Why I'm finally building in public

I've never really tweeted.

Not once seriously. Not as a founder. Not with my real name attached to something I built. I've started accounts, never posted, and then disappeared. That's the pattern I'm trying to break this week.

I'm writing this because I've been quiet for too long — and being quiet hasn't worked for me before. So today I'm doing something different.

What I'm building

I'm building PresenceOS — a platform that helps founders find the right people at the right moment.

The idea is simple: you post what you're looking for or offering right now (a co-founder, an early user, advice, capital, anything specific), and the system matches you with people whose intent fits yours. Not based on who you've been, but on what you need this week.

It's live at presenceos.org. The first version is in real users' hands. There's still a lot to fix.

How it started

I built the first version mostly alone, in evenings and weekends, with AI tools doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Whatever someone with a small team could have built two years ago, one person with AI can build now. That's the part of 2026 that still surprises me when I think about it.

When I had something working, I shared it with friends.

Some replied with real feedback. Some didn't. Friends are friends. You know how it goes.

The ones who DID reply gave me feedback I would never have thought of:

"Your intent box only lets me write 500 characters. I have more to say than that." → I bumped it to 2000.
"You said we're connected, but I can't actually see how to reach the person." → I added contact info exchange on accepted connections.
"The system is matching me with people doing similar things, but I want people who NEED what I'm building." → I'm still working on this one. It's the hardest problem in the product.

Every piece of feedback that I could ship a fix for, I did. The ones I couldn't fix immediately, I wrote down. That's the loop I want to keep going — but in public now, with more people watching, more people giving feedback, more chances to be wrong out loud.

Why public

I'll be honest: this part scares me.

Building quietly feels safer. If nobody knows you're working on something, nobody knows when it fails. But "safer" turned out to mean "no feedback, no readers, no users, no momentum." Silence is a different way of being stuck.

So I'm choosing the opposite this time. I'll share what I shipped each week, what broke, what I'm learning. The wins, but also the experiments that didn't work. The product decisions I'm second-guessing. The matching algorithm I'm still tuning.

If I fail at this, at least I'll fail where someone can see it and tell me why. That's the bet I'm making.

What I'd love from you

Two things:

Honest feedback. If you're a founder looking for something specific right now, try PresenceOS and tell me what worked and what didn't. Negative feedback is more useful than positive — it tells me what to fix. Don't be polite if it's broken; tell me it's broken.

Follow along if you want. I'll be posting on X about what I'm shipping, and writing the longer version of each week's journey here on the blog. If any of this resonates, hit subscribe below or follow me on X.

I'm doing everything alone right now. That's manageable today; it might not be at 1,000 users. We'll see how far the AI-assisted-one-person-team thing can stretch.

P.S. This is the first time I've written something like this in public. If it's bad — well, it can only get better from here. If parts of it landed, tell me which parts. I'm reading every reply.

— Rakesh