Building in public: what it’s really like

Building in public sounds simple: make something, share the process, let people follow along. Then you have to decide what to share when the work is still unfinished.

That is the part I want to make room for here. The page that needs another pass. The idea that is interesting but still needs a buyer. The question I can answer through a small experiment instead of another week of planning.

I’m Ashley Kays. I’ve spent more than 20 years working across product, design, marketing, and growth. Now I’m bringing that experience to my own ventures through Waymaker, Waymaker Agency, and The Wealth Experiment. This is where I’m sharing what I’m building and the thinking behind it.

Experience helps. There are still things to find out.

My background gives me a way to approach a problem. It helps me connect the customer experience to the offer, the page, the marketing, and the work that happens after someone says yes. It cannot tell me in advance which new idea people will care about.

For each venture, I still have to ask: who is this useful for? What are they trying to accomplish? Why would they choose this? How will they find it? What would make it worth coming back?

That is one of the reasons I’m calling this an experiment. I can bring a lot of experience to the work and still have an unanswered question in front of me.

The unfinished middle deserves a place in the story

A finished page gives you something to look at. The decisions underneath it are often more useful to someone who wants to build their own.

Why did I choose this audience? Why does the page lead with that problem? What belongs in the first version? Which feature can wait? What would I need to learn before putting more time into it?

Those are the parts I want this journal to hold. I want you to be able to follow the reasoning, including when the next decision changes. If I revise an offer or narrow an idea, the earlier version can still teach us something.

AI is part of how I build

I use AI in the work: to explore directions, organize information, develop drafts, and help build and improve sites. Being hands-on with these tools is a substantial part of this experiment.

It changes what I can attempt and how quickly I can get a first version in front of me. It also makes my judgment more important. I still need to choose the problem, provide context, review the result, and decide whether it serves the person on the other side of the screen.

My working loop is straightforward:

1. Name the outcome. What should someone be able to do after using this?
2. Give the tool useful context. Include the audience, constraints, examples, and what a good result needs to contain.
3. Build a small version. Get enough in place to inspect the idea and try the experience.
4. Review it myself. Read the words, follow the links, check the claims, and walk through the next step.
5. Test with real people. Use what they do and say to decide what deserves another pass.

I’m sharing AI workflow maps and practical tools here so you can try that approach on your own work. Knowing where a tool helps—and where you need to take over—is a skill worth building.

Building a portfolio means choosing where my attention goes

The Wealth Experiment includes different kinds of ideas: practical education, services, useful content, creative projects, and products. You can explore them in the venture directory.

AI and repeatable systems help me work across that portfolio. Each idea still needs a reason to exist. Each one asks for research, decisions, quality checks, distribution, and maintenance.

The question I keep bringing the work back to is: what deserves my attention next? Sometimes that means building. Sometimes it means making an existing page clearer, improving the next step, or asking a better question before adding anything else.

A live site is a place to begin learning. Revenue, profit, and repeat use each need their own evidence. I want the updates here to make that distinction easy to see.

Small progress can be worth sharing

I want to leave room for the ordinary work: getting an offer into a sentence someone understands, finishing a useful resource, checking a confusing path, or identifying the assumption a test needs to answer.

Those are examples of progress I can document without turning them into claims about customer demand. If something is a hypothesis, I can label it that way. If a result is still unknown, I can say that too.

When there is a result to share, the context matters: what I tried, how long I tried it, what it cost, what happened, and what I’m doing next. A number becomes more useful when you can understand the work behind it.

The experiment scorecard is built around that habit. It gives the time, costs, evidence, and next decision a place to live.

There is a human part to making the work visible

It is easier to explain something after the ending is clear. Sharing while I’m still deciding asks for a different kind of confidence: enough confidence to show the work, and enough openness to change it.

I don’t want every update to need a dramatic lesson. A useful question, a decision with its reasoning, or a small improvement can be enough. I also want to keep enough room to do the work itself.

For me, building in public means sharing a process people can learn from. It does not require putting every part of life online. Client information and other people’s private experiences stay out of the public journal.

A weekly note you can borrow

If you want to try this too, start with one project and one short update. Here is the structure I’m using as a guide:

• What I’m testing: the audience, problem, and assumption.
• What I changed: the specific thing I made or improved.
• What I observed: actual feedback or behavior, with the limits of that evidence.
• What it took: time, money, and effort where I can measure them.
• What I’m still unsure about: the question the work has not answered.
• What happens next: one decision and the next small test.

You can share that as a post, an email, a short video, or a note on your own site. Choose a rhythm that leaves you enough time to build. You do not need an audience of thousands to start documenting useful work.

Come along while it takes shape

My aim for The Wealth Experiment is to make this process useful to you: practical skills, visible decisions, and a clearer way to test something of your own.

You can follow the experiments, explore the Side Hustle Lab, or use the launch path to choose your next step. If you want to build with guidance, take a look at Two Mondays to a Side Hustle or work with me.

I’m building this as I go. You’re welcome to start where you are, too.

— Ashley

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