For the last few years, #BuildInPublic has been a loose community of tech builders sharing their projects as they go, from the first rough idea to the finished product. Progress updates, revenue screenshots, the occasional late-night bug fix thread.
I never quite got the appeal. Was it for feedback? Accountability? Motivation? I'm not convinced that strangers on the internet weighing in on my half-built work is the best way to bring an idea to life. My group chat is far better qualified to roast me, and their opinions are the ones I actually care about.
To me, it always looked a little like vanity.
To be fair, there are some excellent examples of people documenting how they built and now run their businesses. Those are worth reading. But that's the point. Those projects are already past a meaningful milestone. They're sharing what worked, not auditioning an idea.
Still, I don't always understand how other humans do their human things, and that's fine.
What's changed is the cost of sharing early. Today it's folly to post your brilliant shower idea to the world. There are teams of tokenmaxxers who can crank out a 70% version of your product, complete with lookalikes of whatever marketing assets you've made, and get it to market while you're still tuning your build process.
Sure, they'll do the same thing once your app is live in the App Store. But by then you have a working product, a head start, and first dibs on the domain name you wanted. That's a fighting chance. Posting the idea before any of that exists just hands it over.
So where does useful feedback come from? My group chat isn't especially technical. They're great at telling me what normal people think, which is valuable in its own way. Bouncing technical ideas off them, though, mostly falls flat.
What I think is missing is smaller, more focused group chats. A handful of people who know the domain, who you trust, and who aren't going to take your idea and ship it by Friday.
And this is where I break my own theory. I've been thinking about small group chats built on the AT Protocol...
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