Building in Public When You're Still Figuring It Out
Ever since I started putting things out there, I have asked myself the same question. Who is this for? The honest answer is I don't really know yet. And that is fine.
When you look at people who build in public, it usually looks like they already have an audience. They tweet and people reply. They post and people clap. It looks like a conversation already in progress.
What nobody shows is the beginning. The posts with zero comments. The first three readers. The quiet months where you are not sure if anyone even read what you wrote.
I am in that part right now.
My Medium has three posts about cancer cell modeling and semi tensor products and the math behind controlling biological systems. My Substack has one post about insecurity and a hot shower and the kid version of myself who thought he could beat anything.
These are not viral topics. I did not expect them to be. But here is what I found. Writing the post is the point. Not the audience. Not the engagement. The act of forcing yourself to articulate something clearly enough that a stranger could read it.
When I wrote about the 17,000 dimensional elephant on Medium, I was not trying to teach anyone Boolean network modeling. I was trying to understand why I made the choices I made in the research. The filtering pipeline. The PCA without normalization. The decision to scrap Boolean networks for STP. Writing it down forced me to have opinions about my own work.
Same with the Substack post. I did not write about insecurity because I had some grand insight to share. I wrote it because I had a thought in the shower and I wanted to see if I could hold onto it long enough to put words around it.
That is what building in public is when you do not have an audience yet. It is just building in public into the void. And the void does not talk back, but that is okay, because the person who needed to hear it was you six months from now, when you have forgotten why a certain idea mattered.
Here is what I am learning.
The writing compounds. Not in an audience sense, maybe that comes and maybe it does not. But in a clarity sense. Each post makes the next one better. Each argument you commit to paper becomes something you can build on or disagree with later. It becomes a record of your thinking, and that is surprisingly valuable when you are working on something complex for months at a time.
My Medium posts are essentially an annotated version of my research process. If I ever publish the STP Diff paper for real, I will have three blog posts that explain the motivation, the math, and the engineering struggles in plain language. That is more useful than I realized when I started writing them. And this Substack, this one you are reading right now, is where I get to be the person behind the research. Not just Yaseen Khalil the bioinformatics engineer. But the guy who asks himself why he feels inadequate and tries to answer honestly.
Neither of these feels like content to me. They feel like thinking out loud. And I think that is the right way to do it when you are still figuring things out.
So if you are on the fence about writing in public or building in public or just sharing something you made, do it before you have an audience. Do it before you feel ready. Do it because the act of putting something out there changes how you think about it.
The audience might come later. Or it might not. But the clarity you get from writing it down is yours either way.
- Yaseen