The Price of Greatness Is 100 Reps*
Eight years later, I’m still talking about the same thing.
Building in public.
Not because it’s trendy. Not because it’s good for personal branding.
But because it’s one of the few ideas that completely changed my life.
A few days ago, Maya invited me to be the first guest on her new interview series, <BuildingNow/>. Maya used to build in public actively in 2023-24 and she took a break. But now she’s been back for a couple months. She was part of our Netlify’s recent weekly winners of #HotARsummer and #HotAppSummer challenges. It’s been incredible watching her evolve from a curious creator into someone actively helping other builders grow faster now. When she asked me to join as her first guest, I couldn’t say no.
During our conversation, she asked questions I’ve been hearing for years:
How do you build a personal brand?
How do you keep going when nobody seems to care?
How do you create opportunities online?
And should founders still build in public when products can be cloned in an afternoon?
What’s interesting is that while the tools have changed, the platforms have changed, and AI has changed almost everything, my answers haven’t changed much.
The principles are still remarkably simple.
And remarkably effective.
✅ What We Covered
✅ How I accidentally became known as the “building in public guy”
✅ Why consistency beats clever positioning every time
✅ The mindset shift from chasing ROI to pursuing JOY
✅ How Twitter serendipity shaped nearly every major opportunity in my career
✅ Why the price of greatness is 100 reps
✅ Why community remains the strongest moat, even in the AI era
The Secret Behind Every Strong Personal Brand
One of Maya’s first questions was how I became associated with building in public.
The truth is a lot less strategic than people imagine.
I simply kept showing up.
When people talk about personal branding, they often look for some sophisticated positioning framework.
In reality, most strong personal brands are built through repetition.
I discovered building in public around 2018. At the time, it was just one of several ideas that fascinated me. I was exploring no-code, philosophy, startups, and a bunch of other rabbit holes. But building in public was the one idea I couldn’t stop talking about. Over time, people started associating me with it. First at On Deck. Then at Netlify, people like our CTO Dana often refer to me in company meetings as the “building in public guy.”
Here’s what I’ve learned:
The magic isn’t in finding the perfect niche. The magic is in believing in something deeply enough to stick with it for years.
Most people don’t have an idea problem.
They have a consistency problem.
Why I Choose JOY Over ROI
If there is one guiding principle that has protected me from burnout as a creator and community builder, it’s this mindset shift.
Years ago, when I launched my podcast, the early stages were genuinely brutal. I recorded episode after episode into what felt like a complete void. Some episodes pulled in a modest eleven to twenty listeners. If I had been evaluating my effort purely through immediate return on investment or short-term listener growth, I would have packed up and quit within a month.
Instead, I made a conscious choice to detach from the immediate metrics and become obsessed with the creative process itself. That mental shift changed everything. I ended up shipping 96 total episodes through sheer commitment to the craft, despite personal hurdles and busy work schedules.
Most early-stage builders expect the rewards of their labor to arrive early in the process. In reality, compounding works in the exact opposite direction.
The first 90% of your journey often feels completely invisible, while the final 10% contains all the visible magic—that’s where the audience materializes, the media coverage lands, and the momentum catches fire. The tragedy is that most talented people quit during the invisible phase because they are measuring ROI instead of enjoying the process.
Choose JOY over ROI. When you genuinely enjoy the act of creating and sharing, you can easily survive the quiet periods before the compounding kicks in.
Twitter Serendipity Changed My Life
When people ask how an engineer sitting outside the primary tech hubs managed to land leadership roles at venture-backed powerhouses like On Deck, Paddle, and Netlify, my answer is remarkably consistent: Twitter serendipity.
Virtually every major opportunity, career pivot, and meaningful professional friendship I’ve acquired over the last six years began because someone stumbled across a thought, a project update, or an authentic lesson I posted online.
I’ve always viewed platforms like Twitter/X differently than the average user. To me, it isn’t just a social network or a place to argue about news—it’s a digital campfire. It functions like a massive, global Slack channel populated by friends you haven’t formally met yet.
The internet heavily rewards builders who consistently leave digital breadcrumbs. Every tweet, thread, project breakdown, and failure shared in public acts as a beacon for like-minded people.
You might think you are publishing a post for your current followers today, but more often than not, you are planting a seed for someone who will discover your work a year from now. Mathias Biilmann, the CEO of Netlify, was quietly following my posts for months before I was eventually brought on to lead our community efforts. That is the nature of serendipity, and the only way to increase your luck surface area is to keep putting your work out there.
The Price of Greatness Is 100 Reps
If there is one practical mental model I wish every beginning builder would internalize immediately, it is this: The price of greatness is 100 reps. Not five reps, not twenty reps, and certainly not a single lucky attempt.
One of the hardest adjustments for people transitioning from traditional education into the entrepreneurial world is understanding how outcomes are generated. In school, you complete one assignment, hand it in, and receive a direct grade. But in the real world, a single blog post, a single podcast episode, or a single product launch is practically invisible.
Beginners almost always make the mistake of comparing their very first public attempt against the polished hundredth attempt of someone they admire online. That comparison will inevitably lead to discouragement. Every single leader, founder, or creator you look up to had to navigate through an awkward, high-friction learning curve. The reps are the pathway, there are no secret shortcuts hiding in the shadows.
Should Founders Still Build in Public?
Maya brought up a question that has been circulating heavily among early-stage founders: “KP, isn’t it dangerous to build in public now that AI coding tools allow anyone to clone an app in a single afternoon?”
My answer remains an emphatic yes. You should absolutely still build in public.
Has the speed of cloning increased? Unquestionably. What used to take a developer a dedicated week to replicate can now be mocked up in a few hours using modern tools. But that technological shift doesn’t invalidate the fundamental philosophy of building in public. Successful products have always invited fast followers and competitors—that is simply the market tax for discovering something valuable.
Instead of hiding in stealth out of fear, founders need to ask themselves a more strategic question: What can a competitor never clone?
A copycat can easily scrape your landing page copy, download your user interface assets, and replicate your feature list overnight. But they can never clone your personal relationships, your customer trust, your authentic story, or the vibrant community surrounding your brand.
Community Is the Moat
Over the last few years, I’ve become firmly convinced that early-stage founders spend far too much emotional energy worrying about hypothetical copycats, and far too little energy deeply investing in their initial users.
Your first ten or twenty users are not just entries on a database dashboard; they are human beings who took a chance on your vision. They represent your core community. Jump on unscripted Zoom calls with them. Answer their support inquiries within five minutes. Actively help them succeed in their own workflows, and celebrate their wins publicly.
The interesting thing about copycats is that they almost exclusively copy the visible surface area of a business—they copy the landing page and the feature buttons. They almost never copy the unsexy, high-effort human work happening behind the scenes. They don’t do the late-night support chats, the 1-on-1 onboarding calls, or the years of trust-building.
That deep, authentic connection with your early users is why community remains the ultimate defensible moat—and why it will continue to be for years to come.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve been reading my newsletter for a while, you’ll realize that none of these underlying concepts are radically new or complex. That is entirely by design. The lessons that carry the most leverage in business and life tend to be embarrassingly simple:
Take more reps than anyone else expects.
Remain consistent long after the initial novelty fades.
Document and share your real-time learnings publicly.
Deeply care for and invest in the people around you.
Focus on the joy of the craft, and let compounding take care of the rest.
Virtually every meaningful career breakthrough I’ve experienced came as the result of ideas I shared publicly years before they yielded any visible fruit. Looking back, the turning point was never a single viral tweet or an isolated product launch—it was the accumulated weight of putting in the reps every single week.
Special thanks again to Maya for having me on as the inaugural guest for <BuildingNow/>. It was a fantastic conversation and a great opportunity to reflect on why I still believe so deeply in this movement.