439: The Increasing Risk of Building in Public

439: The Increasing Risk of Building in Public

From The Bootstrapped Founder by Arvid Kahl

April 3, 2026 · 16 min

About this episode

In this episode, Arvid Kahl discusses the risks of building in public and the balance between transparency and competition.

Building in public helped me sell FeedbackPanda. That same radical transparency could now destroy a business overnight. With agentic coding tools, anyone can turn your publicly shared architecture, revenue numbers, and feature details into a working competitor in days—no coding skills required. The old safety threshold of $20-30K MRR has collapsed to zero. But that doesn't mean you stop sharing entirely. In this episode, I break down what I still talk about openly, what I'll never reveal again, and the one filter every founder should run before posting anything about their business: is it interesting to follow, or easy to clone? This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Podscan.fm The blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/the-increasing-risk-of-building-in-public/ The podcast episode: https://tbf.fm/episodes/439-the-increasing-risk-of-building-in-public Check out Podscan, the Podcast database that transcribes every podcast episode out there minutes after it gets released: https://podscan.fm Send me a voicemail on Podline: https://podline.fm/arvid You'll find my weekly article on my blog: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com Podcast…

People in this episode

Host: Arvid Kahl

Topics covered

  • building in public
  • transparency
  • competition
  • entrepreneurship
  • risk management

Keywords

  • building in public
  • radical transparency
  • agentic coding tools
  • MRR
  • founder advice

Sponsors

Podscan.fm

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: FeedbackPanda, Zero to Sold, The Embedded Entrepreneur, Find Your Following

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