Arvid discusses how "building in public," once a beneficial strategy for transparency and growth, now poses significant risks due to the advent of AI. He argues that the ease and speed with which AI tools can clone products make radical transparency dangerous, advocating for a more nuanced approach to sharing business details.
Summarized by Podsumo
The host, Arvid, highlights a critical shift: while 'building in public' once helped him sell his company, the same level of transparency is now *dangerous* due to AI advancements.
The *risk of being copied* has dramatically increased, with the threshold for a business being "too small to clone" effectively collapsing to zero thanks to AI agentic coding tools.
AI enables *rapid cloning*: a savvy person can use AI prompts to investigate a business, analyze its product, and generate a blueprint for a clone in days or weeks, even without coding knowledge.
Founders should *avoid sharing specifics* like customer numbers, revenue, detailed features, system architecture, or exact dependencies, as these provide blueprints for AI-powered replication.
A new strategy for building in public involves *nuanced information dissemination*, focusing on sharing general industry insights, operational experiences, and lessons learned that are interesting but not easily clonable.
"I owe my entire career as a writer, as a podcaster and a founder to being pretty much radically transparent about my business."
"I would argue that the day the first CLI agente coding agent found its way into a large enough group of people... was the day that building in public became not just risky, but outright dangerous."
"Everything you share should pass this particular test. If it's not interesting, well, then nobody's going to engage with it anyway... If it makes it easy to copy you, you're building your own competitor."