439: The Increasing Risk of Building in Public

Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap founder. Building in public, I wanna talk about that today. It once helped me to sell my company and today I think that same level of transparency that I used and built in public with, a couple of years ago, four, five, six years ago. Well, it's been a while. That actually, I think can destroy your company if you employed the exact same way today. And I think that's not hyperbole. I owe my entire career as a writer, as a podcaster, and a founder to being pretty much radically transparent about my business. I shared my Stripe verified monthly recurring revenue with the world, and that visibility back then in twenty eighteen nineteen attracted financial and acquisition interest that ultimately led to the sale of my previous software business FeedbackPanda. I talk about this in the very first episode of this podcast too. And that exit put me on the map. It gave me financial independence. It's the reason I have a podcast and a newsletter to begin with if it hadn't been for building in public and sharing my numbers, I probably wouldn't be speaking or writing to anybody right now. So when I tell you that the game has fundamentally changed, I need you to understand that I'm not saying this from the sidelines just observing. I'm saying this as somebody who benefited enormously from this old playbook and I'm now watching founders follow it straight into danger. So So that's why I want to talk about building in public and the risks that come with it today. When I first encountered the idea of building in public around five years ago, six years probably, it was all about transparency. You shared your numbers, you shared your strategies, your tactics, and you let people see behind the curtain, it worked. It built enormous goodwill for founders. It created buzz for their products and was kind of a form of validation too. People bought into your journey and then they became part of it themselves. They amplified your story. They became early adopters and they let me repeat the last part. And they took risks on your unfinished product because they believed in you and what you were building. And while this aspect of building reputation and demonstrating expertise in public is still an ongoing way for people to participate in our larger community, the founders, the entrepreneurs, the means of what building in public constitutes have changed quite a bit. It's kind of the advent of artificial intelligence in particular, but also the increasing scrutiny in public awareness on social media that have made things quite different. The risk of being copied. That's the big thing in building public. Right? It's always existed. Once you share, once you talk about something, people listen. I wrote about this a couple years ago after analyzing when founders dropped out of the building in public race. I kind of wanted to …