Build in public: the distribution strategy hiding in plain sight

There is a documentary filmmaker I follow who does something most directors would consider reckless. She posts her dailies online. Raw footage. Ungraded colour. Scenes with temporary audio and visible boom mics. Her audience watches the film being assembled week by week, and by the time the finished version screens at a festival, hundreds of people already feel like it is partly theirs. They show up because they watched it being made. They share it because they feel invested in its success. She did not market the film. She made the making visible.

I have been thinking about that filmmaker, because what she figured out about distribution is exactly what the smartest founders are figuring out right now. But it is the opposite of what most of us were trained to do.

The stealth tax

For years, I operated inside organisations where secrecy was the default posture. At Boeing, we could not discuss what we were working on outside the building. At Adobe, product roadmaps were guarded with the seriousness of state secrets. Confidentiality was not just policy. It was culture. You did not share half-finished work. You did not discuss problems publicly. You polished, you packaged, you revealed, and you hoped the market noticed.

When I left that world and moved to Wayanad, I carried that instinct with me like luggage I did not know I was holding. My first months of working independently were spent building quietly. Writing ideas in private notebooks. Sketching frameworks nobody saw. I was paying the stealth tax without realising it had a name.

The stealth tax is the compound cost of building in private. Every month you spend in silence is a month where nobody learns your name, nobody associates you with the problem you are solving, nobody develops the kind of trust that turns a stranger into a customer. But the tax is invisible because you never see the opportunities that did not arrive. You only see the silence after you launch.

But here is what changed things for me. I started writing on LinkedIn. Not polished thought leadership with stock photos and motivational closing lines. Just honest observations about product thinking, design decisions, the things I was getting wrong, the things I was reconsidering. The early posts were rough. Some were probably embarrassing. I kept going.

Within a few months, something shifted. People I had never met started reaching out with specific questions. Not generic compliments, which is what social media usually produces. Specific questions about product strategy, team structure, design tradeoffs. A few wanted to hire me for consulting. Others wanted introductions. The best time to build your audience is before you have anything to sell them. I did not have a product. I did not have a service page. But I had built something more valuable than either: a group of people who already trusted my thinking.

Eight months of silence, then nothing

A founder I was mentoring last year learned this lesson the expensive way. He spent eight months building a SaaS tool for independent insurance brokers. The product was genuinely good. Clean interface, thoughtful workflow, a pricing model that made sense for small firms. He wanted to get it right before showing it to anyone. He wanted the launch to speak for itself.

He launched in February. Put up a landing page. Wrote one LinkedIn post. Sent a dozen emails to contacts.

Thirty-seven visitors in the first week. One sign-up. Zero paying customers.

Not slow traction. Silence. The internet responded with its most brutal verdict: indifference.

Stealth mode is not a strategy. It is a comfort zone with a business plan attached.

But here is where the story gets interesting. Instead of giving up, he tried something different with version two. He started posting about the rebuild on X. Weekly updates. Screenshots of the new dashboard. Honest posts about what went wrong with v1 and what he was changing. He shared a thread about a customer conversation that completely altered his pricing model. He posted a video of himself staring at a Figma file at midnight, trying to solve a particularly stubborn onboarding problem.

By the time v2 was ready to launch, four months later, he had eleven hundred followers who had watched the entire journey. The launch post got shared by people he had never spoken to. His first fifty paying customers came from that audience. Same founder. Same market. Same category of product. But this time, the audience existed before the product did. The audience-first advantage turned a silent launch into a noisy one without spending a single rupee on advertising.

Why this works (and why it feels wrong)

The audience-first advantage works because it reverses the sequence most founders assume is fixed. The default sequence is: build the product, then find customers, then earn trust. The reversed sequence is: earn trust, then build the product, then convert people who already trust you into customers. The second sequence is faster, cheaper, and structurally more reliable.

But it requires something that corporate culture trains out of people. It requires sharing before you are ready. Posting the screenshot with the misaligned padding. Describing the feature you cut and why. Admitting publicly that your first assumption was wrong. Every instinct from a decade of working inside large organisations told me this was unprofessional. It turns out it is the most professional thing a founder can do, because it treats the audience as collaborators rather than targets.

But the stealth tax is not just about missing distribution. It is about missing feedback. When you build in silence, every assumption remains untested until launch day. When you build in public, your assumptions get challenged weekly by the people who will eventually decide whether to pay for what you are making. The founders who share their process are not being generous with information. They are being efficient with risk.

But I want to be precise about what building in public is not. It is not performing confidence you do not feel. It is not manufacturing excitement about features nobody has asked for. It is not a content calendar with motivational quotes on branded templates. It is the disciplined practice of making the work visible to the people who might care about the outcome. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The visibility compound

There is a compounding dynamic here that most founders underestimate. Every post, every update, every honest reflection creates a layer of credibility that cannot be replicated retroactively. You cannot fake six months of consistent sharing. You cannot backdate the trust that accumulates when an audience watches you struggle with a problem and then solve it. The compound interest of visibility is real, and it only accrues to founders who start early.

But starting is the hard part. Not because the tactics are complicated. They are not. The hard part is overcoming the instinct that sharing unfinished work is a sign of weakness. That instinct is a leftover from a corporate world where polish was professionalism and rough edges meant you were not ready.

The documentary filmmaker I mentioned at the beginning does not hide in the edit suite until the film is perfect. She shares the dailies. The footage is rough. The colour is wrong. But her audience does not care about polish. They care about the process. They care about watching something come into being. And by the time the final cut is ready, they have already decided to show up.

The founders who understand this are not louder than everyone else. They are simply visible earlier. But visibility is not about volume. It is about consistency. And consistency, compounded over months, is the quietest distribution strategy most founders will ever find.