I almost didn’t deploy it. The tool worked, mostly. There was a button I wasn’t sure about and a corner of the layout that looked off on small screens. My whole body wanted to wait. Polish it first. Don’t let anyone see it like this.
I shipped it anyway. And here’s the thing nobody told me when I was younger and broke and certain everyone else had it figured out: nobody was looking that hard.
You think people are studying your rough edges. They’re not. They’re busy. They’re scrolling. They glance, they nod, they move on. The audience you’re terrified of is mostly imaginary. The version of them in your head is meaner and more attentive than any real person has ever been. I spent years building for that imaginary crowd. They never showed up. Real people did, and real people are generous.
What “in public” actually means
It’s not a brand strategy. It’s not a LinkedIn aesthetic. For me it means two boring things. One: I ship the version that works today, not the version I’m dreaming about. Two: I write down what I found.
That’s it. The thing that does real work, out in the open, plus a note about what happened. Not “here’s my polished launch.” More like “here’s the rough draft, here’s where it broke, here’s what I learned fixing it.” The unfinished thing doing actual work teaches you more in a week than the perfect thing teaches you in a year, because the perfect thing never leaves the house. It can’t lose. It also can’t win.
The week it just worked, and the week it didn’t
One week I pushed something live I genuinely wasn’t sure about. I braced for the message that said “this is broken, what were you thinking.” It never came. People used it. A couple of them told me it was exactly what they needed. I had been one click away from never finding that out.
Another week I shipped something that did not work. It was small but it was wrong, and a real person hit it and told me. My first feeling was the old shame, the one that says see, you weren’t ready. Then I fixed it in twenty minutes and the day moved on. That was the whole consequence. Nobody remembered by Thursday. The disaster I’d spent years avoiding turned out to be a Tuesday afternoon with a quick patch.
Both weeks taught me the same thing. The downside you’re protecting against is much smaller than the upside you’re hiding from.
The portfolio is the product and the product is the portfolio
I used to keep these separate in my head. The work over here. The proof I could do the work over there. But when you build in public they stop being two things. The tool is the proof. The record of what I’ve actually shipped is the resume. People don’t want to read about what you can do. They want to see the thing breathing.
This took the pressure off in a way I didn’t expect. I’m not performing competence anymore. I’m just doing the work where people can see it, and the doing is the evidence. If you’re trying to break in — into editing, into video, into making anything — this is the cheat code nobody hands you. You don’t need permission to look like a professional. You need to ship one real thing and tell the truth about it. Then another. That stack is the credential. I write more about that on the about page, but the short version is: I stopped waiting to be ready and started keeping receipts.
Start before you’re ready
I don’t say this as a slogan, even though it ended up being one. I say it because it’s the only thing that has ever worked for me. Every single thing I’m proud of started before I felt ready. Every single thing I waited on, I’m still waiting on. There’s no perfect version coming. There’s the rough one you ship today and the better one you ship next week because you shipped the rough one.
If you’re reading this and you feel behind, like everyone cracked a code you missed, I want you to hear this from someone who felt that exact way for too long. They didn’t crack anything. They just kept showing their work while it was still ugly. That’s the secret. There isn’t a second one.
So make the thing. Put it where people can see it. Write down what happened. Then do it again tomorrow. That’s the whole company. That’s the whole life, honestly. You’re more ready than you think, and the cost of finding out is one deploy.