GlossaryGrowth & analytics
What does build in public mean?
Also called: building in public, #buildinpublic, open startup
Definition
Building in public means openly sharing your startup's progress as you go, such as what you're building, decisions, numbers, mistakes and lessons, usually on social media, a blog or a newsletter, to build an audience before and during launch.
Build in public, explained
The idea is simple: instead of working in silence and announcing a finished product, you document the journey. People who follow along become an audience that trusts you, gives feedback, and shows up when you launch. It suits solo founders and small teams especially, because it turns the work you're already doing into marketing.
What people share: product updates and screenshots, the reasoning behind decisions, experiments and their results, revenue and traffic numbers, failures and what they learned. Specific, honest posts do far better than vague progress updates. "We tried X, it failed because Y, here's the chart" is interesting. "Crushing it this week!" isn't.
Honesty is the whole point. Building in public only works if the numbers and stories are real, including the unflattering ones. Our own "lesson learned", that publishing about 2,500 posts in a month throttled indexing on our product, is the kind of detail that makes readers trust the rest.
Decide what not to share. Customer data, anything under NDA, security details, and numbers you'd regret publishing if a competitor or investor read them. Some founders share percentages or trends instead of absolute figures.
Building in public also feeds SEO and AI visibility. Detailed posts about real problems and results become pages people search for and link to, and they give search engines and assistants a consistent, first-hand record of what your company does.
Why it matters for founders
It's the cheapest way for a small team to build an audience before launch. Real, specific updates earn trust that polished announcements can't.
Example
A founder posts weekly about building an analytics tool: the schema decisions, a failed pricing test, monthly revenue. By launch, a few thousand followers know the product, and hundreds try it in the first week.
Common mistakes
- Sharing only wins and hiding failures.
- Posting vague updates with no specifics.
- Publishing customer data or numbers you'll regret sharing.
Related terms
- Indie hackerAn indie hacker is someone building a profitable online business independently, usually alone or with a tiny team and without venture capital, aiming for sustainable revenue and control rather than rapid, funded growth.
- Community-led growthCommunity-led growth is a strategy where a community of users, customers and practitioners around your product or field drives acquisition, learning and retention, through members helping each other, sharing work and recommending the product.
- DistributionDistribution is how a product reliably reaches the people who'll buy it: the channels, audiences, partnerships and assets that put it in front of customers repeatedly, not just once.
- Original researchOriginal research is content built on information you produced yourself, such as survey results, product data, experiments, benchmarks or first-hand tests, rather than summarizing what others have already published.
- WaitlistA waitlist is a list of people who have signed up to be told when a product is available, usually by leaving an email on a pre-launch page. It measures early demand and gives you an audience on launch day.