Layla Carter

For 3 months I shared weekly progress updates publicly. Numbers, learnings, screenshots, full transparency. Then I noticed something: I was choosing what to build based on what would look good in the update not what users needed. "Impressive" features got priority over "useful" ones and a dashboard screenshot performed better than a boring fix that actually mattered.

I stopped posting metrics publicly after that. The transparency didn't keep me honest it made me perform.

So for those who build in public: have you caught yourself optimizing for the audience instead of the user? And the harder question: if you removed the audience tomorrow would you still build the same things?

I want to separate the mythology from the data here, because I keep hearing two contradictory things.

Version A: PH launches are a vanity metric now the upvotes don't convert, the badge is a participation trophy, and the real value is the backlink.

Version B: people still get their first 100 paying customers from a single good launch.

My situation: no audience, no list, product is B2B and costs $29/month. A launch would be my first real distribution moment. I'm trying to decide whether to spend six weeks building an audience first, or launch now and use PH as the audience-building event itself.