Building in public: what I learned after 6 months of sharing my work online

Six months ago I made a decision that felt uncomfortable at the time: I would share every project I was working on, in real time, before it was finished.

Not the polished case study after the fact. The messy middle. The interaction that took three days and still does not feel quite right. The client feedback that sent me back to the drawing board. The version I almost shipped before I caught the mistake.

Here is what actually happened.

What I expected

I expected engagement. I had seen other designers build audiences by documenting their process and I assumed the mechanism was straightforward: share interesting work, people follow, following converts to sales or clients.

That part was roughly correct, but the specifics were different from what I imagined.

What I did not expect: the quality of the feedback

The most valuable thing that came from sharing work publicly was not followers. It was the quality of the responses from people who actually knew what they were looking at.

When you share a finished project, people say "this looks great." When you share a work in progress and ask a specific question, "I am trying to decide between these two hover states, here is why I am leaning toward the left one," you get specific answers from people with opinions worth hearing.

I received feedback on three separate occasions that changed the direction of a project in a way that made the final result significantly better. In two of those cases the person giving the feedback was a stranger I had never interacted with before. They found the post, had a relevant perspective, and shared it.

That does not happen with finished work. There is nothing to push back on. The process is what invites collaboration.

The vulnerability problem

Sharing unfinished work is uncomfortable in a way that is hard to describe until you do it. You are essentially asking people to evaluate your judgment in real time, before you have had the chance to correct your own mistakes.

The first few times I posted a work in progress I refreshed the notifications obsessively for the first hour. I was waiting for someone to point out something obviously wrong that I had missed. It happened once, mildly, and it was fine. The person was right. I fixed it and said so.

After about six weeks the discomfort mostly went away. Not because I stopped caring about the quality of the work, but because I started to trust that sharing a mistake publicly and correcting it is not embarrassing. It is actually more credible than pretending the process is linear.

Nobody who builds things believes that other builders get it right on the first try. Showing the iteration is showing the truth of how good work gets made.

What it did to my client pipeline

Before I started building in public, most of my inbound came from referrals. Someone I had worked with recommended me to someone they knew. That is a warm channel and I still value it, but it is slow and unpredictable.

After three months of consistent posting, I started getting inquiries from people who had been following my work for weeks before they reached out. They already knew my aesthetic, my process, my communication style. The sales conversation was shorter because a significant portion of it had already happened through the content.

One client told me on our first call that she had been following my posts for two months before reaching out. She had already decided she wanted to work with me. The call was fifteen minutes.

That is a fundamentally different kind of client relationship than one that starts cold.

The content that performed and the content that did not

Process posts outperformed everything else consistently. Not announcements, not finished work reveals, not opinion pieces. The posts that showed something being made, with enough specificity to be interesting, got more engagement, more saves, and more DMs than anything else I posted.

The specificity is the key part. "I spent two days on this hover interaction" is not interesting. "I spent two days on this hover interaction because I wanted the card to feel like it was breathing rather than snapping, and here is the three-step animation breakdown that finally got there" is interesting.

The difference is whether the post gives someone something to learn or react to. Vague process content is just noise. Specific process content is useful.

What building in public is not

It is not a growth hack. The people who treat it as a formula, posting at optimal times, using trending audio, engineering virality, tend to build audiences that do not convert into anything because the content is optimized for reach rather than resonance.

The people I have seen build genuinely useful audiences through building in public are the ones who post because they find the process interesting and want to think out loud about it, not because they have calculated that process content performs well on a given platform.

The audience can tell the difference.

It is also not a replacement for doing good work. The content surfaces the work but it cannot substitute for it. If the work is mediocre, sharing it publicly just accelerates the discovery of that fact.

Six months in: the honest summary

My following grew by about 9,000 people across platforms, which sounds significant until you realize it happened over six months of posting multiple times per week. The growth was steady rather than explosive, which I actually prefer because it meant the people following were genuinely interested rather than algorithmically swept up in a moment.

My inbound client inquiries roughly doubled. My template sales increased by about 60 percent, which I attribute partly to the content and partly to having more products available.

More importantly: I am a better designer because of it. Explaining decisions publicly forces a level of clarity about why you made them that private work does not require. You cannot say "it felt right." You have to say what you were trying to achieve and why this solution achieved it.

That discipline has made every project I have worked on in the last six months sharper.

Whether the numbers justify the time investment depends on what you are optimizing for. If you are optimizing purely for reach per hour spent, there are probably more efficient channels.

If you are optimizing for building an audience that actually trusts your judgment, there is not a better way I have found than showing your judgment, repeatedly, in public, before the outcome is known.