel like I had anything worth saying.

This is one of the most damaging patterns in building in public, and it's invisible to you while it's happening. Inconsistency trains your audience to stop checking in. It interrupts the narrative continuity that makes building in public work — the ongoing story that compounds over time.

The fix isn't heroic effort — it's building a sustainable posting cadence and treating it as a non-negotiable. Three posts per week is better than ten posts one week and nothing the next. Four posts per week, every week, for six months, compounds into something meaningful. The same number of posts distributed unevenly produces a fraction of the result.

Pick a cadence you can hold when you're busy, when you're uninspired, when things are going badly. That's your cadence. Not your aspirational cadence — your durable one.

Mistake 4: Wrong Platform for My Audience

I started building in public primarily on a platform where my audience wasn't spending time. I posted consistently, got some engagement, and wondered why none of it was driving business outcomes.

The answer was simple: the platform's active user base skewed toward demographics that didn't match my audience. The people engaging with my posts were not the people who would buy my products.

I lost about three months here before I paid attention to where the people I most wanted to reach were actually spending their time. The platform that worked was different from the one that felt comfortable.

The lesson: before you commit to a channel, ask where your specific audience already is. Not where the building-in-public community is — where your customers are. Those aren't always the same place.

Mistake 5: Not Having a Destination Ready

This is the one I'd tell every new builder-in-public to fix before anything else.

My first posts got unexpected traction. People were interested, they wanted to know more, they clicked my bio. And my bio went to a half-finished site with no way to buy anything, no email opt-in, no meaningful destination.

I was generating interest and then immediately wasting it because there was nowhere to send people.

The fix: before you post anything publicly, have a live destination. An email list opt-in, a product people can buy, a way to capture the interest you're generating. When posts hit — and some of them will hit before you expect it — you need somewhere to send people.

For me, the answer was getting my storefront on MadeThis fully set up before I started posting seriously. Not perfect — just functional. Products live, checkout working, email capture on the page. When a post got engagement, people had somewhere to go and something to do when they got there.

If I could only give one piece of advice to someone starting building in public: set up your MadeThis storefront or equivalent destination first. Then start posting. The audience you build from day one should have a place to land.

What I'd Do on Day 1 Now

Post one honest thing about what I'm building and why. Have my storefront live so anyone who clicks has somewhere to go. Commit to a three-post-per-week cadence in my calendar. And teach — not report — from the very first post.

That's it. The first post doesn't have to be good. It has to be real, and it has to point somewhere.

For the foundational mindset on what building in public actually is and why it's worth doing, see what building in public actually means and why I do it. Start there if you're still figuring out whether this is worth trying.

The mistakes are fixable. Most of them are also avoidable — if you know they're coming.