What "Building in Public" Actually Looks Like
By MakerViking
Published
Updated
5 min read
Category: News & Updates
Building in public usually sounds glamorous. The reality, from where I'm sitting, is a lot less cinematic — budget tradeoffs, a wonky camera bottlenecking streams, and a platform growing slowly but steadily on terms one person can sustain. An honest update on where things actually stand.
<h1 class="font bold" What "Building in Public" Actually Looks Like</h1 <p class="mb 2" When people talk about building in public, it usually sounds glamorous. Founders posting screenshots of dashboards going up and to the right. Slick demo videos. Polished announcements. The highlight reel.</p <p class="mb 2" The reality, at least from where I'm sitting, is a lot less cinematic.</p <h2 class="font bold" The unglamorous version</h2 <p class="mb 2" Building in public, in practice, means deciding whether to fix a bug or write a feature this week — because doing both means the to do list never actually gets shorter, it just gets reshuffled. It means weighing a €200 expense against three weeks of groceries. It means knowing exactly which subscriptions you can cancel if a hosting bill goes up.</p <p class="mb 2" It means your camera is unstable and your audio setup is held together with duct tape, and you have to choose between streaming with what you've got or waiting until you can afford something better. (I'm choosing to wait. The Hollyland Lyra 4 with the lapel mic is on the shortlist when funds allow. In the meantime, the Twitch dev streams are on a slower cadence than I'd like.)</p <p class="mb 2" It means a lot of "I'll get to that when I can." And a lot of building things mostly alone.</p <h2 class="font bold" Why I'm still doing it this way</h2 <p class="mb 2" A reasonable question: why not just take on debt, raise money, or push harder?</p <p class="mb 2" The honest answer is that TinkerAtlas isn't a venture backed startup. It's a maker community platform built by one person on disability income, sustained by a small but genuinely supportive group of users and contributors. The funding it brings in is enough to keep the lights on — the servers, the tools, the bills that keep the platform alive — and that's the goal. It's not designed to make me rich. It's designed to exist, and to keep existing, on terms I can sustain.</p <p class="mb 2" That changes the math on a lot of decisions. I can't burn cash to move faster. I can't hire someone to take MakerDraw off my plate so I can focus on something else. I have to be honest about what's realistic and what isn't, and I have to be honest about it <em publicly</em , because the people supporting this project deserve to know what they're actually supporting.</p <p class="mb 2" So that's what this is. The honest version.</p <h2 class="font bold" Where things actually stand</h2 <p class="mb 2" A few real updates, in plain language:</p <p class="mb 2" <strong The platform itself is healthy.</strong We're at 422 users, growing slowly but steadily, with most of the recent dev work going into quality of life fixes and small UX polish rather than big new features. Nothing flashy, just smoothing edges. That's deliberate — the foundation matters more than the headline.</p <p class="mb 2" <strong MakerDraw is still moving.</strong It's the giveaway tool I've been working on for streamers, and it's at the point where I need real world testing more than I need more code. If you stream and want to try it, the door is still open — reach out via TinkerAtlas or any platform we're both on. Smaller streams are genuinely more useful for this than big ones.</p <p class="mb 2" <strong The streaming side is on pause.</strong Until the camera situation is sorted, the public Twitch dev streams are slower than usual. I'd rather come back to it when I can do it properly than push out something I'm not happy with.</p <p class="mb 2" <strong Other projects are simmering.</strong There are things in the background — some I've talked about, some I haven't yet — but I'm being deliberate about not over promising. One of the lessons of building this way is that announcing things early creates pressure that doesn't help anyone.</p <h2 class="font bold" The part where I'm honest about the hard bits</h2 <p class="mb 2" The hardest thing about building in public isn't the work. It's the visibility of the gap between what you want to be doing and what you're actually able to do this week.</p <p class="mb 2" There's a version of TinkerAtlas in my head that's two years ahead of where it actually is. Faster, more polished, with all the tools I've sketched out actually shipped. The gap between that version and the real one is just… time, and money, and the bandwidth of one person.</p <p class="mb 2" I'm okay with that. The version that exists is still real. It still serves the community it has. And building at a sustainable pace doesn't burn out the person doing the building, which matters more than I used to think it did.</p <h2 class="font bold" How to help, if you're inclined</h2 <p class="mb 2" The most valuable thing anyone can do is just be part of the community — show up, share your prints, give feedback when something's off, tell a friend if it's useful to you. That's the whole point.</p <p class="mb 2" If you're a streamer and want to test MakerDraw, that genuinely helps move it forward.</p <p class="mb 2" And if you'd like to chip in toward the camera that's currently bottlenecking my streaming setup, the Hollyland Lyra 4 is on my <a target=" blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="text blue 600 hover:text blue 800 dark:text blue 400 dark:hover:text blue 200 underline cursor pointer transition colors underline offset 2 decoration 1 decoration current/40 hover:decoration current focus:decoration current" href="https://throne.com/makerviking/item/d980e62a 3c34 4d9e afd7 9dcacfb07d7b" Throne wishlist</a . No pressure — it's just there if it makes sense for you.</p <p class="mb 2" Thanks for being here while I figure this out in the open.</p <p class="mb 2" — Thomas (MakerViking)</p
