For six months, I shared every detail of a product build online. Revenue numbers, feature decisions, customer conversations, failed experiments — everything was public. During those six months, I gained 2,000 Twitter followers, received dozens of supportive messages, and was featured in two newsletters.
I also built slower, made worse decisions, and generated less revenue than during the six months before and after when I built in private.
The building-in-public movement has genuine merits. It can generate audience, accountability, and goodwill. But it has costs that nobody talks about — performance anxiety, content creation overhead, and the distortion of optimizing for audience approval rather than customer value.
Let me break down when building in public helps and when it hurts, based on my experience doing both.
When Building in Public Works
It works for audience building. If you’re starting from zero — no email list, no social following, no network in your target market — building in public creates an audience from the process of building. Every update is a piece of content. Every milestone is shareable. Every failure is a story.
This is genuinely valuable when your business needs an audience before it can generate revenue. A newsletter, a course, a community product — these all benefit from having an audience before launch. Building in public creates that audience as a byproduct of the work you’re already doing.
It works for accountability. Telling 5,000 people “I’m shipping this feature by Friday” makes Friday a real deadline. Public commitment is a stronger accountability mechanism than private commitment because the social cost of missing the deadline is higher.
When I publicly committed to weekly shipping, the public component helped me maintain the cadence through weeks where I would have otherwise slipped. The audience expected a Friday update, so a Friday update happened.
It works for feedback. Sharing your work-in-progress with an engaged audience produces real-time feedback. Design decisions, feature ideas, pricing experiments — all get pressure-tested by people who’ve been following the product’s development and have opinions.
This feedback is qualitatively different from customer feedback. It’s not from paying users — it’s from engaged observers. That’s a weaker signal, but it’s still a signal. And the more data sources you have, the better your decisions.
It works for trust building. Transparency builds trust. When customers can see how you make decisions, how you handle mistakes, and how you respond to challenges, they trust you more than a company that’s a black box. This trust translates into higher conversion rates, lower churn, and stronger referrals.
When Building in Public Hurts
It hurts when content creation displaces product work. Every hour spent writing a Twitter thread about your progress is an hour not spent on the product. When the content becomes the commitment — when you feel more pressure to post an update than to ship a feature — the priorities have inverted.
I noticed this pattern in month 3 of my public build. I’d spend Monday morning crafting a progress update instead of doing progress. The update got more engagement than the product got customers. The dopamine from engagement started replacing the dopamine from shipping. That’s a dangerous substitution.
It hurts when you optimize for narrative over reality. Building in public creates a storytelling pressure. Good narratives have rising action, challenges overcome, and satisfying conclusions. Real business building is messy, repetitive, and often boring. When the narrative pressure makes you take a more dramatic action (a bigger pivot, a bolder experiment) than the data warrants, you’re optimizing for your audience’s entertainment, not your business’s health.
It hurts when transparency gives competitors information. If you’re in a competitive market and you share your customer acquisition channels, your pricing experiments, and your growth metrics, competitors can replicate your playbook without doing the work of discovering it. For consumer businesses with low barriers to entry, this is a real risk.
It hurts when negative updates damage customer confidence. If you share a post about a major bug, a struggling month, or a near-miss with running out of money, potential customers might hesitate. Public transparency means public vulnerability, and not all audiences respond to vulnerability with increased trust.
The Selective Transparency Model
I don’t do full building in public anymore. Instead, I practice selective transparency — sharing some things publicly and keeping others private.
Share publicly:
- Lessons learned (what worked, what didn’t, and why)
- Process and methodology (how you make decisions)
- Milestones (major launches, customer count thresholds)
- Philosophy and values (what you believe about business building)
Keep private:
- Specific revenue numbers (share ranges if anything)
- Customer acquisition tactics (your competitive edge)
- Specific customer details (privacy and trust)
- Internal doubts and struggles (share these with your inner circle, not the internet)
- Upcoming features and plans (avoid announcing before shipping)
This model gives you the benefits of building in public (audience, accountability, trust) without the costs (competitive exposure, performance pressure, narrative distortion).
The selective approach also lets you control the pace of sharing. Full building in public creates an expectation of regular updates. Selective transparency lets you share when you have something valuable to say, not when the content calendar demands it.
The Platform Question
If you do build in public, where should you do it?
Twitter/X: Best for startup and tech audiences. High engagement, fast feedback, but short content shelf life.
LinkedIn: Best for B2B and professional audiences. Longer content shelf life. More credibility-building for consulting and service businesses.
A personal blog: Best for long-form content that compounds over time. Slower feedback but complete control. Your blog posts become assets — they drive traffic months after publishing.
Newsletter: Best for building a direct relationship with an audience you own. Not dependent on algorithm changes. But requires consistent quality to maintain subscribers.
Choose one platform. Master that one channel before spreading to others. Building in public on four platforms simultaneously is a full-time job that leaves no time for actually building.
My recommendation for most early-stage founders: build in private, share selectively on one platform, and focus 90% of your public communication on the value you deliver to customers rather than on the process of building the business.
The Audience-Customer Confusion
Here’s the subtlest danger of building in public: confusing your audience with your customers.
Your audience is the people who follow your build story. Your customers are the people who pay for your product. These are different groups with different motivations.
Your audience wants entertainment, inspiration, and relatability. Your customers want their problem solved reliably and affordably. When you optimize for audience satisfaction, you might make decisions that produce good content but bad business outcomes.
I watched a founder change their pricing model three times in two months because their Twitter audience had opinions about pricing. Their actual customers — the people paying — were happy with the original pricing. The audience-driven changes created confusion that actually increased churn.
The rule: customer feedback overrides audience feedback. Always. If your customers love the product but your audience thinks the pricing is wrong, your customers are right. If your audience loves your transparency but your customers want faster support, focus on support quality.
My Current Approach
For what it’s worth, here’s how I handle the public/private balance now.
I build in private. All product development, customer conversations, and business decisions happen without public commentary.
I share selectively through blog posts (like this one) and occasional social media posts. The sharing is retrospective — I write about what I’ve already learned, not what I’m currently doing. This gives me editorial distance and prevents the narrative pressure of real-time sharing.
I maintain full transparency with three people: a business partner, an advisor, and a close friend who’s also a founder. These three get the full picture — the revenue numbers, the doubts, the struggles, the wins. This small circle provides the accountability and support that full public building provides, without the performance pressure.
This approach works for me. Your approach might be different. The important thing is to be intentional about what you share, where you share it, and why — rather than defaulting to full transparency because it’s trendy or full privacy because it’s safe.
Key Takeaways
- Building in public works for audience building, accountability, and feedback. It can accelerate early-stage growth, especially for audience-dependent business models.
- Building in public hurts when content creation displaces product work, narrative pressure distorts decisions, or transparency exposes competitive advantages.
- Practice selective transparency: share lessons, process, and philosophy publicly. Keep revenue details, acquisition tactics, and internal struggles private.
- Don’t confuse your audience with your customers. Customer feedback overrides audience feedback, always.
- Choose one platform and share retrospectively. Write about what you’ve learned, not what you’re currently doing. This provides editorial distance and prevents performance pressure.
