Why We're Building Minti in Public

Most companies build behind closed doors and reveal the result. We're doing the opposite. Minti is being built in public — every decision, every trade-off, every pivot is visible to anyone who cares enough to look.

This isn't a marketing stunt. It's a structural choice about how we think products should be made.

The problem with building in private

Traditional product development follows a predictable script: a small team disappears into a room, emerges months later with a polished thing, and hopes the market agrees it was worth building. Sometimes it works. More often, the first real customer conversation reveals assumptions that should have been challenged on day one.

We've been on both sides of this. We've shipped features nobody asked for and missed problems that were obvious to the people actually experiencing them. The gap between what builders think customers need and what customers actually need is enormous — and it only grows wider when you build in isolation.

What "building in public" actually means for us

For Minti, building in public means three concrete things:

Our roadmap is public. You can see what we're working on, what's coming next, and what we've decided not to build. This isn't a sanitized marketing roadmap — it's the real one, updated as priorities shift.

Customer feedback shapes what gets built. Every piece of feedback submitted through Minti goes through the workflow described in From Feedback to Triage, and the earliest patterns already look a lot like the ones we shared in our first 13 feedback submissions. We don't just collect input — we show you how it's being used.

Our thinking is visible. Through this blog and our public dashboard, we share the reasoning behind decisions. Why did we prioritize this over that? What evidence drove the choice? You can see that operating model more clearly in Building a Customer Research Engine and in these customer feedback examples. You get to see the process, not just the output.

Why this matters for you

If you're considering using Minti — or you already are — building in public means you have real influence over what this product becomes. Your feedback isn't disappearing into a backlog that no one reads. It's being triaged, clustered with similar signals, and directly weighed against everything else we could be working on.

That's a different relationship between a product and its users. It's one where your voice carries weight proportional to the quality of the signal you provide, not the volume. If you want a practical way to pressure-test whether your input is specific enough to influence a decision, use the Minti scorecard before you submit it.

The risk we're taking

Transparency has costs. Competitors can see our strategy. We'll make mistakes in public. Some decisions will be unpopular, and we won't be able to hide behind corporate vagueness.

We think that's worth it. The upside — a product genuinely shaped by the people who use it — is worth more than the illusion of control that comes from building behind walls.

If you want to be part of this, start by submitting feedback. Tell us about the problems you're actually facing, then explore the Product Evidence Kit to see the exact structures we use to turn that input into product decisions. We'll show you exactly what we do with it.