I spent a decade trying to be invisible

PUBlish · The Notebook 5 May · 2026 Issue No. 01 · 6 min read I spent a decade trying to be invisible . I was wrong. A confession from a founder who hid from his own customers on purpose, watched louder people pass him, and finally figured out which mistake costs more. Darius Baltunis · founder, InterioApp Vilnius · Tuesday A few years ago, a partner asked me a small question that I did not have a good answer for. He had been running a window-coverings shop in another country for twenty years, and we were in the late stages of a partnership conversation that I badly wanted to close. We had spent maybe eight hours on Zoom together. He said, near the end of the last call: "Darius, I&rsquo;ve enjoyed talking with you, but I realise I don&rsquo;t actually know who you are. Help me out - tell me about your business." I froze for a beat. Not because I did not know what to say. Because I had spent the previous decade carefully arranging my professional life so that nobody could ask that question and get a complete answer. I told him about InterioApp. Then I stopped. He waited. "What else?" he asked, gently. This is a piece about why I had nothing else to say, and why I was wrong about that for ten years. · · · Here is the thing nobody tells you about being the founder of a SaaS in a small niche. The thing that is most likely to make a customer trust you - the most credible piece of evidence in your favour - is also the thing you will be the most tempted to hide. In my case, the credible thing is that I do not just sell software to retailers in the window-coverings industry. I also own one. A real shop in Vilnius, with real customers, real Saturday-evening crises, real margin pressure, real conversations about which curtain rod a confused homeowner actually needs. My wife runs it. I built InterioApp because I needed it for our shop, before I sold it to anyone else. For ten years, I kept that quiet. I told myself a careful story to justify the silence. The story went: if my SaaS customers know I run a competing shop, they will worry that I might steal their data. They will think I am using their pricing, their customer lists, their workflows to make my own shop better. The conflict of interest will spook them. The story was not entirely wrong. It was real enough that I could believe it. It was also, I now think, mostly an excuse for something else - which is that being visible felt risky, and being invisible felt safe, and I have always preferred safe. So I kept my name off the shop&rsquo;s website. I never posted about the shop on InterioApp&rsquo;s channels. I never mentioned to a SaaS prospect that the founder they were buying from had stood behind a real counter and rung up real sales. I let the shop and the software run as if they were two strangers who happened to share an owner. The story I told myself to stay invisible was a real story. The fact that I needed it to be true was the part I should have noticed. · · · Here is what invisibility actually cost me. I could not see it at the time. I can see it now, with embarrassing clarity. Every prospect who got onto a call with me started from a worse position than they should have. They were buying software from a stranger, when they could have been buying from a fellow shop owner. The pitch took twice as long because I had to manufacture credibility from features and case studies, when I had real credibility sitting two streets away. I let competitors with weaker stories outrank mine, simply because they were willing to tell theirs. Partners who eventually agreed to work with us did so despite, not because of, the absence of my full story. Some partners who could have been a fit walked away during the courtship phase, because they did not feel they knew enough about the person on the other side of the contract. I have to assume that is true - I cannot count the partnerships I never knew I lost, but the count is not zero. And the compounding never started. Authority in a niche is a flywheel. You stand for something specific, you say it out loud over and over, you become the person the niche associates with the thing. I did not stand for anything in public for ten years. So I had nothing compounding, which means today, when I do start, I am starting from zero. A version of me who had been writing honestly about retail-software-from-the-shop-floor for the past decade would not need to do what I am doing now. He would already be there. · · · Now - the other failure mode, because I want to be fair. While I was being invisible, I watched a lot of founders go in the opposite direction. They posted everything. They turned every product release into a five-paragraph LinkedIn essay about resilience. They wrote about hiring their first engineer as if it were a moral lesson for humanity. They built personal brands that were five times the size of their actual companies, and the brand-to-company ratio was the point, not an accident. This is also a mistake, and in some ways a worse one. The founders who built bigger names than their companies eventually had to defend the gap, and the defence consumed them. Some of them shipped less product because the posting was easier and the dopamine was faster. Some of them confused being known with being respected. A few of them ended up with audiences who would have walked away the day they read the actual customer reviews. So both failure modes are real. Hiding makes you invisible to the people who would have been your strongest advocates. Performing makes you visible for the wrong reasons, to the wrong people, in service of a story you eventually cannot back up. I had been so busy avoiding the second mistake that I had given myself entirely to the first. The fact that the first is quieter does not make it cheaper. · · · The third thing - which I am only now starting to do - is the one that took me ten years to see, even though it was always sitting there. It is this: be visible because of the work, not in front of it. Write what is actually true about what you are doing. Put your name on the things you actually own. Stop hiding the parts that make you credible because you are afraid of how they will be misread. Tell the story you would tell on a long flight to a stranger who happens to also run a small business. That is the whole move. There is no clever framework underneath it. It is just refusing to do either of the two convenient things - hiding or performing - and committing to the slower, less convenient third thing, which is showing up as a real person doing real work, in public, on a regular basis. I am writing this piece, and the ones that will follow it, on PUBlish. PUBlish is a writing platform I am building - the one you are reading this on. Part of why I am building it is that I do not trust the platforms that punished invisibility and rewarded performance for the last decade. They are not where I want my writing to compound. So I built somewhere else. There is more to say about that, in another piece. Today I am putting my name back on the shop&rsquo;s website. The paragraph went up this morning. It says, in plain language, that the SaaS founder and the shop owner are the same person, that we run the businesses with separate teams and separate data, and that everything we know about serving customers we learned standing behind a counter. The customers who were going to spook were already going to spook. The customers who were going to lean in have not had the chance to, for ten years. They will, starting today. Here is what I am committing to in writing, so that I cannot quietly back out of it. From this Tuesday, every Tuesday, I am publishing one piece on PUBlish. About something specific from running InterioApp, the shop, or the wider world of building real businesses in a small country. I expect the first ten of them to be uneven. I expect the next forty to start showing a voice. The first piece you are reading is this one. The rest is up to me, and there is no good excuse left. — see you next Tuesday, Darius The Notebook · No. 01 · pub-lish.com 5 May 2026