Building in public without it becoming the product

Building in public means sharing progress, numbers and decisions while you work rather than after. It genuinely works for some products and is a well-disguised waste of months for others.

What it actually gets you

Accountability. A public commitment is harder to quietly abandon.

Early feedback. People tell you your positioning is confusing before you spend six weeks on the wrong thing.

Distribution, conditionally. An audience that overlaps with your buyers is a channel. One that does not is an audience.

Trust. Publishing real numbers, including the bad quarters, is unusual enough that it functions as differentiation.

The trap

The failure mode is specific: you build an audience of other founders, they engage with your revenue charts, and none of them buy - because your product is for dentists.

You then optimise for the engagement you get, which comes from process posts, not from the product. Six months later you have four thousand followers, a habit of posting, and the same twelve customers.

The test: are the people engaging with your posts the people who would pay for this? If your product is a developer tool and your audience is developers, this channel is a real one. If your product is for restaurant owners and your audience is indie hackers, you are performing, not selling.

What to share

• Revenue, as a trend. MRR and its direction is the number people find useful.
• What broke and what it cost. The most-read posts are the failures, and they are the ones that build trust.
• Specific decisions with reasoning. "We raised prices 40% and lost 2 customers" is worth ten posts of encouragement.
• Dates on everything. A number without a date is not a claim, it is a vibe.

What not to share

• Customer information. Ever, in any aggregated form that could identify anyone.
• Exact revenue while you are tiny. A band is more useful and less of a target. "$2–5k MRR" carries the same information for a reader and much less for a competitor.
• Anything under NDA, including which enterprise customer just signed.
• Security details. Your stack, your rate limits, your fraud thresholds.

Cap the time

Building in public expands to fill available time. It has an obvious feedback loop - engagement - and shipping does not.

Pick a budget: two hours a week, one substantive post. Anything past that is coming directly out of building or selling, and you will not notice it happening.

The credibility problem

Every self-reported number in public is exactly that. Most people are honest, nothing verifies it, and readers know that - which quietly discounts everything shared, including the true numbers.

That is why a verified figure is worth more than a screenshot. If you are going to publish revenue anyway, publishing it through something that checks it means the number carries weight instead of being one more unverifiable chart.