[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-post-building-in-public-harder-founder-journal":3},{"id":4,"blog_category_id":5,"name":6,"slug":7,"banner_id":8,"content":9,"meta_title":75,"meta_description":76,"status":77,"publish_date":78,"created_at":78,"updated_at":79,"deleted_at":80,"banner_url":81,"banner_og_url":82,"category":83,"banner":90},"019d7b9d-4b57-73be-a3ea-32a7fcc59863","019d36cb-c629-72c0-973e-5bdfa567f75c","Building in Public: What I've Learned Making Harder in the Open","building-in-public-harder-founder-journal","019dcaa4-0540-70e6-af6f-895af8f7ebc3",[10,16,20,26,28,33,35,41,43,49,51,56,58,64,66,70],{"type":11,"content":12},"text",[13,14,15],"Building in public was not the plan. The original plan was the standard one: build the product, get it right, then tell people about it. Keep the mess internal. Show them the finished thing.","We abandoned that plan quickly and for a reason that now seems obvious: we were making decisions about what u201crightu201d looked like with almost no input from the people who'd actually use it. We had theories. We had assumptions. We had things we'd read and patterns we'd observed. But we'd talked to approximately zero potential users about what they actually needed from a challenge platform.","So we started talking to people, and then we started talking to people publicly, and what followed has been one of the more clarifying experiences I've had building anything.",{"type":17,"level":18,"text":19},"heading",2,"Why We Chose to Build in Public",{"type":11,"content":21},[22,23,24,25],"There were two honest reasons, not one.","The first was strategic. Building in public creates an audience before a product is ready. The blog posts, the conversations, the transparent updates  -  these generate interest, search visibility, and an early community of people who've been following the journey and are primed to try the product when it launches. That's not manipulation; it's just the logic of building something that people will eventually need to discover.","The second reason was discipline. Committing to public transparency about what we were building created accountability that private development doesn't. When you tell people what you're working on and why, you have to actually think it through. You can't paper over a vague decision with private optimism. The act of articulating it publicly forces clarity.","Both reasons were real. I'm putting the strategic one first because pretending it was purely philosophical would be exactly the kind of thing that makes founders untrustworthy.",{"type":17,"level":18,"text":27},"What Talking to Users Before the Product Was Ready Taught Us",{"type":11,"content":29},[30,31,32],"We talked to a lot of people with ADHD. This wasn't planned as a primary focus  -  it emerged from the conversations. We'd put out something about challenge accountability and habit consistency, and the response from the ADHD community was disproportionate. People were describing, with specificity and intensity, the exact experience we'd been trying to design for: the cycle of starting and abandoning, the disproportionate shame of a broken streak, the way standard habit apps seemed almost designed to make their particular kind of failure more visible.","The most useful thing these conversations produced was precision. We came in with a vague idea about u201caccountabilityu201d and left with a clear understanding of the specific mechanisms that matter: external visibility, proof of completion, asynchronous co-presence, streak mechanics that don't punish misses catastrophically. These aren't abstractions. They're specific design decisions, and we knew to make them specifically because people told us what they needed before we'd locked in the architecture.","This is the practical argument for building in public. Not the audience-building, though that matters. The conversations you can have before anything is built are the ones where feedback is most honest. Once a product exists, people soften their criticism because they're responding to something you made. Before it exists, they'll tell you what they actually want.",{"type":17,"level":18,"text":34},"The Most Surprising Thing Users Have Told Us",{"type":11,"content":36},[37,38,39,40],"I expected people to want gamification  -  XP, badges, leaderboards. This is what most accountability apps build, and it seemed like a safe assumption. The response was more complicated.","A significant number of people  -  particularly those with ADHD  -  said explicitly that gamification made things worse for them. The externalisation of reward into points and badges felt hollow after a short period. Worse, the gamification mechanics often compounded the shame of failure by making the gap between your performance and the leaderboard visible in a way that felt adversarial rather than motivating.","What people said they wanted, with more consistency, was a record. Not a score. A gallery of what they'd actually done. The photo proof wasn't about verification for them  -  it was about having something real to look back at. Something that said: I did this. Here is evidence. This happened.","This changed how we think about the proof submission mechanic. It's not a verification feature. It's a self-documentation feature that happens to have social accountability properties as a side effect.",{"type":17,"level":18,"text":42},"The Hardest Decision Made So Far",{"type":11,"content":44},[45,46,47,48],"Whether to require proof for all public challenges or to make it optional.","The argument for optional: friction. Requiring proof adds a step to every challenge day. Some people will find that inconvenient enough to choose private (no proof required) or to not use the platform at all. Reducing barriers to entry is usually good product logic.","The argument for required: the proof is the product. The central differentiator of Harder is that it's a platform where people prove they can do hard things. If proof is optional, you're building a standard habit tracker with a social layer on top. Every major competitor does that. The proof requirement is what makes the social layer meaningful.","We went with required for public challenges. It was the right call for the product's identity, even if it costs us some users who would have preferred optional. Some constraints are features.",{"type":17,"level":18,"text":50},"What We're Most Uncertain About",{"type":11,"content":52},[53,54,55],"Whether the asynchronous community model is enough.","The body doubling research is clear that synchronous co-presence is the strongest version of the effect. People working alongside others in real time perform better than people working alongside others across time. Harder's community layer is largely asynchronous  -  you see other people's proof, they see yours, but you're not necessarily in the same challenge at the same moment.","We believe the asynchronous version provides meaningful but weaker accountability. Whether it's weak enough to matter  -  whether users will find it compelling or whether they'll want something more synchronous  -  is genuinely unknown to us. It's the hypothesis we're most eager to test when the product is in real people's hands.",{"type":17,"level":18,"text":57},"What the First Week of This Blog Taught Us",{"type":11,"content":59},[60,61,62,63],"We launched the blog before the app, which felt backwards until it didn't.","The first week produced two things: a small but engaged group of readers who found specific articles and wrote in to say they'd shared them or bookmarked them, and a clear sense of which topics resonated most. The ADHD content resonated most. The honest analytical content (not the u201chere are 5 tipsu201d content) resonated most. The articles where we were willing to say that standard tools often fail for specific reasons, rather than hedging toward diplomacy, resonated most.","The lesson isn't surprising in retrospect: people have abundant access to generic productivity content. What they don't have abundant access to is content that accurately describes their specific experience and explains why the standard approaches don't work for them. That's what they read, share, and remember.","This will shape the rest of the content we write. Accuracy to experience over optimism about solutions. The problem diagnosis before the product pitch.",{"type":17,"level":18,"text":65},"What Comes Next",{"type":11,"content":67},[68,69],"The app is in the final stages before public launch  -  somewhere in the 70u201380% range of where we want it. The next several weeks are about proof submission polish, the community feed, and the Space (the public profile that functions as a discipline resume). Then we launch, and we find out which of our assumptions were right.","Building in public means being accountable to this account. So: we said what we were building and why. Here's what we learned. The next update will tell you how the launch went.",{"type":71,"heading":72,"buttonText":73,"style":74},"cta","Harder is a social challenge platform launching in the coming weeks.","Join the Waitlist","subscribe","Building in Public: What I've Learned Making Harder in the Open | Harder","Why we decided to build Harder publicly before the product was ready u2014 and what it taught us about what people actually need from a challenge platform.",1,"2026-05-14T09:00:00.000000Z","2026-04-26T16:34:21.000000Z",null,"https:\u002F\u002Fadmin.harder.pro\u002Fstorage\u002Fcache\u002Fblog-posts\u002Fa\u002Fi\u002F950x500\u002Fai_generated_1777221240_1777221240.webp","https:\u002F\u002Fadmin.harder.pro\u002Fstorage\u002Fcache\u002Fblog-posts\u002Fa\u002Fi\u002F480x630\u002Fai_generated_1777221240_1777221240.png",{"id":5,"name":84,"slug":85,"image_id":80,"meta_title":86,"meta_description":87,"created_at":88,"updated_at":89,"deleted_at":80},"Productivity","productivity","Productivity Challenges & Habit Tracking","Boost focus and get more done with productivity challenges and habit tracking on Harder. Build better routines and achieve your goals.","2026-03-28T23:33:37.000000Z","2026-04-10T19:21:29.000000Z",{"id":8,"name":91,"file_name":92,"mime_type":93,"path":94,"disk":95,"file_hash":96,"collection":97,"size":98,"created_at":99,"updated_at":99},"ai_generated_1777221240_1777221240","ai_generated_1777221240_1777221240.jpg","image\u002Fjpeg","blog-posts\u002Fa\u002Fi\u002Fai_generated_1777221240_1777221240.jpg","local","037d5675568a2d221bea64b6040f0934553cb8b38e9bbf548bb6d39cc3b74252","blog-posts",8844579,"2026-04-26T16:34:00.000000Z"]