By Dan — Apr 30, 2027

How to Deal With Imposter Syndrome When You're Building in Public

About two months into building my online business, I wrote a blog post giving advice about digital product marketing.

I had made maybe $200 in total revenue at that point. I'd been doing this for eight weeks. And I was publishing a post like I knew things.

The imposter syndrome was immediate and overwhelming. Who am I to write this? Someone will see through me. People will ask how much I've made and I'll have to say "$200" and they'll laugh and the whole thing will collapse.

I published it anyway. And here's what happened: nothing bad. A few people read it, found it useful, and subscribed to my email list. Nobody interrogated my credentials. Nobody demanded a revenue report.

That was my first real lesson in building in public: the impostor scenario you're afraid of almost never materializes. And when it does, it's usually far less devastating than the version in your head.

Why Imposter Syndrome Is Worse for Online Business Builders

Most professions have a credentialing system that grants you permission to speak. A doctor has a degree. A lawyer has a bar exam. These credentials are social permission slips that say "this person is allowed to give advice in this domain."

Online business has no credential system. Anyone can publish anything about anything. This is great because it removes gatekeepers. It's hard because it leaves you with no external signal telling you when you're qualified enough to share something.

So instead of a credential, you have your own judgment — and your own judgment, colored by imposter syndrome, tends to move the goalposts constantly. First you need $1,000/month before you can write about making money online. Then it's $5,000/month. Then it's $10,000/month. The goalposts never stop moving because the credential never arrives.

The Reframe That Made Building in Public Feel Possible

Here's the shift that changed things for me:

You don't have to claim to be an expert. You can just share what's true for you right now.

There's a huge difference between "Here's how to build a six-figure online business" (which would be dishonest if you haven't done it) and "Here's what I tried this week and what happened" (which is honest regardless of your current stage).

The second kind of content is actually more interesting to most readers, because it's real. Anyone who's trying to build something online knows that the expert-voice posts are often sanitized and retrospective — they tell you how things worked after the fact, with all the uncertainty and dead ends edited out. The in-the-moment stuff, even when it's messy, is often more useful because it acknowledges the parts that are hard.

Build in public as a learner, not as a guru. Most readers prefer the learner anyway.

Practical Ways to Manage the Feeling

Imposter syndrome doesn't fully go away — at least it hasn't for me. But here are the things that made it manageable:

Be transparent about where you are. If you've made $500, say you've made $500. You don't have to announce it on every post, but don't pretend to be somewhere you're not. Transparency preempts the feeling that you're deceiving people, because you're not.

Zoom in on the specific thing you know. You don't have to be an expert in everything. You just need to know something specific and useful that someone else doesn't know yet. Maybe you've spent forty hours figuring out how to get your first 100 email subscribers. That's not nothing — there's someone who needs those forty hours condensed into a twenty-minute read, and you're the person to write it.

Remember that your readers aren't comparing you to experts. They're comparing you to nothing — they're searching for something, they found your piece, and they're evaluating whether it helps them. Most readers aren't thinking about your credentials. They're thinking about their problem.

Separate the feeling from the action. Imposter syndrome tells you to wait. The action is to publish anyway. You can feel like an imposter and still publish. Feelings don't have to precede action — action often creates the feelings you were waiting for.

What "Building in Public" Actually Requires

The phrase "building in public" gets used to mean a lot of things, but at its core it just means sharing the real process of building — including the messy, uncertain, early parts. You don't need a finished success story to share. You just need to show up honestly and share what's actually happening.

Some of the most engaged content I've ever published has been the "here's what went wrong this month" posts. Not because failure is interesting in a schadenfreude way, but because honest accounts of difficulty are rare and people recognize them as real.

Building in public before you "arrive" is also strategically smart. The people who follow you in the early days, when you're still figuring things out, become your most loyal audience. They're invested in your success because they watched you build.

Start with One Honest Post

If you've been hesitating to share your journey because you don't feel qualified, my suggestion is simple: write one honest post about where you are right now. Not where you want to be. Where you actually are.

"Here's what I'm building and why" is a complete and honest piece of content that requires zero credentials to publish. From there, each week, each step, each lesson — it all becomes content. The journey is the content.

MadeThis is where I'd host whatever you're building — it handles the store side of things so you can focus on the content and building-in-public side. Start publishing, start honest, and let the audience find you.