Building in public sounds great when you’re looking backward.
Once something works, you can connect the dots, explain why every decision mattered, and turn years of uncertainty into a clean story. It feels very different when you’re standing inside the part before the dots connect and everyone is watching.
I know because I’m there right now.
Earlier this year, I published Theatre of the Mind, a book about what building a personal branding agency taught me about visibility, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when we decide to be seen. I also launched Visible Leader, an AI-powered platform designed to help people build the strategy, positioning, content, and authority behind their personal brands.
Both were projects I had been building toward for years through my work at The Borden Group.
What I didn’t know was that an idea I had while driving home from visiting day at my daughter’s sleepaway camp in 2025 would eventually pull me into an entirely different industry.
I couldn’t stop thinking about a problem I wanted to solve. So I decided to see if I could solve it.
That idea became Dirty Hippie, an online marketplace I’m building to connect consumers with trusted local providers for laundry, dry cleaning, and specialty garment care.
Now I’m simultaneously running The Borden Group and building a technology startup in an industry completely different from the one I’ve spent years becoming known for.
And that has forced me to think differently about what positioning actually means.
What Happens When Your Career Stops Fitting in One Box?
When your career expands, there is an instinct to immediately clean up the story.
Am I the operator or the advisor? The founder or the executive? Am I the person known for what I built before or the person building what comes next? Which one belongs in my headline? Which one should I talk about? Will people become confused if I talk about all of it?
These are questions I’ve heard from clients for years. Now I’m asking some of them myself.
We have been taught that strong positioning means choosing one thing and repeating it until the market associates your name with it. There is truth to that. Clarity matters.
But clarity doesn’t necessarily mean limitation.
There is an important distinction between what you do and what you’re known for.
You can do more than one thing while maintaining a clear position in the market.
A CEO can be an operator, investor, board member, and speaker without creating four separate personal brands. A founder can build multiple companies without pretending the others don’t exist. An executive can leave one industry, enter another, and still carry decades of earned authority into the next chapter.
Your positioning doesn’t always have to answer, “Which one are you?”
It should help someone understand: Why does it make sense that you’re the person doing this?
Building in Public Lets People See the Evolution
This is where building in public becomes particularly powerful.
Building in public is the practice of sharing parts of the process of creating a company, product, career, or idea while you’re still creating it. It doesn’t mean documenting every meeting, publishing every metric, or turning your professional life into a reality show.
It means allowing people to see the evolution of your thinking.
The decisions. The questions. The experiments. The wins. The mistakes. The things you’re still figuring out.
Almost everyone I interviewed while writing Theatre of the Mind described some version of the same hesitation: they wanted to wait until they felt ready.
They wanted more proof. More clarity. More time to process the change before explaining it publicly.
But there’s a problem with waiting until everything makes sense.
Your audience misses the part that explains how you got there.
When you suddenly announce the finished version, people have to reconcile it with the version of you they already know. When you’ve allowed them to see some of the evolution, the transition makes sense.
You aren’t waiting until your new identity is perfectly packaged before introducing it to the market. You’re giving the market enough context to understand how you arrived there.
Your Previous Chapter Doesn’t Have to Disappear
When I wrote Theatre of the Mind, I thought I was writing it for other people.
I’m starting to think I wrote parts of it for my future self.
Building Dirty Hippie doesn’t erase what I’ve spent years learning about visibility, positioning, marketing, or personal brand. If anything, I’m now experiencing those principles from a completely different seat.
I’m not only advising founders on visibility. I’m navigating what it feels like to introduce a new idea, enter an unfamiliar industry, learn the mechanics of building a technology company, talk to potential investors, and explain why this new thing belongs alongside everything I’ve built before.
The dots haven’t completely connected yet.
That’s the point.
Your career isn’t a finished case study while you’re living it. Sometimes the next chapter makes sense only because of everything that came before it, even if you can’t articulate exactly how yet.
Instead of asking which version of yourself you need to abandon, ask a different question:
What if everything you’ve built was preparing you to see something you couldn’t have seen from only one seat?
That’s a much more interesting way to think about positioning.
You don’t always need to choose between who you were and who you’re becoming.
Sometimes your strongest position exists in the connection between the two.
And sometimes the most valuable part of building in public is allowing people to watch you discover that connection in real time.
