When You Build in Public, You Also Fail in Public

Creators, your passion and dedication can see you through.

When I posted my first video on Instagram,

A close friend told me a bunch of other friends from school made fun of it. They said everything looked so artificial and that I was faking an accent to sound cool.

The truth couldn’t have been far from that.

I wasn’t faking an accent. I just didn’t realize it would be so stressful to talk to a camera.

The accent randomly formed in my head, and before my friends pointed it out, I hadn’t even realized I was talking differently from how I normally do.

The feedback hurt.

I’d worked tremendously hard on the video, and to have people dismiss me so easily sucked.

But I also knew what they said was legit. I’m not a born performer or a trained speaker. Of course, my videos will be imperfect. I can learn as I go, and eventually, my fake accent will disappear and I won’t look so stiff and artificial.

With that conviction, I kept going.

It’s been more than 3 years now, and my videos still are far from perfect. But I’m so proud that I didn’t let the criticism affect me and stop me from putting myself out there. If I got disheartened by that rude comment, I might have stopped making videos forever, and today, my YouTube channel wouldn’t even exist.

This is one of the darkest sides of being an artist (or content creator — whatever word you’d like to use) that very few people talk about.

When you build in public, you also fail in public.

And when that happens, people will be quick to judge, to call out your failure, and say that you’re done for.

But when you’re building something truly great, it’s impossible to do it without a few failures here and there. It’s also impossible to move ahead if you are too attached to failures and don’t treat them as learning experiences.

What’s your take on building in public?

In my opinion, it’s the ONLY route to achieve big success. You iterate as you go, base your final project on real-time output. You work based on stats, not assumptions. And as you keep building, you keep getting better and better at what you do, until one day you look back, and you no longer recognize the problems that troubled you so much when you started.

Building in public is not easy, and maybe that’s why not everyone can do it. But once you start, there’s no going back.

Thoughts? Let me know in the comments.

PS: Do watch the growth and see how far I’ve come in this 2019 vs 2022 video. It’s all a result of consistent effort and taking in positive feedback from well-wishers. Do let me know your thoughts in the comments. :)