Building in public sounds like a highlight reel until you're the one doing it. The version people see is the launch post. The version I've actually lived is a much longer stretch of partnership emails that go nowhere, a payments integration that takes far longer than the tutorial made it look, and an MVP that's "basically done" for weeks longer than that phrase implies.
Giveable is a curated registry marketplace where every product comes from a vetted impact-driven brand, women learning to sew, artisans preserving traditional crafts, cooperatives paying fair wages. The idea is simple to explain. Building the actual thing has not been simple, and I think the honest version of that story is more useful to write than a clean narrative would be.
The MVP took longer than "early 2026" made it sound
The technical build, Next.js, Supabase, Stripe Connect, was substantially complete by March 2026, and that milestone felt like the hard part was behind us. It wasn't. Substantially complete is not the same as launch-ready, and the gap between those two states turned out to be where most of the real friction lives.
Stripe Connect specifically has been more demanding than I expected going in. A registry marketplace means real money flowing to real brands through a platform that has to handle onboarding, verification, and payout correctly for every partner, not just the first one. Getting that live and correct isn't a weekend task, even with modern tooling. It's the kind of infrastructure decision where cutting a corner doesn't show up immediately, it shows up the first time a payment doesn't go where it's supposed to. So it's taken the time it's needed to take, and I haven't rushed past it just to hit an arbitrary date.
The friction nobody puts in the pitch deck
The other honest cost has been brand partnerships. The plan needs roughly fifty vetted brands at launch to make the curated marketplace actually feel like a marketplace instead of a handful of products. Reaching out to impact-driven brands, explaining a platform that doesn't exist yet, and asking them to commit before there's real traffic to point to, is a slow, personal, often quiet process. Most outreach doesn't convert on the first message. Some doesn't convert at all. There's no automation that solves this part, because trust between a new platform and an established brand has to be earned conversation by conversation.
What building in public actually means here
Writing about this honestly means resisting the urge to only post the wins. The real story includes the partnership emails that went unanswered, the extra weeks the Stripe Connect setup took past my original estimate, and the discipline of not launching before the payment infrastructure was actually solid, even though waiting is uncomfortable when you want to show progress.
Where it stands and what's left
The core product is built. The remaining work is the part that doesn't move at the speed of code: getting Stripe Connect fully live and production-ready, and closing enough brand partnerships that launch day means something real for the first person who visits the site. Neither of those is a technical problem anymore. Both are patience and relationship problems, which is a different kind of work than building software, and arguably a harder one for me personally.
If there's a lesson in this for anyone else building a marketplace: budget real time for payments infrastructure and partner trust-building, not just product development. The product is often the easier half.
What building in public has actually earned so far
The upside of writing about this honestly hasn't been a flood of attention. It's been something quieter and more useful: people occasionally reaching out because they recognized their own experience in the friction I described, another founder who's stuck on a similar payments integration, a brand that reads the vetting standard and understands exactly why Giveable is being selective before they're even asked to apply. Public honesty filters for the right kind of interest instead of just maximizing volume of interest, which fits a curated marketplace better than a growth-at-all-costs posture would.
Why I'm not rushing the remaining pieces
It would be easy to force a launch date onto this to create a sense of momentum for the Journal, announce a date, hit it regardless of readiness, call it a win. I'd rather be the founder who's honest about a slower timeline than the one who launched a payments-handling marketplace before the payments were actually solid. The cost of being late is a few more weeks of visible waiting. The cost of being wrong on a live financial integration is a trust problem that would follow Giveable long after the bug itself got fixed. That asymmetry is exactly why the remaining work is getting the time it needs rather than the time a calendar would prefer it take.
What's next
The near-term work is finishing the production Stripe Connect setup end to end, and closing enough of the roughly fifty brand partnerships needed for launch day to feel like a real marketplace rather than a proof of concept. Both are slower than writing code, and both are the actual gate between where Giveable is now and where it needs to be before I'd feel comfortable calling it launched. I'd rather report on that honestly here than round up.
Related Venture
Giveable
Charitable giving, reimagined.
