title: "Building in Public: Transforming Failures into Growth Stories" date: 2026-01-12 author: David Sanker
There's a particular kind of loneliness that comes with keeping your failures private.
You polish the LinkedIn post. You lead with the win. You quietly retire the ideas that didn't work, the projects that stalled, the pivots that humbled you. And somewhere in all that curation, you lose the most useful parts of your story — the parts other people actually need to hear.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Not in the abstract, but in the specific way you think about something when you've lived it from a few different angles. I've filed briefs in courtrooms and shipped broken code at 2am. I've watched clients navigate business decisions with the same knot in their stomach I recognize from my own startup failures. The through-line, every time, isn't the victory. It's what happened right before it.
TL;DR
- Building in public fosters transparency and accountability.
- Showcasing failures alongside successes provides valuable learning.
- Engaging with a community offers feedback and strengthens connections.
Key Facts
- Building in public introduces transparency and accountability.
- Public declarations encourage follow-through and enhance motivation.
- Ali Abdaal's transparency builds trust through candid discussions about failure and iteration.
- Buffer shares financial metrics openly, using both positive and negative indicators as learning tools.
- Airbnb's early struggles, shared honestly, became a motivational narrative for a generation of founders.
Why Show the Mess?
There's a version of professional storytelling that goes: struggle, struggle, breakthrough, lesson learned. Packaged cleanly. Presented after the fact, when the outcome is already known.
That's not building in public. That's retrospective mythology.
Building in public means sharing while you're still in it — before you know how it ends. It means posting the revenue number when it's embarrassing, describing the feature that nobody used, admitting you misread the market. It's uncomfortable in a way that feels almost counterintuitive, because we're conditioned to perform confidence.
But here's what I've noticed, both in my own work and in coaching others through theirs: the people who share the process — not just the outcome — build something the curators never quite achieve. They build trust. Not the performed kind. The durable kind.
The Accountability You Didn't Know You Needed
When I started talking openly about the intersections of my own work — law, code, coaching, the occasional spectacular misjudgment — something shifted. Not just in how others responded, but in how I operated.
Public commitment changes behavior. Not because of external pressure exactly, but because articulating something out loud forces a kind of clarity that private intention doesn't. You have to know what you think before you can say it to someone else.
Pieter Levels built Nomad List and Remote OK in public, logging progress in real time, including the parts that weren't working. That transparency didn't undermine his credibility — it became his credibility. The audience wasn't just watching a product get built; they were watching someone think through hard problems honestly.
That's a different relationship than the one created by polished case studies.
Ali Abdaal has done something similar on YouTube. He talks openly about videos that underperformed, creative decisions he'd revisit, the gap between what he thought would work and what actually did. His audience trusts him not despite that candor, but because of it. He's dismantled the polished veneer of entrepreneurship and replaced it with something more useful: a real person figuring things out.
What Failure Actually Teaches
I'm cautious about the phrase "failure is your greatest teacher" because it's been used so often it's gone soft. But the underlying idea holds, if you're willing to be specific about it.
The tech startup Buffer has, for years, published its revenue, equity structure, and strategic struggles in public transparency reports. Not to perform humility, but to actually examine what the numbers mean. The discipline of writing it down — of saying here's what we expected, here's what happened, here's what we think explains the gap — creates a quality of analysis that private post-mortems often don't reach. There's something about the audience, even an imagined one, that sharpens the thinking.
Airbnb is a more dramatic example. Before they became the company everyone knows, Chesky, Gebbia, and Blecharczyk were nearly broke, funding operations by selling novelty cereal boxes. They talked about those early struggles. The story became formative — not just for Airbnb's culture, but for how the broader startup community thinks about persistence through ugly early chapters.
The lesson wasn't we struggled and then we succeeded. The lesson was: this is what it actually looks like, the part between having the idea and having the outcome, and it looks like this.
The Community You Build by Being Real
Building in public is also, almost accidentally, an act of invitation.
When you share the process, you're not just broadcasting — you're opening a door. Communities like Indie Hackers exist because founders and developers want to think alongside people who are actually in it, not just people who've already solved it. The feedback loop that forms when you share ongoing work is qualitatively different from the feedback you get on a finished product.
Some of the most generative conversations I've had — about legal strategy, about product decisions, about the strange specific challenge of being both a lawyer and an engineer in the same professional life — started because I said something honest about what I was working through, not something confident about what I'd already figured out.
Open channels invite unexpected collaboration. Projects go in directions you didn't anticipate, because someone with a different vantage point sees something you missed. That's not a risk of building in public — it's one of the better arguments for it.
The Bigger Picture
Mozilla has operated on this principle since its founding. Open-source code, visible to anyone who wants to examine or improve it, became the foundation for Firefox and the broader philosophy that transparency accelerates rather than undermines development. The insight is that collective intelligence, distributed across many perspectives, produces better outcomes than a single team working behind closed doors.
That principle scales beyond software. It applies to businesses, to careers, to the coaching relationships I find most meaningful. When people share what they're actually working through — not a curated version of it — something useful circulates that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Practical Takeaways
- Leverage transparency: Use public platforms to share insights from both success and failure to build trust and genuine engagement.
- Cultivate a growth mindset: Treat setbacks as raw material for better thinking, not evidence of inadequacy.
- Engage with your community: Treat your audience as collaborators, not consumers of a finished narrative.
- Normalize openness: Encourage a culture of honest sharing within your industry — it raises the floor for everyone.
FAQ
Q: How can sharing both successes and failures help in professional growth? A: Sharing both successes and failures fosters a growth mindset and encourages reflective learning. This practice allows individuals to view setbacks as learning opportunities, promoting personal and professional development. Transparency can empower creators by teaching resilience and adaptability in transforming challenges into growth opportunities.
Q: Why is transparency important for entrepreneurs in the digital age? A: Transparency builds trust and credibility in entrepreneurial circles, as it allows audiences to witness authentic journeys. This openness enhances connections with followers, encourages accountability, and invites candid dialogues about real-life challenges, which contribute to community building and lasting relationships with stakeholders.
Q: What role does community feedback play in building in public? A: Community feedback creates a dynamic feedback loop that enhances the creative process. It allows creators to harness collective wisdom, enabling better decision-making and innovation. Engaging with an interactive community provides support, critique, and constructive input essential for refining ideas and strengthening projects.
The stories worth telling aren't the ones where everything went right. They're the ones where something went wrong and you had to figure out what to do next — and then you told someone about it honestly, while it was still raw enough to be useful.
I practice law at Hucke & Sanker. I build AI through Lawkraft. I write here to make sense of why someone would choose to do both, and what that strange combination might offer to people navigating their own version of the same question.
What's the part of your story you've been keeping private that might actually be the most useful thing you could share?
AI Summary
Key facts: - Transparency in entrepreneurship is crucial for trust and accountability. - Sharing both successes and failures facilitates personal growth and learning. - Community engagement offers valuable feedback and support networks.
Related topics: growth mindset, community building, entrepreneurial strategy, startup challenges, digital transparency, trust-building, open innovation, social accountability