Building in Public
February 27, 2026
How to build in public effectively: what to share, milestone cadence, how to grow an audience from zero followers, and what to keep private as a founder.
Why Building in Public Works
Building in public creates three compounding advantages that closed-door development doesn't. First, accountability: publicly committing to a milestone in front of an audience creates social pressure that functions as external motivation when internal motivation dips. Second, early users: people who follow a product's development develop investment in its success before it exists; they test it sooner, tolerate more rough edges, and refer it more actively. Third, distribution: each update is a piece of content that may introduce the product to someone who had never heard of it.
Pieter Levels built Nomad List and Remote OK publicly on Twitter starting in 2014, sharing revenue numbers, product decisions, and failures in real time. By 2024, Nomad List was generating over $500,000 per year in revenue with a team of one. The business grew because the transparency itself was the marketing — each update attracted builders interested in the methodology, nomads interested in the product, and journalists who covered the rare founder willing to share actual numbers. The lesson is not that building in public automatically generates revenue, but that it creates a consistent signal in a noisy market that accumulates over years.
What to Share and What to Keep Private
Share four categories of information regularly: revenue milestones (actual MRR numbers, not percentages without context), product decisions (what you built, what you cut, and why), lessons from failures (the failed experiment that cost three weeks and what you learned), and weekly or monthly metrics (activation rate, churn, NPS). The specificity of these updates determines their value — "we had a good month" generates zero engagement, while "MRR grew from $8,400 to $11,200 in October driven by our new onboarding redesign that doubled activation rate from 12% to 24%" generates replies, shares, and new followers.
Keep three categories private: pending fundraising terms (negotiating publicly disadvantages you), customer names and information without explicit consent (a customer who agreed to use your product did not agree to be your marketing), and team conflicts or performance issues (airing internal tensions publicly damages the people involved and your reputation as a leader). The instinct to share everything authentic should be balanced with the judgment about what "authentic" means in a professional context. Sharing that you're struggling with a difficult product decision is authentic; sharing that you're thinking about firing a specific employee is harmful.
Milestone Sharing Cadence
The milestone post format that generates the most engagement follows a three-part structure: context (what changed and from what baseline), number (the exact metric), and lesson (what you learned or what you're doing differently as a result). "We hit $10,000 MRR today. We started from $0 in January and the single biggest unlock was switching from a general positioning to targeting only e-commerce brands with Shopify stores, which tripled our trial-to-paid conversion rate. Here's the full breakdown." This format provides value to the reader — a lesson they can apply — not just a vanity announcement.
Consistency of cadence matters more than the size of milestones. Weekly updates that report $100 increments in MRR outperform monthly posts about major milestones for audience growth because they generate more touchpoints with an audience over time. The founders who build the largest audiences through building in public are those who post when things are bad — when the product launch flopped, when a major customer churned, when a co-founder left — not just when things are good. The counterintuitive insight is that failure updates perform better than success updates in terms of engagement and new followers, because they're rarer, more honest, and more useful to other founders.
Audience Building Without Followers
Starting with zero followers doesn't mean starting with zero audience. Post consistently in the communities where your target users already spend time before investing in a personal audience. For SaaS founders, Indie Hackers has a dedicated building-in-public culture and a large audience that actively engages with founders sharing honest metrics. Product Hunt has a developer and early-adopter audience that supports launches. Relevant subreddits — r/startups, r/entrepreneur, r/SaaS — have tens of thousands of active readers who will engage with genuine building-in-public updates.
The transition from community participation to personal audience happens when you've established enough credibility in a community that people seek out your content specifically. This typically takes three to six months of consistent posting in two or three communities. The mechanism is: each post in a community drives some fraction of readers to your personal Twitter or LinkedIn to follow you directly. After three months of weekly posts in three communities, you may have 500–1,500 followers who found you through community participation. These early followers are typically the highest-quality ones — they found you because of content, not because of a follow-for-follow campaign, and they'll engage more actively with everything you post subsequently.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I handle competitors who copy my public updates? The concern about competitor copying is the most common objection to building in public, and the data consistently shows it's overstated. Execution matters more than information for the vast majority of products. A competitor who reads your monthly update learns what you built last month; they don't learn your next three months of product roadmap, your customer relationships, or your team's specific expertise. Products that can be completely reproduced from a public update aren't defensible regardless of whether you build publicly or privately.
Do I need a large social following to make building in public worthwhile? No. Building in public works at any audience size because the benefits — accountability, early users, distribution — scale with the audience but don't require it to be large. An audience of 200 engaged followers who match your target customer profile is more valuable for early user acquisition than an audience of 5,000 people who followed you for unrelated content. Start posting before you have an audience; the audience arrives because of the posting, not before it.
What platforms are best for building in public in 2026? Twitter/X remains the primary platform for startup building-in-public content because the culture of public metrics sharing is deeply embedded there. LinkedIn reaches a more professional audience and is better for B2B SaaS founders whose customers are professionals rather than developers. Indie Hackers is specifically designed for building-in-public content and provides a dedicated audience. The strategy of posting in all three — a weekly update that's native to each platform's format — multiplies reach without proportionally multiplying effort.
How do I write a building-in-public update when I have bad news? Be direct and specific about what happened, why you think it happened, and what you're changing. "We lost three customers this month, all citing the same onboarding problem we've been aware of but deprioritised. Here's what we're doing about it next sprint." This framing is honest, shows self-awareness, and provides something actionable. It will outperform your good-news updates in engagement and will generate DMs from founders who had the same problem.
Should I share my exact revenue numbers publicly? This is a personal decision with real tradeoffs. Exact revenue numbers generate the most engagement and build the most credibility for building-in-public content. They also invite competitors to track your growth precisely and can create awkward situations with potential customers who see the numbers before a sales conversation. Many founders share revenue in "MRR milestones" — announcing when they cross $1k, $5k, $10k, $25k, $50k, $100k — rather than exact numbers, which provides engagement without full transparency.
