Build in public
Building in public means sharing the work while it is happening, in your own words, where your customers can see it. Done well, it is the cheapest marketing a startup has. Done badly, it is a diary read by other founders. This guide covers the difference, and points to the three deeper guides on examples, numbers and the weeks before launch.
What building in public is
Building in public started with indie software makers posting their revenue and their roadmap, and for a while that is what the phrase meant. It has widened since. Today it means any founder sharing the real work as it happens, with the decisions, the mistakes and the customers left in, rather than waiting for a polished announcement.
The unit is small. A post about the thing you shipped today and what it cost. A post about the number that moved and your guess at why. A post with a customer’s exact words. A post about the decision you cannot make. None of these need a finished product. All of them need you to be honest about where you are.
What it is not is a performance of transparency. Founders who post a revenue screenshot every month and nothing else are not building in public. They are publishing a scoreboard, and scoreboards attract spectators. The founders who get customers from building in public share the thinking, and the thinking is what a customer wants to see before they trust you with their problem.
A useful test. Would a customer, reading this post, learn something about how you think? If yes, it is building in public. If it only tells them how you are doing, it is a status update, and status updates are for the people who already care.
Why it brings customers
A customer buying from a small company is taking a risk. They cannot check your reviews, because there are six. They cannot ask their peers, because none of them have heard of you. What they can do is watch you work. If they have seen you make ten decisions and explain each one, they know what kind of company they are dealing with before the first call.
It also does the slow work of recognition. The founder who posts about the Tuesday when the integration broke is describing a Tuesday the customer has lived. That recognition is the moment a stranger decides you understand their problem, and it happens one post at a time, over weeks.
Jonah builds a scheduling tool for landscaping crews. For sixty days he posted every morning about whatever had happened the day before. A crew lead in Ohio watched for five weeks without replying and then signed up with the message, “I have been reading you every day. I think you actually know what a rain day does to a week.” Jonah had never mentioned a feature to him. He had described rain days.
There is a second effect, slower and larger. Over months, the people who have followed your decisions become the people who recommend you. They can explain your product to a peer because they watched you explain it. Word of mouth from a customer who understands the why is the kind that converts, and building in public is how they come to understand it.
The examples that got customers
The guide on build in public examples that got customers looks at what separates the posts that bring buyers from the ones that bring applause. There are three things. The post carries a specific, a number or a name or a quote, rather than a summary. It answers a question the customer is asking about their own business. And it has one link and one ask, so the reader knows what to do and you can see who did it.
“We shipped invoicing” brings nobody. “The first invoice paid itself at 2am and nobody was watching” brings a reply from someone with the same 2am. The difference is the detail, and the detail is free, because it happened to you.
Read that guide when you want to see the pattern across many posts. Then measure your own. The posts that bring names get asked again. The posts that bring likes from other founders get retired, however good they felt.
What to share and what to keep
You do not have to publish your revenue to build in public. The guide on building in public without giving away your numbers covers how. Decide once what is private, write the list down, and keep it where you can see it before you post. Revenue, runway, exact user counts, pricing under negotiation, customer names without permission. Everything else is open.
Then share direction instead of figures. “Revenue grew faster this month than any month since launch” says as much as the number and gives nothing to a competitor. Share the process, the mistakes and the decisions, which are more useful to a customer than a chart anyway. Ask customers before quoting them, and most will say yes.
When someone asks for the number, say you keep it private and say what you can share instead. Nobody who matters will mind. The founders who worry most about competitors copying them are usually sharing the least useful thing, which is the number, and withholding the most useful thing, which is the why.
Jonah keeps his customer count private because two competitors read his posts. He shares the number of crews he talked to each week, what they asked for and what he said no to. His followers know more about his product than about his business, which is the balance he wants.
What to post before launch
The weeks before launch are when building in public earns the most, because a launch lands better when the right people already know the problem you are solving. The guide on what to post before launch walks through it. Start with the problem, described at the moment it happens, for a specific kind of person. Then show the build, with the parts that are rough. Then talk about the early users and what they said. Then share the doubts.
Doubts are the part founders skip and the part that works. “I am not sure the free plan is right” brings replies from people who have tried both. “I might be wrong about who this is for” brings the people it is for, telling you so. A doubt is an invitation to help, and people like to help.
That guide has a six-week outline. Weeks one and two on the problem and the person. Weeks three and four on the build and the early users. Weeks five and six on what is coming and who it is for. Each week is a few short posts, three minutes each, and by launch day you have a list of people who asked to be told.
The point is that launch day is a day. The six weeks before it are where the customers come from, and a founder who posts through them arrives at launch with people already waiting.
A cadence you can keep
Building in public dies of irregularity more than anything else. A founder posts every day for a fortnight, hits a hard week, and stops. The audience that was forming disperses. When they start again a month later, they start from zero.
The fix is to make it smaller than the hard week. Three minutes a day, answering one question, is small enough to survive a launch, a fundraise and a sick child. Jonah’s sixty days included a week where his co-founder left. He posted through it, about that, in three minutes a morning. Those were his most replied-to posts of the two months, and two of the replies became customers.
Count takes rather than consecutive days. A missed morning is a missed morning. The habit is the number of times you showed up, and that number only goes up.
If you need a question each day rather than a blank page, the guide on what to post when nothing happened covers the slow days, and the guide on how often founders should post covers why daily beats three times a week.
Count who came
Building in public without measurement is a diary. Put one tracked link in each post. Ask new sign-ups what brought them. Keep a list of names with the post that brought each one. After a month you will know which beats bring customers for your product, and that knowledge is yours alone, because it came from your customers and your posts.
Likes are a poor signal and often a misleading one. Jonah’s most liked post, about a pricing change, brought no customers. His post about a rain day brought four. Without the list he would have posted more about pricing.
Read the list monthly as well as weekly. The weekly read tells you which post worked. The monthly read tells you which kind of post works, and that is the one that changes what you ask yourself tomorrow.
Quant100 runs this loop. One question a day, three minutes on camera, the video cut and one post per platform written in your words, posted everywhere, and the next morning a receipt with the names of who watched, replied, clicked and came, with the take that brought each one.