Do you know who is watching?

It has been about 150 days since I started my running journey. From the beginning, I would share both my wins and defeats on social media. Unfortunately, I don't have a large following or many connections and did not engage in my posts or stories. Despite a lack of response, I continued to share mostly to keep myself accountable.

A few months into my journey, a friend reached out to me. I hadn't heard from them in a while, so it was good to spend time catching up. They mentioned earlier that week they had laced up a pair of shoes and got on the treadmill for the first time in years. They were inspired to take action after seeing my continued running story posts.

Through this event, I learned while you may not always see a lot of engagement, you never know who is watching.

This experience has me thinking more about the concept of building in public. I have always kept my ideas guarded and embarrassed by my mistakes in building a product. However, the more I see how sharing my personal life has led to me helping others, the more I believe in building in public.

There are many benefits to sharing your work publicly, one of the most important being accountability. Sometimes we work on our products and don't have anyone holding us accountable. As a result, it can be easy to find ourselves losing focus and slipping away from why we started in the first place.

Building in public has evolved since I first wrote this. In 2026, it is not just about sharing your journey on social media. It is about shipping in the open. Pushing commits publicly. Writing about your architecture decisions. Letting people watch you build with AI in real time. The surface area for visibility has exploded.

Here is what I have learned since then. The silent audience is not just watching. They are evaluating. Potential clients, future employers, collaborators. They are making decisions about you based on what you share. Every post is a data point. Every project update is a proof of competence. You are building a track record whether you realize it or not.

I run an AI executive assistant now. An agent named Kai that helps me manage my entire CTO workflow. I built it in public. I shared the wins and the failures. That transparency led to conversations I never expected. People reached out not because of a polished pitch, but because they watched the messy process of building something real.

So keep showing up. The algorithm does not matter as much as consistency. Your silent audience is bigger than your analytics suggest. And in an era where everyone is consuming AI-generated content, authentic human stories cut through the noise like nothing else.

Related: Product Validation and The Stories We Tell.