What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Show Your Work
Entrepreneurs often build in a bunker, waiting for the product, the pitch, or the pivot to be fully formed before letting anyone outside the founding team see it. That instinct to protect the "big reveal" quietly costs them the early customers, collaborators, and feedback that only show up when people can watch something take shape.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Share your process and work-in-progress regularly, not just the polished result
For a founder, the temptation is to treat the launch as the first thing anyone sees, rather than one moment in a longer story people could have been following.
A founder spends four months building a product in near-total secrecy, unveils it at launch, and only then learns that a core assumption about how customers would use it was wrong from the start. A few early conversations during development would have surfaced the problem months earlier.
Pick one part of the build each week — a rough prototype, a pricing experiment, an early customer conversation — and post a short, honest update about what you tried and what you're still unsure of.
Be generous with what you're learning — teach and share it, not just the finished outcome
The lessons a founder picks up while building — what didn't work, what surprised them, what they'd do differently — are useful to other people long before the company has "made it."
A founder solves a thorny operational problem, quietly moves on, and never mentions how they solved it. Months later they watch a peer struggle through the exact same problem from scratch.
After solving a hard problem, write a few paragraphs on how you approached it and share them with a peer group or a small mailing list, even if the outcome isn't a success story yet.
Share thoughtfully, adding real value rather than promoting yourself relentlessly
Founders are often told to "build in public," but a stream of pure self-promotion trains an audience to tune out rather than lean in.
A founder posts daily updates that are really just thinly disguised pitches — "huge milestone," "biggest month yet" — with no substance about how the work actually got done. Engagement quietly dries up.
Before sharing an update, ask whether it teaches, shows process, or gives context a reader could actually use — and cut anything that's pure announcement.
Handle criticism and stay consistent over the long haul
Founders who share their process will eventually hear that an idea is weak, a pivot looks desperate, or a decision seems naive — and the ones who last treat that as data to sort through rather than a verdict to defend against. Consistency matters more than any single update: a founder who shares roughly and honestly for years builds more trust than one who occasionally posts something dazzling. Over time, the willingness to keep showing the work, even through failed experiments and slow quarters, becomes part of what makes people want to work with a company at all.
Sharing generously can feel at odds with protecting a competitive edge, especially early on. In practice, the specific tactic rarely matters as much as the execution and relationships built by sharing it — so default to openness about process and reasoning, and reserve genuine secrecy for the narrow handful of details that would actually cost you something if copied.
Name one thing, honestly
What is one piece of your current build that you're keeping private out of habit, not because sharing it would actually cost you anything?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Before sharing an update, ask whether it teaches, shows process, or gives context a reader could actually use — and cut anything that's pure announcement.