This week brought an unexpected revival of something I'd set aside two years ago. Not because it failed, but because I couldn't quite make it work in the context I was operating in. Now, with actual software to validate and a clear audience to serve, building in public suddenly makes perfect sense again.
Lost
When I started freelancing in 2023, I was fired up about building in public. The idea was simple: keep a transparent log of progress, share learnings openly, and let audience response guide what to build next. It felt like the perfect marriage of authenticity and market validation.
But somewhere along the way, it morphed into something else. The newsletter became too personal. A journal, really. Which has value, but it wasn't creating the feedback loops I'd envisioned. I wasn't growing an audience around a product or service. I was just processing out loud.
Without traction, the practice faded. Not consciously, but gradually. I kept writing, but the "building in public" spirit got lost. That deliberate, audience-engaged development process disappeared.
The lesson? Building in public only works when you're building something specific that people can respond to. Personal reflection is valuable, but it's not the same thing.
Found
Last week I listened to a podcast with the founder of Beehiiv. Something he said stopped me cold. He described spending as much time talking to people online about what they needed as he spent actually building features. Two parallel tracks running simultaneously: development and conversation.
He'd ask newsletter creators what functionalities they were missing. What frustrated them about current tools. What they wished existed. Then he'd build those things and announce them in ways that made people care.
It wasn't just marketing. It was validation. Every feature launch was a test: does anyone actually want this?
That reframed everything for me. Because now, with Askara, we have something concrete to validate. We're not journaling into the void anymore. We have software. We have a clear target audience: SMEs under NIS2 regulations. And most importantly, we have our first launching customer whose project we can document publicly.
The timing couldn't be better. Our lead engineer just demoed our FAIR-based risk quantification calculator, the first feature that's actually demo-able. It quantifies cyber risks in Euro terms, so management teams can make business-sensible trade-offs on security investments.
Here's what made it click: this isn't just a feature. It's a conversation starter. A tool that SMEs wrestling with compliance could actually use right now, even in its early form. A gadget worth trying.
There's already someone creating content on LinkedIn about FAIR risk quantification who I plan to reach out to. From what they're sharing, they need exactly this kind of software. That's validation before we've even launched.
That's when the parallel tracks became real for me. We're building this for our launching customer. Why not document the journey? Share the challenges. Show the aha moments. Let the target audience see themselves in the story.
Applied
So here's the commitment: we're going to build this feature, and everything that follows, in public.
We'll document our work with the launching customer, anonymised naturally. The technical challenges of mapping FAIR methodology to AI automation. The decisions we make about what to build next. The features we choose not to build, even when people ask, because they don't serve the vision.
LinkedIn will be our primary channel. Not because it's trendy, but because that's where our audience actually is. CISOs, compliance officers, SME directors are all there, wrestling with the same problems we're solving.
The risk calculator is just the start. It's the core of an AI-first management system where everything: controls, incidents, devices, analysis relates back to risk. But we're not going to overwhelm people with complexity. It needs to be accessible for SMEs just starting out with this.
That's the balance: build what people need, but stay true to the vision of making compliance less soul-crushing and more intelligent.
Looking back, I'm grateful the original building-in-public attempt didn't fully take off. I wasn't ready. The context wasn't right. I needed to build more, learn more, find the right team and the right problem to solve.
Now I have all of that. And the practice of weekly reflection, even when it was "just" a personal journal, kept me sharp. It created the discipline I needed to articulate what we're building and why it matters.
This time, the journal becomes the product story. The personal insight feeds the public build. And the audience response shapes what we create next.
That's what building in public actually means.
Let's see where it takes us.
Take care,
Ben