What Is "Build in Public" and Should You Do It?

Building in public means sharing the messy middle of your work as it happens — your revenue, your roadmap, your failed experiments, the decision you reversed last week — instead of waiting for a polished launch. Founders do it to build trust, attract early users, and get feedback before they can afford to scale. It works best when you genuinely enjoy sharing and have something useful to say. It works against you when your market is easy to copy, when you'd rather be quiet, or when chasing engagement starts replacing the actual work.

What does "build in public" actually mean?

It's the habit of working with the door open. Rather than disappearing for six months and emerging with a finished product, you narrate the process: the feature you're shipping this week, the pricing you're second-guessing, the support ticket that taught you something, the month your numbers dipped. Some founders go all the way and publish live revenue dashboards. Most just post regular, honest updates about what they're learning.

The modern version started with a handful of software companies. Baremetrics made its full revenue public around 2014, and Buffer followed soon after. On April 22, 2015, they formalized it as the "Open Startups" initiative — seven companies, including ConvertKit and Ghost, publicly sharing metrics like MRR, ARR, churn, and customer count. At the time, Baremetrics reported over 125,000 people following along. The pitch was simple: transparency adds humanity, keeps you accountable, and gives other founders real benchmarks instead of guesswork.

You don't need a SaaS dashboard to do this. A bakery owner showing the recipe tests that didn't work, a freelance designer narrating how they priced a project, a coach posting the question a client asked that changed their whole approach — that's all building in public. The currency is honesty, not metrics.

What are the real benefits of building in public?

The upside is real, and it's why the approach stuck around. For a small business with no marketing budget, a few advantages stand out:

• Trust before you've earned it the slow way. People buy from people they feel they know. Watching you make decisions — including the hard ones — builds a kind of trust a glossy "About" page never will.
• Free, early feedback. When you share a half-finished idea, your audience tells you what's missing before you've sunk months into it. That's product validation you'd otherwise pay for.
• A reason to keep showing up. Posting your progress creates gentle accountability. You said you'd ship the thing, and now a few hundred people are mildly curious whether you did.
• Distribution that compounds. Open numbers and honest stories get shared. Baremetrics' public dashboards drew other founders who passed them around — a kind of word-of-mouth you can't buy.
• A personal brand as a byproduct. You're not setting out to "build a personal brand," but consistently sharing useful, honest work is exactly how one forms.

None of this requires you to be loud or to perform. The benefit comes from being genuinely useful in the open, repeatedly. A quiet founder who posts one honest update a week will out-earn a loud one who posts ten empty ones.

What are the downsides and limits of building in public?

This is where the honest advice lives, and where most cheerleading articles go quiet. Building in public has real costs, and they're not evenly distributed.

Copycats move faster than you think

The lower the barrier to entry in your market, the faster someone clones what you've validated. Founders who post revenue milestones routinely watch near-identical products appear within weeks. As one builder put it, "every time I post a MRR chart, a whole bunch of new habit trackers with a very similar concept pop up." One caveat worth keeping in perspective: copycats almost never beat the original, because they copy the surface and skip the learning. But they're a stress and a distraction you signed up for.

The performance can quietly replace the work

When your sense of progress gets tied to likes and follower counts instead of paying customers, your priorities drift. The pressure to keep posting can blur the line between your identity and your business, and that's a known route to burnout. If you finish a week feeling worse because a post underperformed — not because the business did badly — the public part is costing you more than it's giving.

Some numbers shouldn't be public

There's been a quiet reversal lately. A number of well-known indie founders have started deleting their old revenue updates and going dark — not abandoning building in public entirely, but protecting specific information. A common rule of thumb among them: share openly while you're small and need traction, then stop publishing exact revenue once you're past roughly $10K/month and worth copying. "I will always build in public," one wrote, "but no more sharing our numbers." That's a sensible boundary, not a contradiction.

Should I build in public for my business?

Probably yes if you recognize yourself here: you like sharing, you learn things worth passing on, your advantage is hard to copy (your taste, your relationships, your craft — not a feature anyone could rebuild in a weekend), and you'd keep doing the work whether or not anyone watched. For service businesses, makers, and experts, building in public is mostly upside, because the thing people are buying is you.

Lean the other way if sharing drains you, if your edge is a copyable idea in a crowded market, or if you'd only be doing it because a thread told you you're "falling behind" by staying quiet. You're not. Plenty of strong businesses are built with the door politely closed.

If you do it, here's a sane way to start:

1. Pick one channel and one cadence you can actually keep. One honest post a week beats a daily streak you'll abandon in a month.
2. Decide your boundaries up front. Write down what you'll share (lessons, decisions, behind-the-scenes) and what you won't (exact revenue, customer details, anything that helps a competitor more than it helps your audience).
3. Lead with usefulness, not metrics. "Here's a mistake I made and what I'd do differently" travels further and ages better than a revenue screenshot.
4. Show the process, not just the wins. The reversed decision and the failed test are the parts people trust.
5. Reassess at milestones. What made sense to share at the start may not at scale — revisit your boundaries as you grow.

The hardest part isn't deciding what to share. It's the consistency: showing up every week, in your real voice, for each platform, while you're already running the business. This is the gap Laspi is built for. You record one weekly voice note about what's new and add a few photos, and it turns that into a week of ready-to-publish posts shaped for each platform. You review, fix the parts that don't sound like you, and publish. It keeps the door open without making "post today" one more thing you forget.

Building in public isn't a personality test you pass or fail. It's a tool. Used on the parts of your work where honesty earns trust — and kept off the parts a competitor would just photocopy — it's one of the cheapest ways a small business can grow. Used as a performance, it's a fast track to burnout. The difference is entirely in how you draw the line.