Build in Public
Build in public is the practice of sharing your startup's progress, decisions, and often its numbers openly as you build, instead of working in private and only announcing at launch.
What Does It Mean to Build in Public?
What it actually involves: a regular cadence, weekly or even daily, of posts (usually on X, sometimes a blog) covering what shipped, what broke, and often real metrics like MRR, signups, or churn. It's not just good news. The posts that build trust tend to include the failed experiments and the flat months, not only the wins.
What it costs: real time, writing and posting takes hours a week you could spend building. It also exposes your roadmap, pricing experiments, and numbers to competitors and copycats. It requires being comfortable making failures public, which is harder than it sounds once people are actually watching. And it doesn't reliably bring customers on its own if you're starting with no audience, the effect compounds slowly over months, it isn't a launch strategy you can turn on the week before you ship.
What it buys you: a compounding audience that exists before you need it, so a launch isn't shouting into a void. It also creates accountability (harder to quietly abandon a project you've told people about), inbound interest from other builders and occasionally investors, and a feedback loop, people will tell you what's missing before you spend months building the wrong thing.
When it's not worth it: if you have no distribution and no time to write consistently, a few months of build-in-public posts with low engagement produces no compounding, just sunk time better spent elsewhere.
Examples
A founder posts a weekly revenue screenshot and a short note on what changed. Early posts get little traction, but by month six a thread about a hard pricing decision gets picked up and drives the first wave of signups from people who'd been quietly following along.