"Build in public" is not what you think it means

There's a thing that happens when you keep showing up to the same places over time.

It happened to me in Pakistan when I was 18, living in my office, grinding in a city where I knew almost no one.

I'd go to the same food spot, didn't talk to many people, wasn't trying to network. I was just consistent, and I was there.

A few months in, the guy behind the counter started having my order ready before I asked for it.

Other regulars started nodding when I walked in.

I hadn't done anything except show up, repeatedly, until my presence started to mean something.

That's the mechanism behind every personal brand that has ever worked.

The compounded weight of being present, in the right rooms, long enough for people to start filling in the blanks about who you are.

I started posting on X in 2020.

It was a time when I was starting completely over and had things I was figuring out in real time and no particular reason to keep them to myself.

I was learning what worked and burning through what didn't.

I shared it as it happened.

The audience that found me in those years found me the same way people find anyone they end up trusting:

1. They watched me be wrong about something

2. Adjust

3. Come back with a better answer.

They saw the iteration.

And somewhere in that process, they stopped thinking of me as someone who posts about personal branding and started thinking of me as someone who knows it.

That's the part of the "build in public" conversation that almost never gets said clearly.

It's a relationship architecture.

You're not documenting your journey for the sake of content. You're letting people into a process, and over time that access creates a different kind of trust than any case study or credential can.

The mechanics of how this plays out on X in 2026 are worth understanding, because the platform has changed significantly since I started.

- X no longer shows your posts to your followers first. It runs on an interest graph which means your content gets tested against people who engage with your topic, regardless of whether they know you exist.

- The algorithm is making a bet on your post within the first six hours. If it earns engagement from that initial test audience, it gets pushed into a second wave. If it doesn't, it disappears.

Once I understood this, a lot of things clicked. I started treating every post as a contract with someone who had never heard of me.

I was telling them, in a single line, whether what I shared is worth their time.

The other thing that separates good personal brands is coherence - the sense, from the outside, that this person has been thinking seriously about a specific set of things for a long time.

You get that not from having a content strategy, but from having convictions, opinions and perspectives that come from having lived through a version of what your audience is currently dealing with.

The accounts that feel authoritative are almost never the most prolific.

They're the most specific and have staked out a corner of a conversation and they keep showing up there, with something real to add, until that corner starts to feel like theirs.

That specificity is what makes you recognizable.

I've been in this for five years. The audience I have now is the result of showing up to the same rooms, over and over.

That compounding is available to anyone.

It just requires that you stop treating your presence online as content and start treating it as a relationship where you're building with people who are watching you figure it all out.

— Wiz

If you're trying to figure out what your version of this looks like, reply or book a call and I'll give you an honest read.