Should You Build in Public? What Founders Who Did It Say

Build in public went from a niche indie hacker habit to a mainstream growth strategy. MRR screenshots on Twitter, weekly revenue recaps on Substack, monthly "what I learned" blog posts. For a handful of founders it has been genuinely transformative. For most it is a distraction dressed up as marketing.

The honest question is not "should I build in public" but "what kind of product am I building, and does my audience actually benefit from watching me build it?"

What build in public actually is

At its best, building in public means sharing real decisions, real numbers, and real failures — not just the wins — in a way that helps your audience understand your journey and builds trust over time. At its worst, it means posting vague "excited to share" updates that generate engagement but no business result.

The founders who get the most from it are not building an audience as a side project to their product. They are building a product whose ideal customer is the same person following their build journey.

When it works

Your customers are builders

Developer tools, no-code platforms, SaaS infrastructure, creator tools — if your customer is a founder or technical creator, your build journey is directly relevant to them. Your problems are their problems. Watching you solve them builds credibility faster than any case study.

You are building a personal brand alongside a product

Some founders are the product. Consultants, educators, community builders. If your expertise is the thing being sold, public build documentation is evidence of that expertise.

You have something real to say

Founders who build in public effectively share specific decisions with specific numbers. Not "we are growing" but "we went from 14 to 23 paying users this month and we think it was because of this one email we sent." That specificity is what makes the content trustworthy and sharable.

When it does not work

Your customers do not use Twitter or Substack

If you are building a tool for enterprise buyers, HR teams, or non-technical SMBs, building in public on Twitter is talking to an audience that is not buying. Your energy is misallocated.

You are only sharing wins

An audience that only sees up-and-to-the-right numbers does not trust you. The founders who build the strongest public audiences share the failed experiments, the months where revenue dropped, the features they cut. If you are not comfortable sharing the messy parts, build in private.

It is taking time away from building

Writing a weekly update takes two to four hours once you account for thinking, drafting, and editing. For a solo founder pre-revenue, that time is almost always better spent talking to customers, fixing onboarding, or shipping a feature that increases activation rate.

The minimum viable version

If you want to experiment without full commitment: post one update per month with three numbers (revenue, active users, churn) and one decision you made — including why. Keep it under 300 words. Post it on Twitter and cross-post to your blog. Do this for six months. If it generates inbound that converts, scale it. If it does not, stop.

The distribution trap

Build in public is a top-of-funnel activity. It generates awareness, but it requires an audience to work. Founders with fewer than 500 followers get minimal traction from it no matter how good the content is. Before investing in build-in-public content, exhaust the acquisition channels that work without an existing audience: directory listings, SEO, launch platforms, community participation.

Build distribution before you build an audience. Launchstag is a weekly indie product directory where every listing is a permanent indexed page with a dofollow badge — no audience required, just a product worth showing. tools.cafe is a curated tool directory with a badge-for-backlink model that drives inbound traffic independent of your social following. LaunchBuff is a fortnightly bracket competition with 16 products across 4 rounds over 14 days — the bracket format gives you an audience to reach even before you have built one of your own.