Product Validation

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.