Building in Public — Why and How

Building in public means sharing your progress, your decisions, your setbacks, and sometimes your numbers with an audience while you are still building the company, not after you already have a story with a tidy ending.

Take Priya, who is building a scheduling app for independent barbershops. Instead of working quietly for a year and then launching with a polished announcement, she posts a short update every week: what she shipped, which shop owners signed up, and what broke. In her third month, exactly two shops used the app and one of them asked for a refund. She posted that too.

That does not mean sharing everything. Building in public is selective transparency, not an unfiltered diary. Priya does not post her cofounder's home address, her exact bank balance, or the specific pricing logic that took her two months to get right. She posts enough real detail that people can tell she is not manufacturing a success story, while keeping back the details that would only help a copycat or expose someone else's private information.

The practical reason this matters: an audience that watches you struggle in month three is far more invested in your company by month twelve than one that only hears about you on launch day. You cannot buy that kind of relationship with a single well produced announcement.

Trust is the scarcest resource for a new company online, and it is expensive to fake. When Alex, a solo founder building an invoicing tool for freelance designers, posted his monthly revenue screenshots going from $340 in his first month to $2,100 four months later, three of his next ten customers told him directly that the numbers were the reason they were willing to buy from a two person company they had never heard of. A polished landing page cannot produce that same effect, because a landing page cannot be wrong. Alex's numbers could have looked bad, and the fact that he posted them anyway is what made them convincing.

Building in public also works as distribution and recruiting at the same time. Customers, future employees, and other founders who might become collaborators are often reading people who post honestly about their work, and a well told story about a real decision reaches people that a marketing page never will. When Alex explained, in a single post, why he chose to charge freelancers a flat monthly fee instead of a percentage of each invoice, that post was shared far more than any feature announcement he wrote, because a real reason is more interesting than a list of features. Every post like that is a chance to reach someone who would never have found him through search or ads, and unlike an ad, the reach does not stop the moment the budget runs out.

There is also a behavioral effect that has nothing to do with what the audience thinks of you. Telling a group of people, publicly, that you plan to ship a feature by Friday changes how you spend your Tuesday. Maria, who builds a fundraising tool for small nonprofits, started posting a Monday plan and a Friday recap every week specifically because she noticed she finished far more of what she intended to when other people were watching for the recap. That is not a trick. It is a normal, well documented effect of public commitment, and it works whether or not anyone actually reads the post.

The line between what to share and what to hold back comes down to one question: does this information build trust because it is costly to fake, or does it hand a competitor a shortcut, or reveal something that belongs to someone else? Weekly progress, the reasoning behind a decision, and even bad news usually pass that test. The specific mechanism behind a feature that took months to get right, or a customer's name used without asking first, usually does not.

Where you post matters less than posting somewhere consistently, but the platforms are not interchangeable. Each one reaches a different kind of audience, and picking the wrong one for your business means writing into a room nobody relevant is actually in.

The hardest part of building in public is the first post, because it is the one where you have the least to show and the most self consciousness about showing it. The fastest way through that is a plan for exactly what the first week looks like, so you are not deciding what to post from scratch every day.