(2025-12-05) Verna Building In Public Is Scary Do It Anyway

Elena Verna: Building In Public is scary. Do it anyway. Most companies still operate like it’s 2012: hide everything, build in silence, save it all for one glossy launch.

It happens because company leaders take marketing inspiration from all the wrong places.

they forget how inconsistent and risky this approach is - you only get one shot!

These leaders want to be Apple, with pixel-perfect videos and industry-wide hype. But they forget that (You Are Not Steve Jobs)

*The iterative nature of software development and distribution is totally different and unlocks all kinds of growth superpowers.

This is what makes Building In Public (BIP) possible. And with AI products, it’s not just possible - it’s necessary.*

BIP is when teams share their work as they build it. Not every detail, not every internal debate, but the steady drumbeat of progress, ideas, wins, and improvements in real time.

The product becomes the story. The shipping cadence becomes the engagement strategy.

At Lovable, this is basically how we breathe.

We don’t just ship big releases. We ship constantly. Agents. Credit rollovers. New paid plan. Prompt suggestions. App Discovery. New dashboard. Design systems. New AI workflows. Visual editor improvements. And a dozen small touches every week that make things smoother, smarter, or more magical.

Instead of holding onto these projects like they require Top Secret clearance, we just… talk about them. As soon as they’re live and sometimes before.

This constant stream of micro-updates does something traditional marketing can’t: make the product feel alive.

Users signed up for version X, but they keep getting version X+. It feels like a free upgrade, and it builds loyalty without you having to ask for it.

Plus, BIP is a brilliant way to build trust with your audience: They get to know you, learn about your team, learn why you’re building things

To be fair, there are also some legitimate challenges and concerns. BIP exposes you to:

• unsolicited feedback from people who don’t use the product
• pressure to build what commenters want instead of what your strategy needs

But the main reason? It’s scary. BIP means giving up some degree of control.

The whole point is to describe things that aren’t done yet, which often means gasp you might be wrong about something.

Aside from your ego taking a hit, this can be legitimately confusing to your users and public audience. Lots of updates can blur the narrative if you’re not careful. Post too often and people start wondering: What’s the real direction? Which update actually matters? Are you building a strategy or just chasing dopamine hits?

At Lovable, we’ve had moments like this. You drop three releases in a week and suddenly people start asking, “Wait, so are you a no-code app builder, an AI agent platform, or a vibe-coding studio?”
The answer is yes.

When you’re moving this fast, you won’t have the chance to carefully frame each update or consider every possible implication on your product narrative.

Which is another thing that makes BIP difficult for some leadership teams: The level of marketing polish has to come down. This isn’t optional.

But here’s the thing: Less polished videos are more effective, anyway.

It all comes back to this: At the end of the day, Building In Public is about building trust.

the updates that land are the ones from Anton (our CEO), from engineers, from designers, from the people who actually made the thing.

Like all true growth, BIP is a company-wide effort, not something that can be dumped on marketing or any other single team. BIP is not a content strategy. It’s a culture-level commitment for the whole org.

But when you do it well, BIP gives you the best kind of distribution: organic, authentic, momentum-based. It’s marketing that emerges naturally from the product getting better.

You need to maintain a tight grip on three things:

• Maintain shipping velocity.
• Bring in the builders.
• Anchor on user understanding. Everything else will change, so build from what your customers are actually saying.