The graveyard of startups is filled with technically excellent products that nobody ever heard of. The companies that win are the ones that tell a story people want to follow.

I talk to a lot of founders and developers who are working on projects, and most of them want to wait until the project is ready before announcing it. They think they need to wait until the thing is polished. Until it's impressive. Until it can't be criticized. They sit in silence, working nights and weekends, telling no one what they're building. Then they finally ship and wonder why nobody cares.

By the time you think it's ready to share, you've already wasted months of potential momentum.

The hardest part of building something is getting people to care. And to get people to care, you have to plant a flag. You have to tell a story.

The Psychology of Public Commitment

There's something that changes when you tell people what you're working on. It shifts from "hobby I might abandon" to "thing I publicly committed to." The stakes feel different.

When you plant a flag, when you publicly claim "I'm building this", you're making a bet with your reputation. You're saying this matters enough that you're willing to be judged by it.

That judgment is the point.

The fear of that judgment keeps you going when things get hard. When you're stuck on a bug at 1am and you could just close the laptop, you remember that you told people you were building this. You don't want to be the person who talks and doesn't ship.

The opposite is also true. When nobody knows what you're working on, it's easy to quit. There's no cost. You just stop. And the project joins the graveyard of half-finished ideas that never saw daylight.

Waiting for Perfect

The perfection trap is real. I see it constantly with developers. We're trained to not ship broken code, to get test coverage up, to refactor before release. So we apply that same mentality to announcing what we're working on. We want the landing page to be perfect. We want the demo to be flawless. We want all the rough edges sanded down before anyone sees it.

But announcing your project isn't shipping your project. They're different things.

When you tell people what you're building, you're not asking them to use a buggy product. You're inviting them to follow a story. Humans are wired for narratives. We love watching someone work toward a goal. We root for underdogs. We get invested in journeys.

Think about how different these two situations feel:

1. Someone you've never heard of announces their product on launch day.
2. Someone you've been following for months finally ships the thing they've been documenting publicly.

The second one has gravity. It has history. People feel like they were part of it. They've watched the struggle, seen the pivots, celebrated the small wins. When you finally ship, they're emotionally invested in your success.

That investment in the story is what makes the difference on launch day. That's why people sign up and stick around even when it isn't perfect. You can't manufacture that on launch day. It has to be built over time.

Stories That Worked

When you look at the founders who've built massive companies, they almost all planted a flag early. They publicly declared what they were building and why it mattered. They gave people something to root for.

SpaceX

Most people assume SpaceX makes its money from NASA contracts. But SpaceX's biggest revenue source is actually Starlink. It did about $8 billion in 2024, roughly 60% of total revenue. But Starlink isn't what Elon talks about. The story he tells is about Mars. Making humanity multiplanetary. He's been telling this story since 2001, long before SpaceX had a single successful launch. And he continued to tell it throughout several failed launches. The business model is satellite internet. The story is saving humanity. Both are true. But the story is what creates the momentum. The story is what inspired the audience and convinced talented engineers to take a chance on SpaceX instead of going to NASA.

Astral/UV

I love the story of UV because its a niche developer tool and the exact opposite of SpaceX, yet it follows the same narrative. Astral (the company behind UV, Ruff and Ty) tell a story the Python community had been waiting to hear for years. Python's tooling situation has been a mess forever, a fragmented ecosystem where nothing really works together and everything is painfully slow. Astral planted the flag that python tooling should be fast, unified and modern. Their story got people invested in their vision and then they backed it with the tools and performance.

HEY

When Basecamp first launched HEY in 2020, they didn't require developers to use Apple's in-app purchase system. Apple didn't like that and rejected the app. So the founders of Basecamp, Jason Fried and DHH, they picked a fight with Apple. DHH went nuclear on Twitter, calling Apple "gangsters" and retweeting stories of other developers that had been forced into using Apple's tools. Whether they were realized it or not (I think they did), they positioned themselves in a David vs. Goliath battle and got the developer community to rally with them. 120,000 people signed up for HEY's waitlist in under two weeks, before it was even GA. Like I said, people love to root for an underdog, especially against a massive corporation.

Notion

In 2015, Notion was dying. The product crashed constantly. Ivan Zhao and his co-founder Simon Last decided to lay off their entire team (after burning through their initial cash) and moved to Kyoto, Japan because it was cheaper than San Francisco. For a year, they lived in a tiny rented house, coding 18 hours a day, eating noodles, barely sleeping. They rebuilt the entire product from scratch. When they relaunched, Ivan didn't hide any of this. He talked openly about the "lost years." That story was about two people who almost failed and refused to give up. The story resonated with their initial audience and Notion took off and is now a $10B copmany. The story was fuel that they needed to get off the ground.

There are thousands of other stories that worked. I would argue that every company that succeeded was a story that worked.

Building a Story

Planting a flag isn't just tweeting "I'm working on something cool 👀" every few days.

Planting a flag means:

State what you're building and why it matters. Not "I'm working on a developer tool." Something like: "Python's packaging ecosystem is broken, and I'm building the thing that fixes it."

Identify your enemy. Every good story has conflict. Maybe it's slow incumbent tools. Maybe it's a widely-accepted assumption that you think is wrong. The enemy gives people something to rally against.

Share the journey, not just the destination. Talk about the problems you're solving. The setbacks you've hit. The technical decisions you're grappling with. People connect with struggle more than success.

Be specific. "Working on AI stuff" tells me nothing. "Trying to make version control work for AI agents generating thousands of lines of code per second" tells me exactly who you are.

The common thread is specificity. Vague updates are forgettable. Specific ones are memorable.

The Feedback Loop

The other thing that happens when you plant a flag is that you start getting feedback. Early feedback isn't about validation. It's about collision detection. When you share what you're building, you find out who else is working on similar problems, what adjacent problems exist that you hadn't considered, and whether your framing resonates.

I've had projects where the public feedback fundamentally changed my direction. Not because the original direction was wrong, but because I learned about a much bigger opportunity just by talking to people. You can't get that sitting alone in your room.

The Fear is the Feature

I get why people don't do this. Putting yourself out there is uncomfortable. There's a real vulnerability in saying "I'm working on X" when X might fail. What if you don't finish? What if the idea is stupid? What if people criticize you? What if no one cares?

But the fear is overblown. Most people are too busy with their own lives to criticize your side project. The ones who do criticize are usually doing nothing themselves. The people whose opinions do matter are the ones who've shipped things. And they, almost universally, will respect that you're putting yourself out there.

The alternative, working in silence and shipping a product no one knows or cares about it way worse than any criticism you'll face.

The Compounding Effect

Stories compound. The earlier you start telling yours, the more time it has to build.

When you finally ship, you're not starting from zero. You've got people who've been following along. They've watched you struggle. They've seen the pivots. They feel invested in your success. They're ready to try the thing and tell their friends about it.

You can't manufacture that on launch day. It has to be built over time.

So plant a flag. Tell people what you're building. Give them something to root for.

The momentum is worth more than whatever polish you think you need first.