"Build in public" has become advice you cannot escape as a founder. Share your journey, post your numbers, document the process. Some of it has been genuinely good for me. But a lot of what passes for building in public is not building in public at all — it is performing in public, and the two look similar from the outside while doing opposite things to the person doing them.
This essay is about telling them apart. Because the performance version is seductive, it is everywhere, and it slowly corrodes the very thing — trust — that building in public is supposed to create.
The two versions
Performing in public is when the sharing exists to produce a reaction. The win is announced because announcing it feels good and draws applause. The "vulnerable" post about a hard week is shaped, on closer reading, to make the founder look resilient and admirable. The metrics shared are the flattering ones; the unflattering ones quietly never come up. The audience is the point, and the work has become raw material for content.
Building in public, the real version, is when you share the actual process — including the parts that do not flatter you — because a truthful record is useful to other people and keeps you honest. The failures appear without being polished into inspirational lessons. The numbers are shared whether or not they are impressive. The work is the point, and the sharing is a byproduct.
From the outside these can look identical for a while. From the inside they feel completely different, and over time they produce completely different reputations.
Performing in public turns your work into raw material for content. Building in public is the reverse — the sharing is a byproduct of work you would be doing anyway.
The test: would you still do it with no audience?
The cleanest way to tell which one you are doing is a single question: would I do this if no one were watching?
The weekly review I keep, I would keep regardless — I happen to share some of it, but the value is mine first. That is building in public. A post engineered for engagement, that I would never bother writing for my own benefit, is performing. The presence of an audience is fine. The audience being the reason is the tell.
A useful sub-test: notice what you do with a failure. If your instinct is to either hide it or immediately repackage it as an inspiring lesson with a tidy moral, you are performing. If you can state it plainly — "this did not work, here is what happened, I am not yet sure what I will do" — without rushing to redeem it, you are building in public. Real building has loose ends. Performance always resolves into a clean arc, because arcs perform better.
Why the performance version is dangerous
It is not just distasteful; it actively harms the founder doing it, in three ways.
It distorts your decisions. Once an audience is the point, you start making choices for how they will share, not for whether they are right for the business. You chase the launch that posts well over the slow work that matters. You optimise your company for its own highlight reel, which is a way of optimising for the wrong thing.
It manufactures a debt of expectation. A feed of curated wins trains everyone — your audience, and worse, yourself — to expect a steady stream of wins. But real building is mostly undramatic, and long stretches have nothing postable in them. The performer, addicted to the reaction, either goes quiet (and panics) or starts inventing wins to feed the machine. Neither is good for the actual company.
It corrodes the trust it was meant to build. This is the deepest irony. People are good at sensing performance, even when they cannot name it. A feed that is all triumph and tidy vulnerability reads, over time, as untrustworthy — too clean to be true. The honest account, failures and dull weeks included, is the one that earns the durable trust. Performance buys attention now and spends credibility later.
How to build in public honestly
A few practices keep me on the right side of the line.
Share what you would record anyway. Start from the writing you already do for yourself — the review, the decision log, the notes — and share the parts that might help someone. If it only exists because of the audience, be suspicious of it.
Let failures stay failures, at least for a while. Resist the urge to immediately convert every setback into an inspirational lesson. Sometimes the honest thing is "this went badly and I do not yet know why." That is more useful, and more trustworthy, than a premature moral.
Pick a cadence and keep it through the dull stretches. Do not post only when there is a win. Post on a rhythm, and let some of those posts be "this was a slow, ordinary month, here is the unglamorous thing I worked on." The ordinary entries are what make the whole record believable.
Measure it by whether it helped someone, not by the reaction. The right scoreboard is the occasional message from a founder who says a thing you shared saved them a mistake. That is building in public doing its actual job. The applause is not the job.
The honest summary
Building in public, done well, is one of the most valuable things a founder can do — it compounds into trust, it keeps you honest, and it genuinely helps the people coming up behind you. But it has a near-twin, performing in public, that wears the same clothes and does the opposite: it distorts your decisions, manufactures a debt of fake wins, and quietly spends the trust it pretends to build.
The line between them is the question you can ask any time you are about to share something: would I do this if no one were watching? Stay on the side where the answer is yes, and building in public becomes what it is supposed to be — a byproduct of real work, honestly recorded, useful to someone other than your own image.