Build in public means sharing your product-building journey openly — revenue, progress, failures, decisions. It started as a Twitter hashtag (#buildinpublic) and became the default growth strategy for indie makers and bootstrapped founders.
Definition
Build in public means sharing your product-building journey openly — revenue, progress, failures, decisions. It started as a Twitter hashtag (#buildinpublic) and became the default growth strategy for indie makers and bootstrapped founders.
You build a product. Instead of working in stealth, you share the process publicly:
The audience watches you build. Some become early users. Some become customers. Some just follow the story. All of them remember you when they need what you are selling.
Gaby Goldberg's Building in Public guide (widely cited in the founder community) frames it as "turning your process into your marketing." You do not need a marketing team when your development process is the content.
Three reasons, in order of importance:
1. Trust. People trust what they can see. Sharing real numbers — including the bad ones — builds credibility that no landing page can match. A founder who shows $687 in week 2 revenue is more believable than one who only shares "$10K MRR" screenshots.
2. Audience before launch. By the time your product is ready, you already have people paying attention. Traditional startups launch to silence. Build-in-public founders launch to an existing audience.
3. Accountability. When you share goals publicly, you follow through. When you work in private, it is easy to quietly abandon a project. Public commitment creates pressure to ship.
Everything. Not selectively. Everything.
Week 2 of my product: 3 sales. $687 revenue. 0 refunds. Hacker News brought 1,200 visitors. A Reddit post got 12 upvotes and zero clicks to the product. Lesson: no community trust built yet. Self-promotion without earned reputation does not work.
That Reddit failure is more valuable to share than the Hacker News success. Anyone can celebrate wins. Sharing what did not work — and what you learned from it — is what separates genuine build-in-public from performance.
Build in public has a failure mode: performing instead of sharing.
You see it on Twitter/X. Founders posting daily revenue screenshots, always up and to the right. Perfectly crafted "lessons learned" threads. Zero mention of anything that went wrong.
That is not building in public. That is marketing dressed as transparency.
Real transparency includes the weeks where nothing works. The feature you built that nobody used. The launch that got zero traction. The pricing mistake that cost you 3 customers.
If your build-in-public content only shows wins, it does not build trust. It looks like an ad.
Pick one platform. Share one honest update per week. Include a number.
"This week: 47 visitors, 0 signups. The landing page copy is not converting. Trying a new headline next week."
That is a build-in-public post. No engagement hacks. No hooks. Just the truth about what happened and what you are doing about it.
The audience finds you over time. The compounding happens slowly, then all at once — the same way SEO works. Consistency beats virality.
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