The Bootstrapped Founder

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is The Bootstrapped 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 employ it 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 Feedback Panda. 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 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 that's why I wanna 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 never 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 and 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 a public race.

I kind of wanted to see, can we time this? Like, when do people stop? And there was a clear pattern there. Companies stopped reporting their financial metrics and sharing their specifics about what exactly they were building. Just around 20,000 to $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue.

That was the threshold then. And below it, risk was manageable. You weren't big enough to be worth cloning and the upside of sharing, getting early adopter customers from your peer community and attracting innovators willing to give your product the chance, well, that outweighed the downside of maybe having somebody try and clone your business. And above it, above 20 to 30 ks, the likelihood of inspiring somebody to build a competitor was just too high. And the return on sharing was too low to justify this kind of exposure.

And I think this particular threshold has effectively collapsed to zero or is on its way of collapsing to zero. I would argue that the day the first CLI agentic coding agent found its way into a large enough group of people, the day that it started being shared as the way forward for software engineering, was the day that building in public became not just risky, but outright dangerous. And I can tell you this because I've seen it happen. It's not theoretical anymore. Here's what a savvy business minded person can do today.

They don't need to know how to code. They don't need to do this extensive market research. They don't even need to understand the tech stack. They just need a monthly subscription to an LLM company and the ability to phrase a prompt clearly. Something like investigate everything that this particular person has ever said on social media about their business over the last six months, distill it into report, then create a free trial on their software platform, go through each page, take screenshots, do a full semantic and HTML analysis, write a report on the product, create a style guide, create a reference document explaining the business and its ideal customer profile based on how the landing page talks about them, then build a product that does the exact same thing, maybe with a twist, something in addition to the existing product that it doesn't already do, using a framework that comes with production ready payment and authentication systems.

That's the prompt. And then they press enter and stuff happens. Now obviously this isn't going to do a one shot perfect copy, but if a business savvy entrepreneurial developer uses this, it might take them a couple of days to build something, maybe a couple of weeks to turn that prompt from a wish into a pretty solid reality. And if they understand paid advertising better than you might, right, if they already have distribution in your market that you don't or in an adjacent market that you wouldn't even think about, some leg up they might have, then all of a sudden there's a new competitor in the field that you have to deal with, one that you essentially helped create by talking about all these specific things. Problematic, right?

Clearly, there's a lot to running a business that has nothing to do with the product itself, and that's also something that building it in public often touches. I talked about this a couple weeks ago. Data is the only mode was the episode. The existing business knowledge and insight that has to be accumulated almost painfully over many years of running a business or being deeply embedded in an industry, well, all of that doesn't come bundled with agentic coding tools like Claude Code. Even though Claude is pretty smart and you can act as if it was somebody with experience, it only has the distilled insights that people have already shared.

These tools have a lot of knowledge available from these blog posts and books and forum posts that they've ingested as training data in the past. They can be a mentor that acts as if they were somebody from this industry, plus somebody from every other industry that intersects with it. So that's a capability that these tools have. And that's kind of scary if you think about it because I'm always realizing over the last couple months in particular that I'm not the best developer. Obviously, I'm not even a good developer.

I I would consider myself a developer at best, but I know what good code looks like. I have a hard time writing it, but I can tell if it is good or not. Kind of have a sense, a taste, a judgment capacity for it. So the same extends to marketing, to sales, to product development, to relationship development, to competitor analysis. I'm not trained in any of these, and I'm not particularly good, but I can tell a good outcome from a bad outcome, like a good report from bad report, an insight insightful report from a useless report.

And that is enough if I have agentic tools that do this work for me with the full underpinning of the collected wisdom of humanity in their training data. So where's that moat, right? I know for certain that product is not a moat anymore. Software engineering capability is not a moat, not anymore. So what do we talk about when we do want to build in public?

Because it's still good, right? Well, the first instinct might be to say, well, I'm never going to talk about my business at all. Honestly, it's not the worst idea at this point. At the very least, it prevents other founders from being made aware of your business in enough detail to replicate it. You'll find ways of talking to customers without exposing everything to your peers, if you kind of do it in a more private way.

But building in public is still beneficial because you built this kind of reputation, you built some kind of connectivity with your peers, with the other founders in the field, the other experts in the field. So it's a good thing to do. And building a public in front of an audience that includes founders has to change just a little bit. It has to be a nuanced information dissemination system. It has to be a strategy.

So here's my personal approach that I use to still build in public without giving everything away. First off, I would never share numbers. Not how many customers I have, not how many dollars I make in revenue, not what my expenses are. And even with features, because they too are now pretty much a well formulated prompt away from being built by anybody, I'm careful about what I share and in what detail. Because there's a meaningful difference between saying we recently started integrating an MCP into our product and customers really like it, which is quite literally what we've done at Podscan, versus ever since we integrated in MCP for these five core features, over 20 new customers have chosen our medium tier subscription plan.

Now these details for anyone, for machine or human, they give far too much insight into the financial dynamics of the business and even the customer behaviors. Like, don't overshare with specificity. I found myself not sharing numbers or specifics at all at this point, but when it comes to revenue, when it comes to customer names, customer numbers, customer accounts, all that, what I do share are things that trip me up along the way. The tripwires, things I didn't expect, and what happened when they occurred, what I did, what I learned from this. Industry insights that are general enough to not immediately make sense to a direct competitor, but are genuinely interesting to anybody else, like in the industry or outside of it, that stuff works.

Operational experiences, like an interesting customer service conversation or fixing a particularly gnarly bug and what went into solving it without showing too much of the big picture. There are a few categories of information that I probably would have shared easily five years ago because they were interesting and today I wouldn't dream of it anymore. System architecture is one. Specifically, how in my case for Podscan, I've set up my data ingestion pipeline, how I built my data distribution systems, right? Podscan is a pretty sizable business at this point.

It takes in tens of thousands of podcast episodes every day. It has like a REST API, a webhook API, an MCP, all that. And that sends similar, if not more data packages per hour, also like tens of thousands per hour out to all the customers. The data needs to come from somewhere, it needs to be stored somewhere, it needs to go somewhere, and the systems that I use for that are hard won consequences of many many experimental efforts over more than two years at this point. Why would I create a systems diagram of this and just give it away for free, handing another agentic system effectively a blueprint to rebuild what I'm doing?

Well, not gonna, right? And neither should you. This stuff is internal. And it might be obvious that this is internal, but for some people it's just interesting. Interesting to know, interesting to share, it becomes problematic.

And the same goes for dependencies. So what kind of service exactly do I use for data extraction or retrieval? What's the exact package and its configuration that I use for transcribing like 50,000 podcast episodes a day? Well, I'm not going to share that, because why would I make it easier for anybody else to build the same thing? Of course, I can talk about the open source components that I've used or specific little tricks to get more performance out of an existing technology.

That's always nice. Maybe I talk about this all the time now that I'm more into testing, like I talk about which particular packages have this little bug when you test them this way. That's wonderful, that's great, that's helpful. But you want to prevent sharing a blueprint. You don't want to create breadcrumbs to clone for somebody else.

And that's really what it comes down to. You want to share things that make it interesting to participate in your journey, but not easy to clone your business. Everything you share should pass this particular test. If it's not interesting, well then nobody's going to engage with it anyway, and you're only increasing your risk surface for no benefit, right, if it's still insightful into your business. If it makes it easy to copy you, you're building your own competitor.

So those two things should always be in place: make it interesting but not easy to clone. That's the filter. So maybe then, let's ask a bit theatrically, is building in public dead? Well, I don't think so, but it's been pruned. It's been cut down to a very nuanced and very deliberate balance of risk management, sharing strategy, and business defense against copycats and clones.

If you're building a public and you want to keep doing it, that's fine. You very likely already have defenses against copycats there. Otherwise, how would you have dealt with them before? Because people have already tried to copy stuff over the last five, ten years, as long as building a public existed. But it is by far not as straightforward to share transparently and widely as it used to be before agentic systems.

I know that people have always hired developers to build copies of existing products out there, and just like they now hire Codex or Cloud Code or whatever tool to do the same thing. But now it's much cheaper, significantly faster and frankly much better, right? It doesn't sleep, it doesn't tire, it has all the knowledge already baked in. Something that other people would have taken days, if not weeks, to figure out is now a couple seconds away, because it's already in the model. There's real value at this point of not being in the spotlight.

When it comes to successful software businesses today, at some point you're going to have to have a customer mode. You'll have customers, large customers especially, that you can only have by having built relationships with them. So that's another mode that an agentic tool won't be able to have, right? Relationships that took six months of back and forth emails and four meetings with the team and some Zoom calls and careful negotiation to get a deal in place, no agentic coding tool is going to replicate that for your competitor just yet. I mean, we have seen with 11, like automated tools that speak as if they're humans, Then we have agents, the open claws of the world that just consistently interact with people.

We're getting to this point. We're just not there yet. But for small and growing businesses, the ones that are still in this vulnerable stage, the early stage, you might want to keep things under down low for a bit. Otherwise, you might be inviting your own competitors to the table and not competing humans, but humans that kind of spawn robots to compete with you. And in this kind of new world of AI powered development, those things show up a whole lot faster than you will expect.

That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder. You can find me on Twitter at Arvid Kahl Arvid Kahl. Okay. Same.

Let me let me do this whole thing again. You can find me on Twitter at Arvid Kahl, Arvid Kahl. If you're a founder who's now thinking more carefully about what gets said about your business out there, well, this is exactly why I built PodScan. We monitor over 4,500,000 podcasts in real time, and we alert you when anybody mentions you so you know what's being said before somebody else uses it against you or uses it to, you know, further their own agenda. And we turn unstructured podcast chatter into competitive intelligence, so you can use that to set yourself apart.

If you're looking for your next venture, you don't know what to do, check out ideas.podscan.fm where we identify startup opportunities from hundreds of hours of expert discussions on podcasts daily, so you can build what people are already asking for. Share this please with anybody who needs to turn conversations into competitive advantages. Thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.