Building in public became fashionable in the late 2010s and the advice has since multiplied into a genre of its own: thread your journey, share your metrics, post your setbacks. The underlying logic is real—transparency builds trust, an audience compounds, and early users become advocates. But the advice is routinely applied without enough consideration of when it makes sense and when it doesn't.
We've seen it work. We've also watched founders share their way into problems that a little more discretion would have avoided. Here's a more honest take on the tradeoffs.
When It Actually Works
Building in public delivers real value in specific circumstances. Consumer products with a developer or enthusiast community around them—tools, indie software, creator-focused platforms—benefit enormously from transparent building. The people you're building for are online, they're opinionated, and they want to participate in the product's development. Sharing gives them a reason to pay attention before you're ready to ship.
It also works well when your differentiation is in your approach or philosophy rather than in a specific technical implementation. Sharing how you think attracts people who think the same way. That's a recruitment tool, a sales tool, and an audience-building tool simultaneously.
And for founders who are building a brand around their own expertise—where the founder's identity is genuinely part of the product's appeal—public building creates the kind of trust that advertising can't buy.
When It Backfires
The problems start when founders confuse "building in public" with "telling competitors exactly what to build next." If you're operating in a market where large, well-resourced competitors are watching the startup ecosystem for ideas to absorb, your public roadmap is their product backlog.
We've seen this happen. A founder shares detailed posts about a specific enterprise workflow they're automating, the customer segments showing the most interest, and the technical approach they've validated. Six months later, a larger competitor announces a feature that's nearly identical. Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe it isn't. Either way, the information was freely available.
The second failure mode is what happens when things go badly. Public building during growth is easy. Public building during a rough patch—a pivot, a co-founder departure, a product that isn't working—is much harder to manage. Founders who've committed to radical transparency find themselves in situations where the honest public update creates problems with customers, employees, or investors that discretion would have avoided.
The Metrics Question
Sharing revenue numbers publicly is probably the most common version of building in public, and it's also the most consequential to get wrong.
Real metrics shared honestly—including the bad months—build credibility with a specific audience that values intellectual honesty. That audience tends to be other founders, developers, and people who respect authentic struggle. If that's your target customer or investor, it works.
If your target customer is a procurement manager at a mid-size enterprise, the fact that you had three bad months in a row on a public leaderboard can kill deals before they start. Those buyers are risk-averse by incentive structure. They need to believe you'll be around in three years.
Your audience for "building in public" content should be the same as your audience for your product. If they're different audiences, you're doing two different things simultaneously and probably not optimizing for either.
The Fundraising Angle
Public building can be genuinely helpful in the early fundraising process. Investors who've been following your journey before you reach out are warm, not cold. They have context. The first meeting starts three steps further along than it would have otherwise.
The limit: once you're in a fundraise, the relationship with specific investors becomes private. Sharing details of your funding round publicly while it's in progress—which firms you're talking to, the terms you've received, which investors passed—is a meaningful mistake. It signals naivety about how the funding process works and creates friction with investors who value discretion.
A Simple Framework
Before you post something, ask: who is the intended audience, and is that the same as the people you're trying to reach with your product? Does sharing this create value for your business, or does it primarily satisfy a desire to be perceived as a certain kind of founder?
The performative version of building in public—the "here's our journey" content that's really just personal branding in disguise—is fine if that's what you want to do. Just don't confuse it for a business strategy.
The real version: sharing genuine insights, honest setbacks, and specific learnings with an audience that finds those things useful. That creates something durable. The other version creates an audience of people who are interested in startup content generally, which has limited commercial value.
Questions about whether this is the right strategy for your specific company? Email us at [email protected]. We've seen enough versions of this play out to have a useful opinion.
