I've been thinking about this more and more lately. Are we all still building in public?
In this era where AI is giving anyone the ability to replicate your company quite quickly, it seems like building in public probably brings more problems than benefits, especially early on. I've seen quite a few people complain about this, even those with large accounts that rely on building in public for distribution. Would love to get your thoughts. It's honestly the first time I'm holding a lot more of my cards closer to my chest.
We're drowning in dashboards. Impressions, click-throughs, followers, reach, saves, shares but not all things are equal. Telling, is there a metric you're meant to be keen on, yet in actuality, you're not? Maybe you: Don't care about likes but are ridiculously fixated on replies Track shares but never take the time to check reach Are concerned about DMs only because that's where the magic happens We're building a social tool on the social web and taking a lot of time deliberating about what's truly important, and what just looks good on a chart. Would be great to hear your own opinion regarding what you're paying attention to (and what you're not).
Been going back and forth on this. Right now my setup lets Claude Code run migrations and seed scripts directly against a local dev database, but I've kept it firewalled off from ever touching staging or prod, even read-only. Everything that reaches prod goes through a PR I review manually.
Saw a comment in another thread here about a subagent going off-script and targeting its own orchestrator, which made me second-guess even the local access I've been giving it.
Where does everyone else draw this line? Is read-only prod access ever okay in your setup, or is that a line nobody here crosses? And for the people who do give agents broader database access, what made you comfortable enough to do that?
30 days ago my team looked around the room, confirmed we had zero marketing hires, and decided the person who analysis data should run our social media. This is my report from the field: Lesson 1: Just make it fun is not a spec. My first draft was a clean blue banner with our logo and tagline. Rejected: "too corporate." Second draft: I added memes. Rejected: "what is this." There is apparently a narrow band of acceptable fun.
Lesson 2: Marketing has its own build pipeline and it's invisible. I used to think posting was the work. The work is actually: research the platform's culture, learn its unwritten rules, draft, get roasted internally, redraft, post at the right hour, then watch a number. It's a deploy with no logs and no rollback.
I test products for a living. Bugs, edge cases, broken flows. I catch it all before it ships. So I always assumed the hard part of a startup was the build.
Then I started watching what happens after launch, and it completely changed my mind.
Getting a product to work is a checklist. Getting people to care about it is not. There's no QA process for that. No test case that tells you your marketing is broken. You just... try things, and most of them don't work.
I'm not a founder, and I'm not here to sell anything. I work at Nexobe doing QA, content, and design, and I've become genuinely obsessed with understanding this gap between "we built it" and "people are using it."
Curious if other founders/makers here are seeing this: a chunk of my own search behavior has quietly moved from typing something into Google to just asking ChatGPT or Perplexity directly, and getting an answer with no click to any website.
For anyone building a product with organic/SEO as a growth channel, has this shown up in your numbers yet? Or is it too early to tell?
Not trying to sell anything, genuinely curious how other builders here are thinking about it (if at all).
