Building In Public is scary. Do it anyway.
BIP is the way.
Most companies still operate like it’s 2012: hide everything, build in silence, save it all for one glossy launch, blow a ridiculous amount of money, expect a lasting lift… then watch it all vanish in days and start anxiously waiting for the next “launch.”
It happens because company leaders take marketing inspiration from all the wrong places.
They want to be Hollywood, trying to turn product releases into blockbuster-level brand moments. But they forget how inconsistent and risky this approach is - you only get one shot!
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These leaders want to be Apple, with pixel-perfect videos and industry-wide hype. But they forget that, aside from being worth a few trillion (with a T) dollars, Apple’s business is different: they make hardware, which fundamentally requires long development cycles, intense secrecy, and announcing ‘Coming Soon’ products to accommodate gradual, physical distribution.
But that’s not how marketing for digital products works. Or at least, it’s not how it should work. The iterative nature of software development and distribution is totally different and unlocks all kinds of growth superpowers.
This is what makes Building In Public (BIP) possible. And with AI products, it’s not just possible - it’s necessary.
Quick definition: BIP is when teams share their work as they build it. Not every detail, not every internal debate, but the steady drumbeat of progress, ideas, wins, and improvements in real time.
It moves marketing out of a separate “campaigns” bucket and stitches it directly into your development cycle. The product becomes the story. The shipping cadence becomes the engagement strategy.
At Lovable, this is basically how we breathe.
We don’t just ship big releases. We ship constantly. Agents. Credit rollovers. New paid plan. Prompt suggestions. App Discovery. New dashboard. Design systems. New AI workflows. Visual editor improvements. And a dozen small touches every week that make things smoother, smarter, or more magical.
Instead of holding onto these projects like they require Top Secret clearance, we just… talk about them. As soon as they’re live and sometimes before.
This constant stream of micro-updates does something traditional marketing can’t: make the product feel alive.
You know how a Tesla gets better every couple weeks? You buy the car once, but the software keeps leveling up. You wake up to new features. More convenience. Zero extra dollars. It feels superior to any traditional car.
Micro-releases trigger the same psychology. Users signed up for version X, but they keep getting version X+. It feels like a free upgrade, and it builds loyalty without you having to ask for it. You get resurrection without boring newsletters, buzz without marketing spend, and a steady stream of reasons for people to talk about you - and root for you.
Plus, BIP is a brilliant way to build trust with your audience: They get to know you, learn about your team, learn why you’re building things, and how you think about problems. That creates a sense of loyalty and investment that is irreplaceable. Especially with how fast AI products are evolving and leapfrogging each other, establishing a sense of connection with your users is a big deal.
To be fair, there are also some legitimate challenges and concerns. BIP exposes you to:
• unsolicited feedback from people who don’t use the product
• pressure to build what commenters want instead of what your strategy needs
• competitors reverse-engineering your direction
• public commitments you may need to walk back later
But the main reason? It’s scary. BIP means giving up some degree of control.
Sharing what you’re doing as you’re doing it means there isn’t time to craft a perfect presentation. To make yourself look good. The whole point is to describe things that aren’t done yet, which often means *gasp* you might be wrong about something.
Aside from your ego taking a hit, this can be legitimately confusing to your users and public audience. Lots of updates can blur the narrative if you’re not careful. Post too often and people start wondering: What’s the real direction? Which update actually matters? Are you building a strategy or just chasing dopamine hits?
At Lovable, we’ve had moments like this. You drop three releases in a week and suddenly people start asking, “Wait, so are you a no-code app builder, an AI agent platform, or a vibe-coding studio?”
The answer is yes.
When you’re moving this fast, you won’t have the chance to carefully frame each update or consider every possible implication on your product narrative. By the time one release is done, it’s on to the next.
Which is another thing that makes BIP difficult for some leadership teams: The level of marketing polish has to come down. This isn’t optional. Apple-style keynote presentations take months of lead time. Creative scripts, shiny pre-shot demos, giant stages, meticulous editing, all presented to a big live audience… you can’t do all of that stuff when the team is fighting just to stay on the PMF treadmill. If you don’t know what will be shipping more than a few weeks out, this kind of preparation becomes impossible. So leaders need to adjust expectations for what a launch video should even look like.
But here’s the thing: Less polished videos are more effective, anyway. This style of content has already become popularized by the top content creators on YouTube and Insta and TikTok. Publishing announcements quickly with an “authentic” vibe is actually an added benefit, not a disadvantage.
It all comes back to this: At the end of the day, Building In Public is about building trust.
This is also why BIP cannot be run by your corporate account. People don’t want “the company POV.” They don’t want spin or anything that smells like BS. They want to hear from builders. At Lovable, the updates that land are the ones from Anton (our CEO), from engineers, from designers, from the people who actually made the thing. That’s what makes the story feel real instead of manufactured. It builds connection. It demonstrates transparency. It shows intent and effort.
So, how do you get started? Like all true growth, BIP is a company-wide effort, not something that can be dumped on marketing or any other single team. BIP is not a content strategy. It’s a culture-level commitment for the whole org. A way of working that turns every improvement into a part of a larger story that people actually want to talk about.
Done poorly, this approach can actually make things worse. So don’t just start firing off half-baked features that no one asked for and call it ‘BIP’ – this just creates noise, confusion, and an audience that can’t tell what your product actually is. Instead of building trust, you’ll just make everyone feel anxious.
But when you do it well, BIP gives you the best kind of distribution: organic, authentic, momentum-based. It’s marketing that emerges naturally from the product getting better.
What’s the difference? You need to maintain a tight grip on three things:
Maintain shipping velocity. If the product release speed and consistency drop, then your public discussions will just become empty hype.
Bring in the builders. Your content team can help streamline the process and keep things consistent, but they can’t fake the unique POV of people creating the product.
Anchor on user understanding. Everything else will change, so build from what your customers are actually saying.
Other than that, you’ll have to get used to not having the same degree of control over launches. Things won’t be as glossy as you might like. And yeah, that’s scary. But with the pace of AI innovation, maintaining control is impossible anyway. Going slow and steady is a guaranteed path to irrelevance. These are the fastest-moving waters of our generation, so don’t get left behind. Building In Public is a superpower for teams who are in this situation – because it builds the trust and loyalty you need, and when you’re going this fast… you don’t have time for other types of launches anyway.
 | A guest post by
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Ideas have become insanely cheap in the age of AI. Execution, even if it’s just a prototype that you can share to gather feedback on, is huge. It separates the vast majority that are wishful to the specific few who are serious. And those serious ones are the ones who gather the data needed to decide whether to keep going, or do something else.
How do you deal with: pressure to build what commenters want instead of what your strategy needs?