Building in Public — Eazybee

Prologue

Recently I came across an intriguing concept called ‘building in public’. It’s pretty self-explanatory but essentially it means you share your journey of building whatever you’re working on with your audience, be as transparent as possible and document the journey while you’re at it. You share your process, learnings, wins/losses, basically everything that happens behind closed doors.

One would think why the hell would I do this? It’s super risky, it could backfire, it might (most definitely actually) lead to a lot of criticism, and more importantly, if you’re doing the right things, someone might just copy your ideas. This is a bad idea — said everyone who heard about this.

As risky as this sounds, you definitely can’t deny that it sounds bloody interesting. They say being comfortable naked is one of the most liberating and exhilarating experiences — this feels just like that, minus actually being naked.

Honestly, I’ve spent a month thinking about the pros and cons of doing this:

PROS :

1. Documenting your journey and sharing it with the world — Behind all the glam and fluff, there is a vast amount of work that goes into making something work. That’s my thing, I have always been more interested in the ‘BTS’ rather than the glam. When you share it with the world, you’re opening yourself up to various perspectives and opinions on matters you’d rarely discuss with anyone else, and that might just help me build better. At least that’s the hope. The way these BTS stories have helped me, If my stories can even help 1 person, I’d genuinely be the happiest.
2. Accountability — It’s easy to hold someone else accountable, but when it comes to yourself, not that easy! I’ve been in 2 scenarios where

• The answers to the burning questions are more often than not fabricated or exaggerated to stay happy and calm
• You change the questions altogether to stay comfortable and avoid the heart wrenching answers.

Either way, you aren’t doing a great job of holding yourself accountable. Maybe with this, I might just be able to change that.

3. Transparency = Credibility (My opinion) — It’s okay to show the chinks in your armour. It’s okay to discuss your losses and wins, the mistakes you make and the power to overcome them. Showing your vulnerabilities, discussing your problems and learning from them is what makes us human. ‘Humanifying’ the process of building something in public could also be a great way to gain trust. This tbh is a slippery slope, I can think of a few cons too, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

4. Help — I’ve been so pleasantly surprised in the last few months with the number of people who have offered to help. Ones who I never thought in my wildest dreams would be my go-to guys. I always had this notion ‘Why would this person help me?’, but man I was so wrong. Maybe our ego has conditioned our mind to believe that only our friends and family will help us, but trust me when I say this, EVERYONE wants to help, all we have to do is ASK.

5. Feedback — More often than not, we make decisions based on our whims and fancies. These are nowhere close to being informed decisions, but solely based on our ‘gut’ — I’m definitely guilty of this, every day. While listening to your gut is the most important thing for an entrepreneur, being in the D2C space, there is no better way to fine-tune your approach than getting honest feedback from your audience.

CONS

1. Transparency misinterpreted — Being 100% transparent is a slippery slope. What agrees with me, might not agree with you. Having a difference of opinion is normal but having said that, we do tend to break down someone’s opinion or action, criticize and pass a judgement. I’m a bit nervous about this tbh, but I guess I’ll only know with time.
2. Risk of someone copying your efforts — It’s next to impossible to copy-paste an entire business. It takes a lot of trial and error to find the winning strategy. If this was a game, I know I’ll be losing a lot of lives before I get to the next level. Assuming I keep advancing the levels, I wouldn’t want to give away the strategy that helped me do that right!
3. Public criticism = Anxiety = Fear — Will people read this? What will they think of it? What if they don’t agree with me? Will a bad month affect the way people perceive me or this business? These are just the thoughts I’m going through currently and I know this list will keep populating every time I decide to put out an update.

There’s unquestionably a lot that goes into building something. Putting it out there, for the world to see, it all might sound a bit too risky, but honestly, I’m pretty excited about this. I’m more focussed on the upside of it!

So What’s next?

I’m writing our next piece on the ‘Why’ and ‘How’ of Eazybee. I’m already overthinking 100 things while working on the next one but can’t wait to share this blog first.

— Shail Madlani. Co-Founder — Eazybee

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