The Power of Building in Public

There’s a dangerous moment in the development of any digital product: the moment everyone in the room agrees it’s a good idea before they’ve spoken to potential clients.

You know your clients. You understand their problems. You’ve spent years working with the people you want to help, and you’ve heard the same frustrations again and again. So you start designing the solution.

And, to be fair, you’re probably making a very educated guess. But it’s still, ultimately a guess.

That distinction matters, because knowing your customers well doesn’t automatically mean you know what they’ll buy. People are surprisingly good at telling you what frustrates them. They’re less reliable when it comes to predicting what they’ll actually pay to solve.

Which is why, when we’re developing a new digital product, we don’t just think about validating the product. We want to validate the market too.

Nobody wants to spend three months designing, building and polishing something only to launch it to silence. That’s a lot of effort to create something that sits on a digital shelf gathering digital dust.

And it happens more often than you might think.

Build the shop window first

One of the simplest ways to avoid this is to build the product page before you build the product.

Not a vague teaser page. A proper product page.

What is it? Who is it for? What problem does it solve? What will someone be able to do as a result? How will it work? What will it cost?

In other words, describe the proposition as if it already exists, then put it in front of the people you expect to buy it.

This is where things get useful. Do they understand it? Does the problem feel important enough? Does the language resonate? Do they ask questions you hadn’t considered? Do they care about the feature you thought was crucial, or do they immediately want something completely different?

All of that is valuable. But there’s one piece of feedback that matters more than the rest: will they buy it?

There’s a big difference between “That sounds brilliant” and “Where do I pay?”

The first is encouragement. The second is validation.

A sale tells you something a survey can’t

It’s easy to get positive feedback on any idea. People are generally nice, particularly if they know you. We call this ‘ugly baby syndrome’. Ask someone whether they’d find a product useful and they’ll often say yes. Ask whether they like the concept and they’ll happily tell you they do.

Ask them to put £500 on a card and the conversation becomes much clearer.

That doesn’t mean every product needs hundreds of pre-orders before development starts. But if you can get even a small number of the right customers to commit before the product exists, you’ve learned something important.

The problem matters. The proposition makes sense. The value is strong enough for someone to act. Suddenly, you’re no longer building entirely on assumption. You’re building with evidence.

Let the market fund the build

There’s another advantage: those early customers can help fund development.

Instead of investing everything upfront and hoping you can recover the cost later, you begin creating revenue before the full product exists. More importantly, you start building with real customers already waiting at the other end.

That changes the nature of the project.

The launch is no longer the first time the market encounters the product. The market has been involved from the start. You’ve tested the proposition, heard the objections, changed the language, challenged your assumptions and prioritised the things people genuinely care about.

By the time you release the first version, it already has customers. It can wipe its feet on the way through the door.

Building in public doesn’t mean building everything in public

The phrase can conjure up images of founders posting daily revenue screenshots on LinkedIn or sharing every design decision with the internet. That’s not what we mean.

Building in public is simply about removing the wall between development and the people you’re developing for.

Show them the idea before it’s perfect. Show them the proposition before the platform exists. Put rough things in front of real people. Ask awkward questions and let potential customers tell you where you’re wrong while it’s still cheap to change direction.

Then build, ship, learn and improve.

The alternative is to disappear for six months, emerge with the thing you were convinced people wanted, and discover that somewhere along the way you solved the wrong problem.

That isn’t careful product development. It’s a very expensive guess.

The best time to find out whether people want your digital product isn’t launch day. It’s before you build it.