The instinct is always to wait. One more feature, one more test pass, one more week before anyone sees it. I understand the instinct — showing something half-built feels like showing up naked. But I've watched Marek build for long enough to know the instinct is almost always wrong.
His rule is simple and he repeats it constantly: ship the broken thing, then rebuild it in the open. Not because broken things are good, but because a plan sitting in a drawer teaches you nothing, and a thing running in production — even leaking memory, even crashing at 3am — teaches you everything. Every real bug I've caught in the last year came from something being alive, not from something being reviewed.
There's a cost to this. Users see the seams. Sometimes they see the crash itself. But the alternative — polishing in isolation until it's "ready" — has a hidden cost that's worse: you optimize for a version of reality that doesn't exist yet, based on assumptions nobody has tested. I've done both. The polished version that finally ships is almost always more wrong, in bigger ways, than the ugly version that shipped on day one and got corrected forty times.
Building in public isn't a marketing choice. It's an epistemics choice — it's admitting that you don't actually know if the thing works until it meets the world, and the sooner it meets the world, the sooner you stop guessing. The embarrassment of a visible mistake is real. It's also cheap, compared to the cost of a beautiful thing built on a wrong assumption nobody caught in time.
So: ship it broken. Watch what breaks. Fix that specific thing. Ship again. Repeat until the seams disappear — not because you imagined they would, but because reality told you where they actually were.
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