Building In Public Anxiety? Be someone else.

So I come by this not through traditional business channels-- I've been a performing artist (music) for my entire adult life, and it is frankly fucking weird and positively jam packed with anxiety. Getting up in front of a hundred people and asking them to pay you money to sit and listen to you stand on stage and play them the exact same songs you play in your living room, badly, for free, is the kind of thing that will give you a nosebleed if you think about it for too long.

Consequently, what a lot of performing artist will resort to to square the cognitive dissonance between being a regular person 99% of the time and a wild electric performer leaping around the stage and shouting for an hour is.... being somebody else. Pretend you are another person. That person may or may not have the same name as you. That person does things you don't, things you can't, and they are completely at peace with it. Bono does it. Beyonce does it. The list goes on and on. When I'm on stage I'm not me, I'm another person and that other person is going to act like a fucking lunatic with no shame whatsoever.

What does that mean for you?

It means that, ok, you're building in public, but what does in public mean? It doesn't mean you need to answer for it at Thanksgiving dinner, you don't have to tell your neighbors, you don't have to tell your friends, or your classmates that are crushing at Google. You just need to put it out on the internet for, frankly, strangers.

The intersection of people who know you and will judge you, for better or worse, and people who are interested in your product starting out, is vanishingly small if not out-and-out zero. So if you're worried about starting out from scratch because of the judgment of your peers, don't. Let somebody else do it. Start an alter ego from zero, that alter ego is going to build in public, in front of an audience that is hopefully likely to care, and if they die like a dog, cast them off and move on with your life. "Billy Startup? Never met him.
Sounds like an idiot though."

Your friends and family and coworkers are very very unlikely to be a meaningful driver of your success building in public, your target market and your fellow indie hackers are what's going to move you forward. So let your legal name and physical friends go if they're what's holding you back. I've had a bunch of customers, many many thousands, and let me assure you that you could count the ones that even knew, let alone cared, who I am on my fingers.

The only real danger is picking a stupid name that you'll be stuck with if and when you achieve Sasha Fierce a.k.a Beyonce levels of fame and success.