The Receipts: A Week of Building in Public
The takeaway
build in public: the actual list of what i read, built, and shipped this week — receipts, not a highlight reel.
What’s in this article
Most people only ever show you launch day. The clean screenshot, the "we're live," the part that looks effortless — and watching it quietly teaches everyone that the work is supposed to look easy. So here is the opposite: my actual week, unedited. What I read, what I built, what I shipped, including the bug I found at 11pm and am not proud of.
The actual list, no highlight reel
Read this week. Two papers on habit formation, which keep landing the same point on me: the cue does more of the work than willpower ever does. Half a chapter of James Clear on identity-based habits, read again, slower this time. And fourteen client messages I had been quietly avoiding. The reading was easy. The fourteen messages were not.
Built this week. A partner page, rebuilt from scratch after the first version felt wrong in a way I couldn't argue myself out of. I tried to talk myself into keeping it for about a day. Then I deleted it. And a fix for a bug that was silently deleting things every time we deployed — every push wiped data nobody was watching. I found it at 11pm. I am not proud of how long it took me to see it.
Shipped this week. Four legal pages, the boring kind nobody thanks you for. And one email, the small kind, so a lead never falls into a gap and disappears.
That is the whole week. No reveal at the end, no clever framing. I'm putting it down in plain text because the plain text is the part almost nobody publishes, and the part almost everybody needs to see.
What building in public actually is
Building in public means you share the work while it's still unfinished. Not the polished after. The during. The broken parts, the version you scrapped, the thing that doesn't work yet.
The person who made this real for a lot of us is Pieter Levels, who writes online as levelsio. He built a profitable company more or less out loud — posting revenue, posting bugs, posting the half-finished screens — and watched strangers turn into believers because they could see the thing get made. The watching was the point. People don't trust a finished object the way they trust a process they witnessed.
Here's the distinction that matters. A highlight reel says: look what I produced. Building in public says: here's what producing it actually cost. The first one impresses people. The second one bonds them to you, because they recognize their own messy work in yours.
This is not a content strategy I'm dressing up as a philosophy. I'm describing what I notice happens to me when I do it versus when I don't. When I publish the receipts, I work differently the following week. When I save everything for a reveal, I get quietly worse. The next section is why.
Why showing the middle keeps you honest
When you only ever show finished things, you slowly train yourself to hide the middle. The doubt. The 11pm bug. The version you threw away because it felt wrong. And the middle is where the real work lives — that's not a metaphor, it's just where most of the hours go.
Hide it long enough and something shifts inside your own head. You start to believe other people don't have a middle. That their launches really were that clean. So when your own process feels chaotic and slow, you read it as evidence that you're behind, or not built for this. You're comparing your raw footage to everyone else's final cut, and you'll always lose that comparison.
There's also a plainer mechanism. Naming what you did out loud is a form of accountability that costs almost nothing. Research on goals is pretty consistent that vague intentions don't move behavior much; specific, witnessed commitments do. "I'll work on the site this week" evaporates. "I shipped four legal pages and found a deploy bug" is a record someone could check. You behave like someone who knows it's a record. Honesty stops being a virtue you're trying to have and becomes a side effect of the format.
Why the highlight reel quietly fails you
The polished post seems like the safe choice. It's not. It fails in two directions at once.
It fails the people watching, because it teaches them the lie that the work is supposed to look easy. Someone earlier than you sees your clean launch and concludes the struggle they're in means they're doing it wrong. You didn't mean to discourage them. The format did it for you.
And it fails you, the maker. Saving everything for the reveal means you go long stretches with no feedback, no witnesses, no small reasons to keep your standards up between launches. You ship less often because every ship has to be perfect. The pressure to only show wins makes you allergic to publishing anything at all.
I'm not romanticizing the mess. There's a version of building in public that's just performing your chaos for attention, narrating every minor feeling, mistaking oversharing for honesty. That's not it. The receipts have to be real and they have to be specific. "Hard week, but we pushed through" is a highlight reel wearing a vulnerability costume. "Found a bug deleting data on every deploy, 11pm, took me too long" is a receipt. One is a posture. The other is a fact someone could learn from.
How to keep your own receipts
You don't need an audience to start. The format works on you before it works on anyone else.
Keep it to three lines: read, built, shipped. Or whatever three verbs fit your work. The constraint is the whole trick — three buckets force you to name concrete things instead of writing a diary. "Read: two habit papers." "Built: rebuilt the partner page." "Shipped: four legal pages." If you can't fill a line with something specific, that's information about your week, not a gap to paper over.
Include one thing that didn't go well. Not for drama. Because the failed item is the most useful line for anyone reading, and the most clarifying for you. The bug. The scrapped version. The messages you avoided.
Use real nouns and real numbers. "Fourteen client messages," not "some catching up." "11pm," not "late." Specificity is what separates a receipt from a vibe, and it's also what makes the thing impossible to fake.
Post it weekly, same day, low ceremony. The goal isn't a viral post. It's a record you'd be comfortable having checked. Do it for a month and you'll notice you start choosing your week differently, because you know you're going to have to write it down. We built the whole rhythm at MARSA around this — the work first, the receipts after — and the receipts changed the work.
The work first, the proof after
There's a quieter reason this matters, and it's not about content at all.
Most people's relationship with their own effort is broken by comparison. You feel behind constantly, not because you are, but because your entire input is other people's finished output. Building in public is one of the few reliable ways to fix that, because it puts honest middles back into circulation. When you show yours, you give someone else permission to stop hiding theirs. The discouragement that the highlight reel manufactures, the receipts undo.
It also slowly rebuilds your trust in your own pace. When you have four weeks of receipts, you stop arguing with yourself about whether you're working hard enough — you can just read it. The doubt has less to grip. You're not relying on a feeling about your week. You have the week, written down, with the bug and the scrapped page still in it.
So this is the practice, and the whole of it: do the work, then show the receipts, including the ugly ones. Not because it markets well. Because a person who can look at their own unedited week and keep going is a different kind of person than one who only ever shows you launch day.
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Frequently asked questions
Isn't building in public just oversharing or seeking attention?
It can be, and that version is worth avoiding. The line is specificity and usefulness. Narrating every feeling and dramatizing your chaos is a posture. Posting concrete receipts — what you read, built, shipped, including one thing that broke — is a record. A good test: would the post still be worth publishing if nobody liked it? If it's only there for the reaction, it's performance. If it would help one person doing similar work, it's a receipt.
Do I need an audience for this to be worth doing?
No. The format works on you first. Keeping a weekly three-line record — read, built, shipped — changes how you choose your week, because you know you'll have to write it down. The accountability is internal before it's external. An audience is a bonus that shows up later. Plenty of people keep their receipts in a private note for months before they ever post one, and still get most of the benefit.
What if I share unfinished work and someone copies my idea?
This is the most common fear and the most overrated one. Ideas are cheap; the thing that's hard to copy is the accumulated process, the taste, and the trust you build by being the person who showed up every week. Watching you make something is what bonds people to you specifically — that's not copyable. The risk of building in silence (no feedback, no witnesses, shipping rarely) is almost always bigger than the risk of being copied.
Won't showing the bugs and the failures make me look unprofessional?
It makes you look honest, which clients and peers trust more than looking flawless. There's a difference between showing the broken parts of the process and shipping broken work — you fix the bug, then you can talk about having found it. People who only show perfect results read as either lucky or hiding something. Naming a real mistake, plainly, with what you learned, reads as competence. Most experienced people relax around someone who can do that.
How is this different from a regular progress update or to-do list?
A to-do list is forward-looking and aspirational; receipts are backward-looking and factual. A typical progress update also tends to round everything up to a win. Receipts deliberately include what didn't work and use real numbers — fourteen messages, 11pm, one scrapped version — because the specificity is what keeps it honest. The point isn't to report momentum. It's to record the actual week, ugly parts included, in a form someone could check.
How often should I post receipts, and what should each one contain?
Weekly is enough, same day each week, kept short. Three buckets work well — read, built, shipped, or whatever three verbs fit your craft. Fill each with concrete nouns, not vibes. Include at least one thing that didn't go well, because that's the most useful line for readers and the most clarifying for you. Resist the urge to make it dramatic or to wait until you have something impressive. The unimpressive weeks are exactly the ones worth recording.