Building in public has become one of the most discussed founder strategies of the past five years. Founders share revenue charts, hiring struggles, product launches, and funding rounds. The audiences grow. The DMs pour in. And then many of those founders privately admit that none of it has meaningfully moved their business.
There's a version of building in public that is genuine transparency and a version that is just content marketing dressed up as vulnerability. Knowing which one you're doing — and which one your audience can sense — is the whole game.
**What works: sharing the decisions, not just the outcomes.** The posts that build real audiences and real trust are the ones where you let people inside a decision in real time. Not 'we hit $1M ARR' (that's a press release). Instead: 'We're deciding between two pricing models and here's the tradeoff we can't figure out.' Ask for input. Share what you decide and why. Follow up three months later with what actually happened.
This kind of transparency does something funnels and ads cannot: it creates genuine intellectual intimacy. Your followers feel like they're inside the company. Some of them become customers for that reason alone. Others become advisors. A few become hires or co-founders. The relationship is fundamentally different from what you get with polished content.
**What doesn't work: vanity metrics and curated struggle.** Revenue milestones get engagement because they're relatable and aspirational. But if that's all you share, you're building a highlight reel that happens to have numbers on it. Curated vulnerability — 'this was hard but we figured it out' — is not building in public. It's retrospective PR.
The acid test is whether you'd share the information if things weren't going well. The founders who have the biggest impact are the ones who post their worst months with the same transparency they post their best months. That's genuinely rare, and audiences know it.
**The competitive disclosure problem.** The most common objection to building in public is that you're sharing your strategy with competitors. This is mostly wrong. The execution advantage that comes from being open — the community, the early customers, the distribution — almost always outweighs whatever tactical insight a competitor can extract from your posts. Your competitors aren't paying that close attention to you anyway.
The one real risk is oversharing in ways that create legal or employee relations problems. Don't share cap table details, individual compensation, or information about specific customers without consent. Everything else is generally fine.
Build in public with a strategy, not as a strategy. The goal is trust, distribution, and community — not an audience that watches your journey. The distinction sounds subtle, but it determines whether your transparency compounds into something valuable or evaporates into impressions.
