To build in public or not… that’s the question, eh?
Insights to help evaluate if you should jump onto the #buildinpublic train
The interwebs are buzzing with chatter about the aptly titled #buildinpublic approach to product building. While debates are ablaze on whether it is a mere trend or not, seeding products to established organizations (hello, Twitter Spaces) are all unearthing undeniable value in adopting this process. Their learnings are all out there. Yet product builders, especially those at early stages, have questions, like: How do we decide if it’s for us? Are there risks to this approach? What does it entail?
Here, I seek to take the edge off the dilemma that builds around these questions for an early-stage founder, while humbly adding to the #buildinpublic conversation. My insights stem from the juxtaposition of building in private at an R&D team for India’s fastest-growing startup (Swiggy) and building in public at an early-stage start-up (Pause).
While I view this writing as a bridge to more conversation, it can also be used as a decision-making guide while choosing one over the other. With the ‘why’ of this approach being easily accessible, I aim to share actionable guidance about ‘when’ you can choose to build in public.
When can you choose to build-in-public?
Judge a person by their questions, they said. I reckon I know why: they bring you closer to higher-conviction answers. To decide if building in public is for you, here are some questions you can ask yourselves to reach a decision with refined thought:
Is your target audience aware of the problem you’re trying to solve?
If yes, then you might build in public and play in the problem space a little longer. If not, then you can go-to-market with a solution directly.
This might sound like a question with a ludicrously obvious answer (i.e. YES!). But there are products omnipresent in the market that solve problems their users weren’t originally aware of. As the quote (somewhat dubiously attributed to Henry Ford) goes, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.
Play in public to deeply understand the underserved areas for your customers when in a highly competitive market
Tesla, for instance, is inherently innovative and focuses its efforts on revolutionising how people use, view, and think about mobility. Founders working in this space go to market with a solution first and evaluate later. Why, you might ask? Their imagination of the problem space far exceeds those that their target customers can relate to, especially at an early stage of the product life cycle.
Closer home, in the case of Pause, however, time-off management for SMEs was a known problem. We needed to play in public to deeply understand the under-served areas our customers encountered, despite already having options available to them.
Does your product have direct competition already?
No man — or rather — product is an island. Where competition is unnerving, it is bound to exist, and can counterintuitively be a positive sign when evaluating the potential of your industry. Feeding competition, however, feels like the biggest risk of building in public. You’ll probably have these questions running through your mind:
- What if others steal my idea?
- What if my competition banks on the groundwork that we did?
- Am I prematurely exposing a half-baked product to my customers who already have refined options available?
All of these are valid concerns and I see you.
With Pause, we were backed into a similar corner, because time-off management is a Red Ocean market.
Uh… why did we build it at all, then? That’s a longer answer.
And why did we build in public? Let me explain.
It’s a bit like the saying, “with more information comes more power”. Speaking to a wide range of target organisations early in the process allowed us to narrow down our target group to a more specialised segment. This encouraged us to make unorthodox product decisions and build our product to be more opinionated — and hence differentiated. Not only were we able to define our value proposition, but we could also pivot it from a different one. And that felt equally valid.
Do remember that while your product is your core offering, other pillars of the business like marketing are also going to hold you up (pun intended). As for the competition? Well, we do wish them well!
Choosing to build in public despite the competition isn’t the worst idea after all.
For a unique & innovative product, you might choose not to build-in-public, instead wait for a grand reveal.
Is your product riding on a one-of-a-kind, patent-worthy technology?
If yes, well firstly… get that dough!! Secondly, you might choose not to build in public to avoid spilling your secret sauce. That’s fair — let’s discuss this with some real examples.
For a still-under-NDA product I was a part of at Swiggy, we built and experimented in private. While we still ran data-driven experiments to test our hypothesis around the technology and customer behaviour, we did so with a closed group of people in a controlled environment. The high level of investment and potential returns wasn’t worth the risk of exposing our solution prematurely, despite us having a huge technological moat.
Given the nature of the product, we knew we had one shot at creating a positive impression on customers with a well-designed and smoothly functioning product. Given that our team was dabbling in something entirely new, time away from a larger audience allowed us to fail… and fail… and fail… before we succeeded.
Let’s contrast that with Pause. To build the mobile app in Flutter, our engineers had complete freedom to crowdsource resources and best practices from the community in order to be quick and efficient. After all, it’s pretty well-known just how correlated velocity and community are during early-stage development, right?
To conclude…
Building in public has its perks and perils. As a new baby on the block, it’s evolving as we speak– I learn something new every day. How deep you’re willing to go and how much you share, for now, isn’t set in stone either.
While there are no straightforward and guaranteed answers in business, there are questions you can ask to get closer to the best answer for you. Being deliberate and moving with intent while making this choice can set you up for success and set up an incredibly fun ride for your team.
This was the ‘when’ of building in public. I’ll delve into the ‘how’ of building in public — and the ways it permeated Pause’s business verticals — in the next post. Stay locked!
