Perhaps this is the end of building in public?
Welcome to The Current.
This is where we gather real founder conversations to track what’s on their radar right now.
When “building in public” backfires
Broadcasting every revenue milestone, feature launch, and roadmap update on social media used to be the gold standard for generating early hype. But the “build in public” process is hitting a harsh reality check after an indie builder woke up to find an identical clone of his entire platform ranking on launch feeds, built line-by-line from his public logs.
You might be building brand clout but handing over your exact operational playbook simply gives lookalikes a free growth map to undercut your pricing overnight. Builders all around are starting to close the curtains to keep their core distribution channels and backend logic out of the public eye.
Dropping a job posting right now is a fast track to getting buried in slop. Because anyone can use AI to mass-apply hundreds of roles, a single opening triggers a landslide of bot applications within hours. Big tech can handle the spam, but a lean startup might not. For a founder who is also HR, public job boards have become less efficient in hiring talent.
Instead, they are moving early hiring strictly to private networks or small, “proof-of-work” tasks before anyone gets an interview.
The Reality Check
Yuv Bindal
Co-Founder
Produck
To attract users today, it’s getting really important to build a brand around the product that goes beyond raw functionality. Look at PostHog – a lot of people don’t even know what it is, but they’ve heard about them because of how well they run guerrilla marketing. Whether that’s organising events or building a community obsessed with the same problem you’re solving, that shared focus naturally becomes your strongest growth funnel.
When protecting what you build, don’t give out your architecture. You can generate plenty of content just by focusing on the problem, talking about the mission, and documenting the journey – sharing the outcomes, failures, and successes. There’s so much to say around the problem that you don’t need to share how the product works to get people excited.
Ultimately, it’s about building hype around the belief of what you’re solving. On calls, we keep our intro broad, going with something like, ‘we’re building self-improving software powered by your best users.’ We never monologue about building features X, Y, and Z.
Instead, we let the other person speak, treat their issue as the anchor of the conversation, and imagine their ideal future together. Working backwards towards the tech from there lets us test if our solution can meaningfully improve their circumstances.
The Bottom Line
“Build hype around the belief of what you’re solving. If you make users dream about the problem, they will tell you exactly how to tailor the solution.”
Here’s another thing on founders’ minds today:
no more burner email strategy
Buying five cheap secondary domains to blast out automated sales pitches used to be the default outbound playbook. Now, major email providers are deploying smart spam filters that flag and quarantine those lookalike domains almost instantly, leaving automated sequences stuck in dead mailboxes before a real human ever sees them.
Mass cold emailing is officially hitting a wall. Buying burner domains to fire off thousands of automated pitches no longer works because it gets your brand permanently blacklisted. Growth teams are dumping the spam bots and returning to real, hyper-targeted emails sent directly from their primary domain.
The countdown is on for A5X, where 1,000+ innovators, investors, and venture builders converge as East meets West across four tracks – from Capital & Venture Building to the Space Economy.
Expect insights from global speakers spanning Stanford University and X, The Moonshot Factory (Google X), alongside a 40+ startup NUS Venture Showcase and Singapore’s inaugural Defense Tech Hackathon with European partners.
24 – 25 September 2026
i³ building, Singapore