What Is Building in Public?
Building in public is the practice of openly sharing the journey of creating and growing a product or company - including revenue, user metrics, challenges, decisions, and failures - with an online audience. Instead of operating in stealth mode until launch, founders who build in public treat transparency as a distribution strategy. They turn the startup building process into content that attracts customers, collaborators, and community. The practice took root in the indie hacker movement and has since spread to venture-backed startups, solo creators, and established companies looking for authentic ways to connect with their audiences.
Where Did Building in Public Come From?
Building in public emerged from the indie hacker community in the mid-2010s. Founders like Pieter Levels (Nomad List), Jon Yongfook (Bannerbear), and the early members of the Indie Hackers forum started sharing monthly revenue updates, product development decisions, and honest growth metrics publicly.
The practice gained traction for a simple reason: it worked. Founders who shared openly attracted audiences who became early customers, beta testers, and advocates. The transparency created trust that traditional marketing could not replicate.
By 2020, building in public had moved beyond indie hackers. Venture-backed founders began sharing fundraising processes, hiring decisions, and growth metrics on Twitter and LinkedIn. The pandemic accelerated this shift as remote work made online presence more important and founders sought connection in distributed environments.
What Should You Share When Building in Public?
The most effective build-in-public content falls into several categories, each serving different purposes.
Revenue and Growth Metrics
Monthly revenue updates, user growth numbers, and conversion rates are the backbone of build-in-public content. 82% of people are more likely to trust a company when executives are active on social media, and sharing real numbers amplifies that trust significantly. A founder posting "we hit $10K MRR this month, up from $7K last month" creates more credibility than any marketing landing page.
Product Decisions
Explaining why you built a feature, chose a technology stack, or redesigned your onboarding flow gives your audience insight into your thinking. This type of content attracts users who share your values and approach - the exact users most likely to become long-term customers.
Challenges and Failures
Counter-intuitively, sharing what went wrong often generates more engagement than sharing wins. A post about losing a major customer and what you learned from it resonates because it is honest and relatable. Most founders experience similar challenges, and seeing someone navigate them openly builds deep audience connection.
Behind-the-Scenes Process
How you run your team meetings, how you prioritize your roadmap, how you handle customer support - these operational details fascinate other founders and professionals. Process content is evergreen, highly shareable, and positions you as someone with genuine expertise.
What Platforms Work Best for Building in Public?
Twitter/X
Twitter is the home platform for building in public. The real-time, conversational format suits quick updates, metric shares, and reflection threads. The indie hacker and startup community on Twitter actively engages with build-in-public content, creating a built-in audience that rewards transparency. A founder sharing a revenue milestone or a candid post-mortem on a failed feature can gain thousands of impressions from community retweets alone.
LinkedIn works for B2B founders building in public with a professional audience. The platform's algorithm rewards personal stories and authentic content, making build-in-public posts naturally high-performing. LinkedIn's audience skews toward decision-makers who might become customers, investors, or partners.
Blogs and Newsletters
Long-form build-in-public content - monthly retrospectives, detailed product post-mortems, and annual reviews - suits blogs and newsletters. These formats allow depth that social media cannot provide. Many founders pair a weekly Twitter cadence with a monthly detailed blog update that goes deeper into metrics and decisions.
Multiple Platforms Together
The most effective build-in-public strategies span multiple platforms. A product decision shared as a quick Twitter thread becomes a detailed LinkedIn post becomes a section in a monthly newsletter. Each platform reaches a different audience segment, and the content only needs to be created once.
What Are the Benefits of Building in Public?
Trust and Credibility
Transparency builds trust faster than any other marketing strategy. When potential customers can see your revenue trajectory, read about how you handle challenges, and watch you iterate on feedback, they develop confidence in your product before ever trying it.
Audience as Distribution Channel
Every build-in-public post is also marketing content. An audience that follows your journey becomes an organic distribution channel. When you launch a new feature, your build-in-public audience already understands the context, cares about the outcome, and is primed to try it and share it.
Community and Feedback
Building in public attracts people who care about your success. These community members provide feedback on features, share your content, introduce you to potential customers, and support you through difficult periods. This community is a form of community-led growth that emerges naturally from consistent transparency.
Accountability
Sharing goals publicly creates external accountability. When you tell your audience you plan to launch a feature by end of month, you are more likely to follow through. This accountability loop makes build-in-public founders more productive.
Recruitment
Talented people want to work at companies they believe in. Building in public gives potential hires an inside look at your company culture, decision-making process, and trajectory. Some of the most effective startup recruiting happens through build-in-public content that attracts candidates who align with your values.
What Are the Risks and Boundaries?
Building in public is not without risks, and setting clear boundaries is important.
Competitive Exposure
Sharing revenue and growth metrics gives competitors information about your business. In practice, this risk is smaller than it appears - execution matters far more than information, and the trust benefits typically outweigh the competitive risk. But founders should avoid sharing proprietary technology details, specific customer information, or strategic plans that could be directly exploited.
Emotional Toll
Sharing publicly during difficult periods - revenue drops, customer losses, team departures - requires emotional resilience. Not every audience member will be supportive. Set boundaries about what you share when it involves other people, and remember that you control the narrative.
Sustainability
Building in public requires consistency to be effective. Many founders start enthusiastically and burn out after a few months. Choose a sustainable cadence. Weekly metric updates and a monthly retrospective are more maintainable than daily detailed posts. The goal is to build a long-term habit, not sprint and stop.
The most important boundary is personal: decide what you will and will not share before you start. Revenue is usually fine. Employee performance issues are not. Product roadmap is usually fine. Investor disagreements require more care. Having clear personal guidelines prevents regrettable posts.
At Conbersa, we believe building in public is one of the highest-ROI personal branding strategies available to founders. The infrastructure to maintain consistent presence across platforms - where your build-in-public content actually reaches people - is what turns transparency from a nice idea into a growth engine.