Building In Public Comes With This One Pitfall They Don’t Tell You About

The solution isn’t easy either

Without any unnecessary teasing, here it is —

You risk being held back by your own moments of shame.

‘Building in public’ is the new cool thing in the creator circuit. As the term suggests, it involves sharing your growth story as you go, rather than when you’ve peaked. The idea is that you don’t just pop up on the feed with your million-dollar income and dispense advice about how to get there. You’re sharing successes along the way, thus demonstrating that it’s a growth journey for you just like for everyone else and you don’t have some rich daddy in the background.

For the most part, honestly, it’s the same grandiose storytelling packaged as something more self-aware. You see folks sharing how they’re getting 10000+ followers every three months or less, or outlining plans for how they’ll grow from a revenue of $750k to a million in 2023 — in other words, stuff that actual people can’t relate to or replicate. Ever tried going on LinkedIn and writing a post celebrating that you got 10 new followers in a week? The algorithm doesn’t give a fuckity-fuck, oh no no no. Wildly improbable numbers or nothing.

But let’s say you’re a regular person. You’ve been writing consistently, building an audience, building an email list, and now you’re onto the next step. Maybe a product or course launch, or a podcast.

You did all the right things — send out teaser emails, write posts hinting at the value it offers, welcoming questions from your email subscribers, collecting testimonials from a few folks you shared it with for free. There’s been decent engagement, you’ve been getting encouraging DMs.

Launch day arrives, you say a prayer and hit Publish.

And then, it flops.

Never mind why it flopped. In today’s overkill digital product market, most are bound to. Maybe your product name was off by a syllable, maybe your deliverables weren’t the sparkly over-promises people love to swallow, maybe your cover image didn’t feature a sufficiently zen-chica-in-the-mountains photo of you.

But the fact is, the thing that you were so pumped to launch and that you’d written so many anticipatory newsletters/Medium/LinkedIn/Twitter posts about failed to be the moneymaker you’d dreamed it would be.

The thing with digital products is that once created, they exist forever. Long past the sale ends or you take down the product listing, they’ll still exist as

• emails in your followers’ inboxes
• Tweet threads you built
• the subject of DM conversations
• the topic of a Medium article series on how you’re going about making the product

When the product works, those peripheral pieces serve as reference material for yourself and for other creators looking to make it like you.

But when it doesn’t work, those pieces are a reminder of how you fell onstage while everyone was watching.

And this is the part that successful creators gloss over — the emotions attached to having failed in public. In theory, you can delete everything about your product from the internet if you hire a good enough developer. But how hard can you scrub at your own memory? And yes, you will eventually come out of that self-cancellation mode and move on — perhaps create new products that do better — but depending on individual traits and any pre-existing mental health conditions, you may lose months or even years to it.

Is there a solution to this? Yes, and it’s not an easy one. If you can train your mind to see those public failures as stepping-stones — and I mean really, really train yourself so you can skip the self-cancellation and move straight to recovery — you can come out of those failures an exponentially wiser person.

How do you do this? By owning the narrative. Don’t pretend that the failed product didn’t happen — own that it failed, and make a new story out of it.

Share a newsletter or social media post about the failure journey, why you think it happened and the lessons you’ve learned.

If you got even one sale/subscription, reach out and thank them.

Share the product/hold the course with that one person with as much confidence as if you’d gotten hundreds. Will it feel like rubbing salt into your wound?

Of course it will. But you were brave enough to share the process that led to the fall; you can be brave enough to share your commitment to bouncing back from the fall.

Or — a radical option — maybe just reconsider your ‘building in public’ strategy. I know it’s cool to build in public. I know all the big guys tell you to be honest and relatable. But at the end of the day, the greatest honesty you owe is to yourself. If you aren’t comfortable sharing your baby projects and growing ideas, you shouldn’t have to, no matter who says what. Build in private, like the geniuses used to before the internet age — work quietly, sincerely and passionately until you’re ready to share your project with the world.

And at that point, hype away. You and your project are ready for it. :)