Building in Public: A Builder's Account

Building in public is not a content strategy.

Most people treat it like one. They frame it as audience growth, or brand building, or a distribution play. Those things happen when you do it well. But the founders who sustain it long-term are not running a marketing channel. They are doing something simpler and harder: being honest about what they are building, how it is going, and what it actually costs.

I have been building in public at Super Venture Studio for over a year. Not as a strategy. As the only honest way I could think to document what running a venture studio with 80+ brands and an AI workforce actually looks like. I want to explain what I have learned — what building in public is, why it works, where it breaks, and how it scales.

What Is Building in Public?

Building in public is a founder practice of sharing real-time progress on a business — including revenue, failures, pivots, and operational decisions — with a public audience as the work happens. It is not a marketing tactic. It is a transparency protocol. The audience is secondary. The record is primary. Pieter Levels, widely credited with popularizing the practice, documented revenue, experiments, and failures on his Nomad List build log starting in 2014.

Building in public is a commitment to show the machinery, not just the output.

Most business communication is backward-looking and curated. You announce the launch after the product ships. You share the revenue milestone after it is already stable. You write the case study after you have figured out the narrative. Building in public inverts that. The update happens in real time. The uncertainty is part of what gets shared.

It takes different forms for different builders:

• Revenue sharing: Posting monthly revenue updates with real numbers. MRR, costs, net. Not rounded or framed.
• Build logs: Documenting the technical decisions, the things that broke, the architecture you chose and later regretted.
• Operational transparency: Showing how the business actually runs — what the team looks like, what the costs are, what the systems are, what broke this week.
• Failure posts: Writing honestly about brands that did not work, experiments that failed, decisions that cost you.

The common thread is that the work gets documented as it happens, not after you have sanitized it.

This is what building in public is not: it is not "sharing your wins." Founders who only post milestones — launches, revenue records, big partnerships — are doing brand marketing. It looks like building in public from the outside. It is not.

Why Do Founders Build in Public?

Founders build in public for three distinct reasons that often get conflated: accountability (deadlines made public are harder to abandon), distribution (regular updates attract an audience without a marketing budget), and feedback (the public build process generates input that private development misses). The founders who last are usually motivated by all three, in that order.

Accountability is the underrated one.

Most solo founders lack external structure. There is no manager, no board, no Monday standup. The only accountability is self-imposed. When you commit publicly to launching something by a specific date, or to sharing revenue numbers monthly, you create an external anchor. Saying it publicly makes abandoning it cost something.

Distribution follows from consistency. A founder who posts weekly progress updates for a year has done 52 pieces of content without thinking of it as content production. The posts exist. They document a real story. Readers accumulate over time because the signal is genuine and the narrative is ongoing.

Feedback is less predictable but high-value when it happens. Sharing a design decision or a product problem publicly often surfaces perspectives you would not have found inside your own head. The IndieHackers community was built on this observation — that transparency creates a collaborative environment where founders help each other in ways that closed-door building prevents.

The founders who burn out doing it are usually optimizing for distribution without the underlying accountability motivation. They are treating it as a growth channel. When the audience does not grow fast enough to justify the effort, they stop. The founders who sustain it are not trying to grow an audience. They are trying to have a record.

Does Building in Public Actually Help You Grow?

The evidence is directional, not definitive. Founders with consistent building-in-public practices typically report meaningful organic audience growth within 12 to 18 months of sustained posting. The effect is strongest on Twitter/X and newsletter platforms. Distribution varies significantly by niche — software and SaaS founders tend to see faster audience compounding than those in service or local businesses. Consistency matters more than any individual post.

The honest answer is: it depends on what you mean by "grow."

Audience growth tends to happen if you are consistent and in a niche where people want to follow builders. Software, AI tools, and SaaS see the strongest effect. Local services and traditional ecommerce see much less. The signal has to be interesting to the people who might find it.

What building in public reliably delivers, regardless of niche, is a searchable record. Every update you publish is a document that can be found. A potential partner researching you finds your revenue breakdown from six months ago. A potential hire reads how you describe your decision-making. A journalist writing about AI founders finds your operational posts before they contact anyone.

Here is how building in public compares to other founder visibility approaches:

| Approach | Time to results | Effort level | What it produces | Longevity | |---|---|---|---|---| | Building in public | 6–18 months | High (consistent) | Audience + reputation + record | High — compounds over time | | Conference speaking | Immediate at event | High (sporadic) | Credibility in specific community | Moderate — fades quickly | | PR and media | Variable | High (requires pitch) | One-time burst of visibility | Low — fades quickly | | Paid advertising | Immediate | Medium (ongoing cost) | Traffic to a specific page | Zero — stops when you stop paying | | SEO content | 3–12 months | Medium (ongoing) | Sustained organic traffic | High — compounds over time |

The two approaches that compound — building in public and SEO content — are also the two that require sustained output over months. That is not a coincidence. Compounding returns require compounding input.

How Do You Start Building in Public Without Oversharing?

Start with constraints: decide what you will always share (revenue, key metrics, major decisions), what you will never share (private client data, internal conflicts, early-stage ideas that have not been tested), and what you will share selectively (team dynamics, failure details, granular financials). Write these constraints down before your first post. They are your editorial policy. Without them, you will overshare once, regret it, and stop.

The question everyone asks is about privacy, but the real problem is judgment.

Oversharing is not usually a revelation of secrets. It is a failure to think through what the information means once it is public. Sharing a client's frustration without their permission. Publishing early-stage metrics that misrepresent where you actually are. Writing a failure post that names a specific person as the reason something broke.

A simple framework for deciding what to share:

• Always share: Outcomes and decisions. Revenue numbers. What you launched. What you killed. Why you made the call.
• Share selectively: Process details. How a specific system works. The cost breakdown for a specific experiment.
• Never share: Third-party information. Client data. Personal details about people who did not choose to be in public.

Want to see how a real venture studio documents the work? Read the Super Venture Studio building log — portfolio updates, system design decisions, and honest numbers from an operation running 80+ brands with an AI workforce.

The other constraint that matters is timing. Not everything is ready to be public. An idea before it is tested is not interesting to anyone else. A product before it has users does not tell a useful story. Building in public does not mean sharing every thought in real time. It means documenting the work at the right stage — after you have enough data to say something true.

What Should You Share When Building in Public?

The highest-value building-in-public content falls into four categories: revenue and financial updates (the most credible signal of real progress), decision logs (why you chose X over Y with specific reasoning), failure analyses (what broke and what you learned), and system or architecture posts (how the business actually runs). Surface-level posts — screenshots of positive metrics without context — perform poorly with an audience of builders.

The format matters less than the specificity.

A short post with your MRR and a brief note on what changed is more valuable than a long-form reflection on "lessons learned." A two-paragraph note on why you killed a feature — with the actual reason — lands harder than a generic "we are pivoting" announcement.

What to share, in rough order of value to an audience of builders:

1. Revenue numbers. Not "we are growing" but "$X this month, up or down Y% from last month. Here is why."
2. Real failure analysis. Not "we learned a lot" but "here is what specifically broke and what the cost was."
3. Decision logs. Not "we made a hard call" but "we chose X over Y because of this specific reasoning, and here is how we will know if it was right."
4. Architecture and systems. Not "we automated some things" but "here is the specific system, how it works, and what it replaced."
5. Phase updates. Regular snapshots of where things actually stand — launched, stalled, paused, killed.

What most people share instead is milestone announcements stripped of context, or reflection posts that describe emotions without providing operational information. Those posts have low signal. They tell a story without actually telling the story.

How Does Building in Public Work at Scale?

At portfolio scale — 10 or more active brands — building in public requires a system. Individual updates become unmanageable. At Super Venture Studio, transparency is structural: the AI workforce generates weekly operational data per brand, the SEO and funnel systems produce monthly reports, and the portfolio updates come from that data stream rather than from memory. Transparency that does not depend on the founder's bandwidth or recall is the more reliable version.

Most founders who build in public are running one or two projects.

I am running over 80.

That changes the mechanics significantly. I cannot write an individual update on each brand each week — that would be a full-time job by itself. What I can do is build a system that generates the data and then surface it. The AI workforce at Super Venture Studio runs continuous reporting across the portfolio. Every week there is a funnel health report, a content performance snapshot, and a record of what shipped, what broke, and what is next.

The building-in-public content comes from that data stream, not from sitting down and writing from memory.

This is actually a more reliable version of building in public than the manual kind, for one reason: it is honest in a way that recall is not. When you write a monthly update from memory, you naturally emphasize recent events and emotionally salient moments. When the data generates the record, you get what actually happened, not what you remember happening.

For anyone running more than a handful of projects, the operational question is not "what should I share" but "how do I generate a reliable record to share from." The answer is instrumentation — metrics you track consistently, systems that report automatically, an operating practice that produces data rather than relying on you to produce narrative.

The venture studio model creates this problem at an extreme: I need to document what is happening across a portfolio too large to hold in working memory. The building-in-public practice had to scale with the studio, not sit outside of it.

What Are the Most Common Mistakes When Building in Public?

The four most common mistakes are performative transparency (sharing wins that look humble but are not), inconsistency (posting regularly for three months then disappearing), misaligned audience targeting (building-in-public content in a niche where nobody is watching), and sharing without editorial constraints (posting about private third parties or pre-validated ideas). The first mistake is the most common. The fourth is the most damaging.

1. Performative transparency. This is sharing "humble" milestones that are actually brags. "$0 to $10K in six months on a side project while working full-time" is a marketing post. It is not building in public. Actual building in public includes the month where you made $0 and the six months where nothing worked.

2. Inconsistency without explanation. Posting weekly for three months and then going silent is worse than never starting. The audience you built is now reading silence. If you have to stop, explain why. A pause post is still a post.

3. Wrong niche. Building in public works best when your audience is other builders in your niche. If you are building a local services business, the IndieHackers audience is not your audience. Optimize for the people who are actually interested in what you are building, not for the building-in-public meta-community.

4. No editorial constraints. Sharing information about third parties who did not consent to being in your public narrative. Writing failure posts that name specific people as responsible. Publishing early-stage ideas before you have validated anything. These mistakes damage relationships and occasionally damage the business. Write the constraints policy before you start, not after something goes wrong.

5. Vanity metrics. Publishing follower counts, page views, or impressions as the progress signal. These tell an audience nothing about whether the business is working. Share operating metrics — revenue, active users, retention, cost structure — not distribution metrics.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does building in public mean for a solo founder?

Building in public means sharing your real progress — revenue, failures, pivots, and decisions — as they happen, not after the fact. For solo founders, it serves as both an accountability system and an organic distribution channel. The most useful content is operational: what shipped, what broke, and why you made a specific decision.

How often should you post when building in public?

Consistency matters more than frequency. A monthly update posted reliably for 12 months outperforms weekly posts for two months followed by silence. Most founders who sustain a building-in-public practice settle into a biweekly or monthly rhythm. The key is that each update covers real operational information — not just emotional reflection or milestone announcements.

Do you need a large audience to benefit from building in public?

No. The accountability effect works at zero followers. The feedback effect often works better with a small, relevant audience than a large, general one. The distribution effect compounds over time regardless of starting point. Most founders who report meaningful outcomes from building in public started with no audience and built one through consistent, specific posting over 12 to 18 months.

Should you share exact revenue numbers when building in public?

You do not have to, but specificity is what makes the content useful to other founders. "We made between $5K and $10K last month" is less useful than "$7,200 in June, down from $9,400 in May because of a specific reason." If exact numbers feel too exposed, a rounded figure with directional commentary is better than nothing.

What is the difference between building in public and a founder blog?

A founder blog is usually backward-looking — analysis and lessons written after the fact. Building in public is real-time, with updates happening during the process rather than after it. The two can overlap: a founder who posts regular updates and also publishes reflections is doing both. The distinction is the timing and editorial stance — are you documenting as you go, or writing retrospectively?

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