Building in public is the practice of sharing your product's development, revenue, and decisions openly as they happen, usually on X or LinkedIn. Pieter Levels grew multiple profitable startups this way, posting his numbers in real time. It works because the documentation of the work becomes the marketing for the work.
What is building in public and why does it matter?
Building in public is sharing your product's progress, revenue, and decisions openly as you make them. It matters because transparency compounds trust and distribution at the same time. In HubSpot's 2022 State of Marketing survey, 70% of marketers said transparency is key to building trust with customers.
The idea spread through founders like Pieter Levels, who posts live revenue and ships products in weeks instead of years. Stripe's writing on transparency in startup growth frames it plainly: sharing the messy middle turns strangers into an audience that roots for you. You are not marketing a finished thing. You are documenting the work, and the record is the marketing.
How do founders build in public without leaking their edge?
Founders build in public by sharing outcomes and lessons, not the exact mechanisms a rival could copy overnight. Share your revenue, your churn, and what you learned. Keep unreleased pricing experiments and proprietary code private until they ship.
A workable boundary looks like this:
You might also like
- Share metrics that are already true: MRR, signups, churn.
- Share decisions after you've made them, with the reasoning attached.
- Share failures once you understand the root cause.
- Hold back unshipped positioning, security specifics, and anything a competitor can copy faster than you can defend it.
The test is simple: if a post helps a customer trust you more and only helps a competitor marginally, publish it. If it hands a rival your playbook before you've banked the advantage, wait.
What are the real benefits of transparency for a startup?
The real benefits are trust, faster feedback, and cheaper distribution. Transparent companies tend to earn stronger loyalty—Harvard Business Review's reporting on the benefits of transparency ties open operations to higher retention.
Here is how the two approaches compare:
| Factor | Building in public | Building in stealth |
|---|---|---|
| Feedback speed | Daily, from real users | Delayed until launch |
| Distribution cost | Low—audience compounds | High—cold ads at launch |
| Trust signal | Strong, evidence-based | Weak until proven |
| Risk of tactic copying | Higher | Lower |
| Accountability | Public and motivating | Private only |
Stealth protects secrets. Public builds an audience before you need one. Most solo operators need the audience more than the secret.
How we build in public at Botensten
We build in public at Botensten because the documentation doubles as our marketing budget. Every week we ship production software with AI, and we post what broke, what it cost, and what we changed.
A concrete example: we rebuilt a member workspace and the first version silently failed to persist edits—a classic stub that looked done but saved nothing. The handler was wired to no backend. We posted the bug, the root cause, and the same-day fix. That thread pulled more qualified signups than any ad we ran, because founders trust a studio that shows its failures instead of only its wins.
Our working rule is strict: if a feature isn't verified end to end—data persists, the reload survives, we clicked through it ourselves—we don't call it shipped, and we don't post it as done. Building in public only builds trust if the thing you showed actually works.
What are the common pitfalls of building in public?
The common pitfalls are oversharing, vanity metrics, and burnout. Posting every raw number can invite competitors, spook enterprise buyers, and trap you in a loop where posting quietly replaces building.
Watch for these:
- Vanity metrics: sharing follower counts instead of revenue or retention.
- Oversharing: exposing legal, security, or unreleased pricing details.
- Audience capture: building what gets likes, not what customers pay for.
- Consistency debt: starting daily updates you can't sustain.
- Comparison spiral: measuring your month-one numbers against someone's year-three.
The fix for most of these is a cadence you can actually hold and a rule that the product always ships before the post about it.
Can building in public grow a community and a personal brand?
Yes—it is one of the fastest ways to grow a community and a founder's personal brand. When you share the journey, early followers feel like part of it, and that sense of ownership turns them into contributors and customers.
Austin Kleon's Show Your Work! argues that sharing your process, not just your product, is what makes people care. Practically: pick one platform, post one real update a week, reply to everyone, and let the archive of your work become the proof. The personal brand is a byproduct—people follow the builder because they trust the building.
0 Comments
Log in to comment
Not a member yet? Join the community
Pick a meme
KlipyHave a great take?
Drop your email — we'll send a magic link so you can post it. No password.
Not a member of the community? Join today.
Join the community →