Buffer has openly published its revenue and every employee salary since 2013—proof that building in public gives founders four compounding benefits: pre-launch distribution, faster feedback, lower acquisition cost, and trust that closes sales. You share the process, not just the finished product, and the process becomes your marketing. The cost is exposure. For most solo founders and small SaaS teams, that trade is worth it.
What does building in public actually mean?
Building in public means sharing your real numbers, decisions, and progress while you build, instead of waiting for a polished launch. It covers revenue, user counts, roadmap choices, mistakes, and the reasoning behind them—posted openly on X, LinkedIn, or a public changelog.
The practice predates the label. Austin Kleon's 2014 book Show Your Work! argued that sharing your process is how you get found. Buffer took it literally with a live open revenue and salary dashboard. Indie Hackers built a whole community around founders posting their monthly recurring revenue in public.
The core idea is simple: your process is content, and content is distribution.
What are the main benefits of building in public?
The main benefits are distribution, feedback, and trust—three assets that normally cost money and time to buy. Building in public generates all three as a side effect of work you were already doing.
Distribution comes first. You grow an audience before the product exists, so launch day has a warm list instead of silence. Feedback comes second: shipping decisions in the open means users correct you early, before you waste weeks building the wrong thing.
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Trust comes third and matters most for sales. People buy from people they can verify. Nielsen's 2021 Trust in Advertising report found that recommendations from people you know remain the most trusted format worldwide, well above paid ads. Public building makes you that trusted person for strangers, because they watch you keep promises over months.
| Dimension | Build in public | Build in private |
|---|---|---|
| Audience at launch | Warm, pre-built | Cold, starts at zero |
| Feedback speed | Days | After launch |
| Acquisition cost | Lower, content-driven | Higher, ad-driven |
| Competitor visibility | High | Low |
| Emotional cost | Higher (exposure) | Lower |
| Accountability | Public, strong | Private, weak |
How does building in public lower customer acquisition cost?
It lowers acquisition cost by turning your build process into free, compounding content that attracts buyers without ad spend. Each post, metric, or lesson is marketing you did not have to write separately.
Three mechanisms do the work:
- Content doubles as marketing. A post explaining why you chose SQLite over Postgres is a decision you had to make anyway—and it ranks, gets shared, and pulls in the exact people who face that choice.
- Followers convert warmer than ad clicks. Someone who watched you ship for three months already trusts you. The Edelman Trust Barometer tracks falling trust in institutions and advertising, which pushes buyers toward individuals they can watch over time.
- Every honest milestone is shareable. Real numbers and real setbacks get reposted; polished press releases do not.
The result is a flywheel: you build, you post the build, the post brings people, some become customers, and their attention funds the next post. Nothing here requires an ad budget.
What we ship differently because we build in public
At Botensten we build production software with AI every day, and building in public changes what we ship, not just how we market it. Two concrete examples from our own work.
First, we treat the changelog as a public feature. When we shipped our members database, we posted the schema before it was finished. A reader flagged that our email column had no uniqueness constraint—about two hours before we would have shipped a duplicate-account bug to production. Private, we'd have caught it in support tickets a week later, if at all.
Second, we publish costs. We run one SQLite database on a single box and said so openly: monthly infrastructure under $50. That post out-performed every feature announcement we made that month, because founders want the renter-to-owner math, not the feature list.
The trade-off we hit was real. A competitor cloned one of our landing pages within a week of us posting it. We shipped faster anyway, and the audience already knew who was the original. Exposure is the tax; speed and credibility are what you buy with it.
What are the risks, and who should not do it?
The two real risks are exposure and emotional drain. Competitors can copy visible ideas, and public metrics invite criticism that can knock a solo founder off course.
Building in public is a poor fit in three cases:
- Your moat is a secret—a proprietary algorithm or patent-pending method you cannot show without giving it away.
- You're in a regulated space where sharing revenue or user data creates legal or compliance exposure.
- Dipping metrics would derail you. Numbers go down sometimes. If a bad month in public would stop you shipping, keep the metrics private and share lessons instead.
For everyone else, the guardrails are simple: share outcomes and reasoning, not credentials or customer data; pick which numbers you'll show and stay consistent; and never post anything you'd panic about a rival seeing.
How do you start building in public this week?
Start by picking one platform and one metric you'll share weekly, then post your next real decision with the reasoning behind it. You don't need an audience to begin—you build the audience by beginning.
A five-step first week:
- Choose one channel (X or LinkedIn) and commit to it for 90 days.
- Pick one metric you'll report weekly—signups, revenue, or active users.
- Write your next build decision as a short post: the choice, the options, the reason.
- Share one thing that broke and what you changed. Setbacks earn more trust than wins.
- Reply to everyone who engages for the first month. Early relationships compound.
Do this for a quarter and you'll have distribution, a feedback loop, and a track record—three things money can't buy quickly, earned as a byproduct of building.
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