The Problem With Building in Silence

Why I Started Building in Public After 10 Years of Growing in Silence

The Context

Before I became a builder of AI systems and SaaS tools in the indie hacking space, I never truly understood the importance of building and sharing in public. For almost 10 years, while writing research papers and delivering data analytics solutions to individuals, businesses, and institutions, my routine was almost always the same:

• Work behind closed doors, wrestling with difficult problems late into the night — sometimes waking up at 3 a.m. to finish tasks I couldn’t solve the previous day.
• Work out by 6 a.m. while listening to street jams — a way of disconnecting from work and, ironically, recharging for the tasks ahead.
• Begin the real workday at 9 a.m., continuing from where I stopped while racing against deadlines
• Deliver pending solutions to clients or attend long strategy and consultation sessions.
• Wrap up one sprint, move on to the next problem, and repeat the cycle all over again

This was my normal routine as a researcher and data analyst. And through all of this, I shared almost nothing publicly. I got paid for my work — something I remain deeply grateful for — but the highs, lows, lessons, failures, and breakthroughs stayed private. That is simply the nature of research writing and analytical consulting. Client privacy is non-negotiable. Silent execution pays the bills. You accept the task, wrestle with uncertainty through long nights, deliver the solution, and move on. The “ta-da” moment, if it exists at all, is usually invisible to everyone except you and the client.

Every profession has its own rules, and for years, those were the rules I operated under...and still operating with to some extent.

The Change

That mindset of silent execution followed me into the indie hacking space. Around 2021, after spending much of the 2019/2020 pandemic period expanding beyond research and data analytics into software engineering, I started building more technical systems independently. I taught myself Python more deeply, explored scalable system architecture, and began experimenting with real software products. But even then, I still shared almost nothing publicly.

• No posts about learning how to code.
• No documentation of the struggles.
• No reflection on big howlers and small wins. Not when I built my first calculator with Python. Not when I developed a restaurant ordering system using Python and SQLite3. Not even when I locally deployed my first AI chat wrapper using the Mistral 7B API through OpenRouter ...and later mistakenly pushed the API key to the github repo for an app no use eventually!

Even after deploying a working application into a real production environment — an app that is still running to this day — I said almost nothing about it publicly. My entire journey existed mostly in my head. The issue was not lack of confidence. I was willing to ship products and push systems into production environments, sometimes even before writing proper test scripts!. And the problem was not necessarily the quality of the products either.

The real problem was that of mindset.

I came from a professional culture where solving problems quietly was considered normal. Visibility was optional. Documentation was unnecessary. Public scrutiny was avoidable. But the indie hacking world operates differently. Eventually, I began to understand something important: In the modern creator and startup ecosystem, building alone is no longer enough. You also need to document, communicate, and share PUBLICLY

The Turning Point

Beginning my indie hacking journey seriously in 2023 changed my perspective completely. For a long time, I was exploring AI systems, data analytics tools, and SaaS ideas in isolation. I would build things, break them, rebuild them, learn new technologies, and quietly move on to the next idea. But over time, I noticed a pattern: I was learning a lot, but none of that learning was compounding publicly because nothing was discoverable. I was largely waiting for my work to be discovered instead of pushing it to public discovery. 

It took me a while to realize that the growth dynamics of indie hacking are fundamentally different from the world of research ghostwriting and private consulting. In the indie hacking space, the rules of the game are different. It says:

• Don’t just learn and build in isolation.
• Document it. 
• Share it, and your experience. 
• Let people see the journey.

Understanding these as the basic rules changed everything for me. Almost every app and products I have been building are done in the public. If I don't do, I don't get to know what people think of it and how to make it better. A testament to this is when I was building Bayantx360-Suite as a no-code platform for advanced statistical analysis for researchers, students and data analysts. Feedback from early users was crucial for me in developing and integrating features that they truly need and eliminates what I thought they might want. 

The Results

Building in public became a major turning point in my journey. By sharing the tools I use, the systems I am building, the mistakes I make, and the lessons I learn, I began improving more than just the discoverability of my work. I was also improving across clarity of thought, communication, consistency, accountability, and long-term professional leverage.

Instead of isolated learning cycles disappearing into memory, my experiences began turning into assets: access to mentorship/guidance, industry exposure, product launches, and collaborations that I believe will compound over time because the general public (startup founders, technical leads, developers, hiring managers, product users, policy makers, etc.) is not just seeing only the products/solutions I am working on, but also the thinking behind them. 

The impact of building in public is reflected in the early success of Bayantx360-Suite as a no code tool for non-technical users. They basically find it a useful statistical tool to generate custom dataset of any size, automatically clean messy dataset, fix factor loading issues that makes a dataset failed Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), as well as run panel regression without writing a single line of code, without installing complex software, or paying for huge license fee. Building in public helped me to inject and build what user think, need and wants into Bayantx360-suite, and make it a really useful product.

The Lesson

Having experienced both worlds (silent execution in research/data analytics, and public building in indie hacking), I have learned something important:

• When people build entirely in isolation, they still learn, experiment, fail, and improve. 
• But that growth remains limited to their private mental scope.

Building in public changes that. It forces thinking to become clearer. It makes progress measurable. It allows learning to compound over time. And most importantly, it makes work (and the owner) more discoverable. This is because they are not just building only for delivery but also building a reputation, a network, and a long-term narrative around their skills and ideas. It is a transformational growth strategy.

Here’s my takeaway for anyone building a career in the tech ecosystem — and in the professional world at large: Play by the rules of your profession, but never neglect the importance of building yourself and your work in public. Technical competence will always matter.  Deep work will always matter. But in today’s world, visibility matters too. A mid-level professional with strong visibility, documented work, and a clear public narrative will often encounter more opportunities for growth and career advancement than a highly skilled expert whose work remains largely invisible. This is because people cannot value what they never see.

• Building in public is not about showing off. It is about:
• Documenting growth
• Creating discoverability
• Compounding learning
• Having a traceable digital footprint and positioning yourself to attract opportunities
• Building long-term professional leverage.

In many ways, visibility has become part of the skill set itself. Cultivate it.

See you next time, Gambatte.