The Build-in-Public Era: Breaking It a Hundred Times to Get It Right Once
- Rich Washburn
- 16 hours ago
- 4 min read
Somewhere along the line, the culture shifted. We stopped pretending.
For decades, success was about the illusion of control. The polished pitch deck. The glossy commercial. The polished founder who never broke a sweat — even when everything was on fire behind the scenes.
That’s the “fake it till you make it” era.And it’s over.
Because right now, we’re watching something wild happen across the entire digital landscape: the rise of the Build-in-Public crowd — the people who are saying, “Screw the magic trick — you’re going to see how the illusion works, step by step, mistake by mistake.”
And it’s not just a movement. It’s a tipping point.
From Confidence Game to Construction Zone
Back in the day, confidence was currency. The game was: act like you know what you’re doing, get the client, get the funding, get the title — and then scramble like hell behind the curtain to figure it out. We all played it. The cloud era practically ran on it. Remember those days? Everyone was “cloud-first” and “digitally transformed” before they even knew what a workload migration was. Whole companies locked themselves into seven-figure, multi-year deals because somebody at the top faked it till they made it.
And yeah — they made it. They made a lot of money. Just not a lot of sense.
That whole era was smoke and mirrors. But what’s happening now? It’s transparency on steroids.
The Build-in-Public crowd doesn’t just show their wins. They show their failures — in real time. They launch things half-baked, break them, rebuild them, and narrate the whole process online. They’re saying, “We’re going to screw this up 100 times so that when we finally get it right, you’ll know it wasn’t luck — it was iteration.” That’s not arrogance. That’s evolution.
The Cultural Flip
This new mindset is fascinating because it’s not limited to startups or solopreneurs — it’s creeping into every layer of business culture.
Even the big companies — the ones that used to guard their processes like state secrets — are starting to realize that polish doesn’t perform anymore. Authenticity does.
And I don’t mean the “authenticity” you put in a marketing deck. I mean the gritty, messy kind where you break something on a Tuesday, talk about it on a Wednesday, fix it on a Thursday, and launch the patch on Friday — all while livestreaming the chaos. That’s real. That’s trustworthy.
Look at how the influencer economy has adapted.Brands aren’t buying glossy ads anymore; they’re sponsoring creators who curse, complain, and troubleshoot on camera — because that’s what people engage with.
Tech companies are literally paying engineers and writers to use their products, find bugs, and rant about it publicly. Ten years ago, that would have been brand suicide. Now it’s smart marketing.
Because somewhere deep down, people have collectively decided: we don’t trust perfect anymore.
The IT Connection: Controlled Chaos as a Feature
Maybe I’m biased, but I think IT culture was the first to figure this out.
We’ve always had a slightly unhinged relationship with failure. There’s this weird satisfaction in breaking something just to understand it.
You break a fax machine in front of the CEO? You’re fired. You break it in front of the IT director? He’s probably laughing, saying, “That thing was a piece of junk anyway. Let’s tear it apart and see what’s inside.”
That’s not recklessness — that’s curiosity with teeth.
The Build-in-Public movement is that mindset gone mainstream. It’s the same energy, just scaled up. It’s not “failure as a badge of honor” — it’s “failure as part of the process.”
And that’s what’s changing the cultural operating system.
The New On-Ramp to the Future
Here’s the big insight: The Build-in-Public crowd is becoming the on-ramp to the AI-driven future.
Right now, most people are standing on the sidelines, staring at AI, automation, and the next wave of tech with wide eyes and crossed arms, thinking, “I don’t even know where to start.” That’s normal. Every revolution looks like chaos from the outside. But the Build-in-Public creators — the tinkerers, the coders, the small teams building weird little tools on Twitter — they’re the ones lighting up the path. They’re showing the work. They’re proving that you don’t need permission or perfection to participate. You just need to start.
And that public experimentation is lowering the barrier for everyone else. It’s softening the landing into a future that used to feel intimidating.
We’ve moved from “fake it till you make it” to “break it till it works.”And that shift isn’t just happening in tech — it’s happening in culture.
The New Credibility
So yeah, this isn’t a fad. It’s a generational recalibration.
For years, we rewarded people who looked like they knew what they were doing. Now we reward the ones who show us how they figure it out.
That’s not performative transparency — it’s earned trust.
And if you zoom out, it’s not just about startups, influencers, or product launches. It’s about how we learn, how we teach, and how we lead.
Because if “fake it till you make it” was about hiding your uncertainty,then “build in public” is about turning uncertainty into momentum.
And that’s how you build the next era of innovation — not behind closed doors, but right out in the open, where everyone can see how messy it really is.
Comments