There is a particular kind of advice that circulates in WordPress and SaaS product circles. If you follow certain people on X (and you probably do if you’re reading this) we are sure you’ve heard it, or at least some of it.
“Build in public”
“Share your journey”
“Share your struggles”
“People buy from people”
“Distribution is everything”
The implication is persistent: if you aren’t publicly narrating your work, tweeting your thoughts, sharing ideas, posting graphs of your monthly recurring revenue — then you are leaving growth on the table.
We’ve heard it all over X, in podcasts, in cohorts, in newsletters. Recently makers have said that with AI changing everything, building in public isn’t optional anymore. It’s what you need to do.
Well, it’s certainly an angle. But we really disagree on it being the only angle — and we’re tired of being told it is. If you’re a maker or a founder, you may, like us, think (or even know!) that there are other ways to run a business.
This isn’t a post about why building in public is wrong. For some people, it works. For some businesses, it works. If it energises you, do it.
But we’ve been around for a while, and we’ve made a deliberate choice not to participate.
Here’s why.
The Personality-Led Default
The loudest model in the WordPress ecosystem right now is personality-led.
Founders tweet. They share metrics. They document struggles. They post hot takes. Attention is currency, and attention must mean profit.
After that, it’s the advocates. The devrels. The sponsors. Attention for them is not only currency, but their wages. They are more than likely expected to tweet. I’m sure they enjoy it, it’s good community relations, but a darn lot of them sure do seem to stop participating as soon as they move jobs.
But anyway – somewhere along the way, “this works for some” became “this is required.”
It isn’t.
A business can be personality-led, community-led, audience-led, or product-led. These are strategic choices, not moral defaults.
These are strategic choices, not moral defaults.
There are millions of successful companies where you don’t know the founder’s name. But in WordPress, plugins, and SaaS culture — especially the #BuildInPublic corner of X — it often feels like you must become the brand.
That’s culture, not law.
Cultures can be wrong. Trends can just be, erm, trends.
And very small corners of X – as we have seen time and time again – do not represent the real world, or a vast majority of normal folks.
The Cost of Visibility
Here’s something that rarely gets said in these conversations: visibility has a cost.
And some of us have already paid it.
The founders of YMMV have had plenty of experience of running things in public — events, communities, groups, forums, software.
It has taught us that attention is not a neutral resource.
It has led to real outcomes.
But also abuse, personal attacks, hate campaigns, anxiety, arguing with strangers, dread, fear, never switching off and so much more.
Not only that, but as we watched the world discover social media, we started worrying about old posts. Could yesterday’s jovial, joking, or off-the-cuff remark be tomorrow’s headline and destroy literally everything we’ve built? It seems everyday there’s something being taken out of context and used against someone. Why supply the ammo?
After years of being “public” we realised social media wasn’t actually getting us anything meaningful.
So we stopped. We opted out.
Nothing about our businesses changed.
But life measurably improved.
So when someone says “build in public,” we hear: invite scrutiny, relive old dynamics, give strangers access to your inner working life, trade peace for reach.
So when someone says “build in public,” we hear: invite scrutiny, relive old dynamics, give strangers access to your inner working life, trade peace for reach.
That doesn’t sound like a sound business strategy to us. That sounds like a nightmare.
The best part about social media is that anyone can do it. The worst part about social media is that anyone can do it.
It lowers distribution costs. It also lowers context. It invites commentary you didn’t ask for. Feedback when you asked for none. Opinion from everyone and anyone. Wanted or not. 24/7, always a tap away.
Celebrities seem to have to embrace it, but they are compensated handsomely for it.
We aren’t going to do that for a $29 plugin.
If tweeting more sells more plugins, but costs us our peace, then we don’t want the extra sales.
Survivorship Bias Is Doing a Lot of Heavy Lifting
People say “building in public” works.
We don’t see it working for many.
For every visible founder thread that blows up, there are hundreds of quiet attempts that burn time, fragment attention, attract the wrong audience, and never compound.
The people promoting building in public are — by definition — the survivors. We don’t think that’s cynicism. That’s what survivorship bias literally means.
What often gets conflated: visibility with value. Narration with traction. Engagement with demand. Exposure with durability.
What often gets conflated: visibility with value. Narration with traction. Engagement with demand. Exposure with durability.
Those are not the same things.
Software Does Not Improve Because It Is Announced
Our plugins are evaluated on stability, clarity, extensibility, and restraint. They are made from professional experience, fixing real problems, tested with Enterprise clients, improved and expanded upon over time.
We’ve sold thousands of copies. But none of the ideas or features we’ve done have ever come about because we post a thread about them.
Can public feedback help shape a product? Absolutely.
If you’re still searching for product-market fit, building what other people want, iterating based on public response, chasing startup cash — that model makes sense. Sometimes.
But that’s a specific strategy for a specific stage of a specific kind of business. It’s not a universal law. It’s not for everybody.
We build plugins we believe should exist.
We build plugins we believe should exist. We believe a detailed changelog builds more long-term trust than a viral tweet. Clear documentation reduces more support friction than a personal origin story. Explicit non-goals prevent more criticism than public vulnerability ever will.
That work compounds quietly, and we are comfortable with quiet.
AI Does Not Change This
AI is changing the game. AI accelerates execution. Competition is increasing. Execution is cheap. Distribution is the only moat!
So should every founder now become a broadcaster?
If execution is cheap (which any competent developer knows is still not that cheap to do properly), what becomes genuinely defensible isn’t the person narrating.
It’s problem selection. Taste. Maintenance. Restraint. Trust.
These are demonstrated over time.
They are not amplified by performance.
You cannot tweet your way into being the kind of developer people depend on for years.
There Is a Choice
Every business decides how much of itself to expose. Some founders are energised by visibility. Some teams thrive on community discourse. Good for them.
But if a strategy requires a personality you don’t have, recreates conditions you deliberately walked away from, and makes you anxious before it makes you money — that is not a growth opportunity. That is a mismatch. Not every effective strategy has to be tolerable to the people executing it.
You can build loud. You can build personality-first. You can build audience-first. Or you can build product-first.
Quiet is not the same as invisible.
Our Work Is Visible Where It Matters
Not building in public does not mean building in secret. Our work is visible in the repository, in the documentation, in the changelog, in the marketplace, and in the sites that depend on it.
We prefer to invest in clear plugin pages, explicit purpose statements, extensible architecture, careful versioning, and durable documentation. That is our distribution model. It doesn’t make for great X content, and we’re fine with that.
We are not anti-visibility. We are not telling anyone else what to do.
But building in public is a strategy — not a moral obligation.
And the next time someone tells a quiet, profitable, well-run product business that they need to be posting more, they should probably ask themselves whose problem they’re actually solving.
At YMMV, we build software we believe should exist. We make it extensible. We maintain it carefully. And we let the work speak.
At YMMV, we build software we believe should exist. We make it extensible. We maintain it carefully. And we let the work speak.
Choosing the path that fits your temperament is not weakness. It’s design.