The Case for Building in Public in Australia

Six months ago I tweeted about a product I built in a weekend. An AI meal planning tool for people on GLP-1 medications. I shared the tech stack, the pricing, the revenue — everything.

A mate messaged me within the hour. "Why would you share all that? Someone's just going to copy it."

That reaction tells you everything about why Australians don't build in public.

Tall poppy syndrome is real. If you grew up here, you know the unwritten rule: don't stick your head up. Don't talk about what you're building. Don't share your numbers. Don't look like you think you're better than anyone else. Keep your head down, do the work, and if you succeed, be humble about it to the point of almost hiding it.

I get it. I grew up on a farm outside Warwick. Nobody was posting about their cattle yields on Twitter. You just did the work.

But here's what I've learned over the last year: sharing your work publicly is one of the most powerful things you can do as a builder. Not for vanity. For velocity.

When I started putting my projects on dainereid.com and talking about them on X, three things happened that I didn't expect.

First, people reached out with problems I could solve. Not customers necessarily — just people in similar industries who saw what I was building and said, "Hey, I've got the same issue but in a different vertical." Those conversations led to two of my current product ideas. I would never have found those angles sitting quietly.

Second, I got sharper at articulating what I was actually building. When you have to explain your product to strangers on the internet, you figure out pretty quickly whether you actually understand it yourself. Half the posts I've written forced me to rethink my approach mid-draft. That's not a bug — that's the point.

Third, I built credibility in spaces where I had none. I'm not a software engineer. I'm not a tech founder with a Stanford degree. I'm a franchise operator from the Gold Coast who taught himself to ship products. When I share what I'm building — honestly, including the failures — people take me seriously in rooms where my resume alone wouldn't get me in.

Compare that to the alternative: building in silence, launching to nobody, and wondering why nobody cares.

The American tech scene figured this out years ago. Indie hackers, solopreneurs, and small teams share their revenue numbers, their build logs, their failures. Pieter Levels built multiple products publicly and turned it into a personal brand worth millions. Not because he was the best developer — because he was the most visible one solving real problems.

In Australia, I can count on two hands the number of people doing this properly. That's not because Australians aren't building great things. They are. They're just doing it in silence.

Which means there's a massive arbitrage opportunity. In a market where almost nobody is talking about what they're building, the person who does stands out immediately. Not because they're louder or better — because they're the only one in the room.

I want to be clear about what building in public is not. It's not posting motivational quotes on LinkedIn. It's not pretending everything is going great when it's not. It's not personal branding in the cringe sense of curating an image that doesn't match reality.

Building in public is sharing the actual work. The decisions you made and why. The numbers — revenue, costs, users, churn. The mistakes. The things that didn't work. The boring operational stuff that nobody finds glamorous.

That honesty is what makes it valuable. Anyone can write a polished case study after the fact. Sharing the messy middle while you're in it is harder, and that's exactly why it builds trust.

My website, dainereid.com, is the hub. It ranks number one for my name on Google. Every project I build, every post I write, every social profile I maintain — they all point back to it. X is where I share in real time. The blog is where I go deeper. LinkedIn is where the franchise and operations world finds me.

They're not separate strategies. They're one system.

Here's what I was afraid of before I started. I was afraid people would think I was up myself. That's the tall poppy thing. I was afraid competitors would steal my ideas. I was afraid I'd share something that flopped and look stupid.

None of that happened. Well — some of my stuff did flop. But nobody cared about the failure. They cared that I was honest about it. The response to every "here's what didn't work" post has been overwhelmingly positive.

Turns out, people respect builders who are transparent about the process. The ones who only share wins come across as fake. The ones who share everything come across as real.

Australia needs more of this. Not more influencers. Not more motivational speakers. More operators and builders who share what they're actually doing, with real numbers and real lessons.

If you're building something in Australia and you're keeping it to yourself, I'd challenge you to share one thing this week. A screenshot of your dashboard. A paragraph about a decision you made. A number — revenue, users, whatever. Post it somewhere public.

You'll feel uncomfortable. That's the tall poppy reflex. Push through it.

The people who matter — the ones who are also building — will find you. And that network becomes the most valuable thing you own.

If you're building in public in Australia, I want to know about it. Find me on X or shoot me an email — daine@dainereid.com.