What "Building in Public" Actually Means
Building in public means sharing the real, unfiltered story of creating your startup as it happens. Revenue numbers, user growth, feature decisions, failures, wins, and everything in between. It's the opposite of the typical startup approach where you build in secret and reveal a polished product at launch.
This is not the same as posting vague motivational content on LinkedIn. Building in public means sharing specifics. Actual numbers. Real decisions. Honest reflections on what worked and what didn't.
Think of it as turning your startup journey into a running documentary that your future customers can follow along with. When people watch you build something from scratch, they feel invested in your success. That emotional investment turns followers into users, and users into advocates.
Why It Works: The Psychology Behind Building in Public
People root for founders they can see working hard. It's the same reason people watch cooking shows instead of just eating at restaurants. The process is compelling.
When you share your journey openly, three powerful things happen:
Trust builds automatically. Showing your real numbers and honest mistakes signals that you have nothing to hide. That transparency is rare, and people notice it.
Reciprocity kicks in. When you share valuable insights from your experience for free, your audience feels a natural desire to give back. Often, that means trying your product or recommending it to someone who needs it.
You become memorable. In a sea of startups with polished marketing sites and generic messaging, the founder who shares their actual $3,200 MRR number and explains how they got there stands out immediately.
There's also a selfish benefit: building in public forces you to reflect on your progress. Writing a weekly update about what you accomplished makes you more intentional about how you spend your time.
Where to Build in Public
Not every platform is a good fit. Choose one or two that match your audience and your strengths. Spreading yourself across five platforms means you'll do a mediocre job on all of them.
Twitter/X is the most popular platform for building in public. The indie maker and startup community there is active and supportive. Short updates, threads about lessons learned, and milestone announcements all perform well. If your customers are other founders, developers, or tech workers, start here.
LinkedIn works surprisingly well for B2B products. The format favors longer posts with personal stories. If your product serves professionals, marketing teams, or enterprise customers, LinkedIn gives you access to decision makers who rarely hang out on Twitter.
Indie Hackers is purpose built for this. The community is full of founders building products and sharing progress. Monthly revenue updates and "milestone" posts get genuine engagement from people who understand exactly what you're going through.
A personal blog gives you full control and SEO benefits. Long form posts about your journey rank in Google and drive traffic for months or years. The downside is that it takes longer to build an audience compared to social platforms.
YouTube or TikTok works if you're comfortable on camera. Video content about building a startup has a surprisingly large audience, and the algorithm can expose you to people who would never find your written posts.
Pick one primary platform. Get consistent there. Add a second one only after you've built a rhythm on the first.
What to Share (And What to Keep Private)
The biggest fear founders have about building in public is oversharing. That's a valid concern, so here are clear boundaries.
Share these things freely:
Revenue numbers and growth metrics. Monthly recurring revenue, number of users, conversion rates, churn rate. These are the posts that get the most engagement because real numbers are rare and valuable.
Milestones and wins. First paying customer, first $1K month, first 100 users. Celebrate these publicly. Your audience will celebrate with you.
Lessons from failures. A feature that flopped, a marketing campaign that bombed, a pivot you had to make. Failure stories are more engaging than success stories because they feel more honest and relatable.
Behind the scenes decisions. Why you chose one tech stack over another, how you priced your product, why you turned down a partnership. Decision making content is some of the most valuable you can share.
Tools and processes. What tools you use, how you organize your day, your development workflow. Other founders love this kind of practical content.
Keep these things private:
Security details. Never share your infrastructure setup in a way that could be exploited. No API keys, server configurations, or vulnerability information.
Customer data. Never share anything that could identify individual users without their explicit permission. Aggregate data is fine. Individual data is not.
Information that helps competitors directly. Your pricing strategy reasoning is fine to share. Your exact customer acquisition cost by channel might be giving away too much if you're in a competitive space.
Anything you're contractually bound to keep confidential. NDA terms, private investor conversations, and partnership details that aren't public yet.
When in doubt, ask yourself: "Would I be comfortable if my biggest competitor read this?" If yes, share it. If no, keep it private.
How to Write a Good Build in Public Update
Bad updates are vague and self congratulatory. Good updates are specific, honest, and useful to the reader even if they never use your product.
The formula for a strong update:
1.Lead with a specific number or fact. "We hit $4,800 MRR this month, up 22% from last month" is better than "Great month of growth!"
2.Explain what drove the result. "Most of that growth came from a single Reddit post that brought 2,000 visitors in one day" gives your audience something actionable.
3.Share what didn't work. "We also spent $300 on Google Ads and got zero conversions" is the kind of honesty that builds trust and helps other founders avoid the same mistake.
4.End with what's next. "Next week, I'm testing cold email outreach to 50 marketing agencies" gives people a reason to follow along.
Keep it concise. A build in public update should take 5 to 15 minutes to write. If you're spending an hour crafting every post, you're overthinking it. The whole point is that it's real and unpolished.
How Often to Post Without Being Annoying
Consistency matters more than frequency. Posting three times a week every week for six months beats posting every day for three weeks and then going silent.
A sustainable schedule looks like this:
3 to 5 times per week on Twitter/X. Mix quick updates ("Just shipped the new dashboard") with longer threads about lessons learned. Not every post needs to be a revelation. Sometimes "Spent 4 hours debugging a webhook integration, finally fixed it" is enough.
Once a week on LinkedIn or Indie Hackers. A weekly summary or a single focused story. These platforms favor longer, more thoughtful content, so one solid post per week outperforms daily low effort ones.
Once or twice a month on a blog. A longer reflection on what you learned, your monthly revenue update, or a detailed breakdown of a specific challenge you solved.
The worst thing you can do is start strong and disappear. If you can only commit to two posts a week, that's perfectly fine. Just make sure you actually do it every week.
Turning Followers Into Users: The Soft Sell
Building in public is not a sales pitch. The moment your updates start feeling like ads, your audience will disengage. But that doesn't mean you should never mention your product. You just need to do it naturally.
Approaches that work:
Share the problem, then the solution. "I kept hearing from freelancers that invoicing takes too long. So I built [product] to cut the process from 20 minutes to 2 minutes." The sell is implicit.
Show your product in context. When you share a screenshot of your analytics dashboard or a video of yourself using the product to demonstrate a feature, people naturally want to try it. You don't need to add "Sign up now!"
Let others do the selling. When a user tweets something nice about your product, share it. When someone posts a review, repost it with a brief thank you. Social proof does the selling for you.
Include a link in your bio, not in every post. Your Twitter bio, your LinkedIn headline, and your Indie Hackers profile should all link to your product. That way anyone who's curious can find it without you needing to pitch in every update.
The conversion path is: they follow your journey, they start rooting for you, they get curious about the product, they click the link in your bio, they sign up. It happens slowly, but it compounds over time.
Real Founders Who Built Businesses Through Building in Public
This isn't just theory. Plenty of founders have turned building in public into a core growth strategy.
Pieter Levels built Nomad List and RemoteOK while sharing every detail publicly on Twitter. His audience watched him go from side project to millions in annual revenue. That audience became his primary distribution channel, no ads required.
Jon Yongfook documented building Bannerbear from zero to $25K MRR on Twitter and Indie Hackers. His transparent revenue updates attracted both users and press coverage, including features in multiple newsletters.
Tony Dinh shared his journey of building multiple small SaaS products on Twitter, posting revenue screenshots and development updates regularly. His following grew to tens of thousands, and each new product he launches benefits from the audience he built through transparency.
What all these founders have in common: they were consistent, specific, and honest. They shared real numbers, admitted failures, and kept posting even when growth was slow. None of them went viral overnight. They all built their audience one post at a time over months and years.
The Compound Effect: Why Six Months Changes Everything
Building in public is a long game. Your first few posts will get minimal engagement. That's normal. The compound effect takes time to kick in.
Here's what the typical trajectory looks like:
Month 1: You post regularly. A handful of likes, maybe a few follows. It feels like shouting into the void.
Month 2 to 3: A few posts start getting real engagement. Other founders reply, share your content, and offer advice. You start recognizing the same people in your notifications.
Month 4 to 5: Your audience crosses a threshold where new content gets consistent engagement. People start tagging you in conversations related to your space. You get your first DMs from potential users who discovered you through your posts.
Month 6 and beyond: Building in public becomes one of your top acquisition channels. New followers arrive daily. Your older posts keep getting shared. Journalists and podcast hosts start reaching out to you instead of the other way around.
The founders who give up after one month miss all of this. The ones who stick with it for six months almost always say it was worth the effort.
Getting Started Today
You don't need a strategy doc or a content calendar to start building in public. Here's what to do right now:
1.Pick one platform. Twitter/X if you're targeting founders or developers. LinkedIn if you're targeting business professionals. Indie Hackers if you want a supportive founder community.
2.Write your first post. Share what you're building, why you're building it, and one specific number (users, revenue, weeks since you started, whatever you have). Post it.
3.Commit to three posts this week. They don't need to be long. "Shipped feature X today. Here's why I prioritized it over feature Y" is a perfectly good post.
4.Submit your startup to directories like PostYourStartup.co so that your build in public posts have something to link to. When someone discovers your journey and wants to learn more, they should be able to find your product listed somewhere credible.
5.Set a reminder for one month from now to review your posts and see what resonated. Double down on the content types that got the most genuine engagement.
The best time to start building in public was when you first had the idea for your product. The second best time is today. Every day you're not sharing your journey is a day of potential audience growth you're leaving on the table.
Timothy Bramlett