Building in Public: The Growth Strategy That Compounds

What Building in Public Actually Means

Building in public means sharing your process — decisions, mistakes, metrics, learnings — as you build a product or company. Not just the wins; the real journey.

It's not a content strategy. It's a practice that, when sustained, produces content as a byproduct.

The companies and founders who do it well — Levels.io (Nomad List, RemoteOK), Pieter Levels building in public on Twitter, Buffer sharing revenue dashboards, Linear discussing product decisions in changelog posts — aren't doing it primarily for marketing. They're doing it because they've learned that public thinking produces better outcomes than private thinking.

The audience and the SEO are secondary effects of something more fundamental.

The Compounding Loop

Building in public creates a compounding loop:

1. You make a decision or learn something
2. You share it publicly (post, thread, article, video)
3. People engage — they correct you, validate your thinking, share their experience
4. You learn faster because your thinking is in public and attracts feedback
5. Your audience grows because you're demonstrably working on something interesting
6. When you ship, you have an audience ready to try it
7. That audience gives you data faster than you'd have gotten without them

The loop starts slowly. Week 1 of posting your learnings, you have 30 followers and no engagement. Month 6, the compounding has started. Month 18, building in public is a genuine growth channel.

What to Share

Process and decisions: "We're choosing between Supabase and PlanetScale. Here's our analysis." These are valuable to anyone facing the same decision — a large audience that will discover the post through search.

Failures and mistakes: "We shipped a bug that deleted user data. Here's exactly what happened and how we fixed it." Counterintuitively, these posts drive trust. Honesty about failure signals confidence and authenticity.

Metrics and milestones: MRR milestones, user counts, traffic numbers. These give people a sense of trajectory and reality. "We hit $10k MRR" gets shared and celebrated by a community that's rooting for you.

Product decisions: "We removed our most-requested feature. Here's why." Posts about difficult tradeoffs showcase the thinking behind the product and attract users who agree with your values.

Technical learnings: "Here's the architecture we use for X." These drive technical SEO, attract developer users, and build credibility.

The Formats That Work

Twitter/X threads: High distribution, low barrier to produce. Good for decisions, quick learnings, and milestone announcements.

Long-form blog posts: Low immediate distribution, but durable. Search engines index them; they compound over time. Best for detailed technical writeups and retrospectives.

Changelogs: Document every shipped feature. Linear and Vercel have made changelogs a genre — they're read by fans of the product and discovered by people researching alternatives.

Metrics dashboards: Baremetrics "Open Startups," Nomad List's open metrics page — making your metrics public is a strong signal of confidence and generates ongoing discussion.

The Discomfort Is the Point

Building in public is uncomfortable because it creates accountability. If you share a goal publicly, missing it is embarrassing. If you share a metric, people can see when it declines. If you share a decision, people can disagree with it.

This discomfort is a feature. It:

• Forces clearer thinking (you have to articulate the decision, not just make it)
• Creates accountability that improves execution
• Attracts critics whose criticism, when valid, improves your product

The founders who do this best are genuinely comfortable with being wrong in public. They see correction as information, not embarrassment.

The SEO Dividend

Every piece of content you publish as part of building in public is a potential long-tail SEO win. "How we migrated from Prisma to Drizzle" ranks for people searching for that exact decision. "Our $0 to $10k MRR playbook" ranks for founders in the early stages.

These aren't written for SEO. They're written because sharing the learning is valuable. But the SEO dividend is real and durable — a blog post from three years ago continues to drive traffic and signups indefinitely.

Building in public at scale produces a content library that would be impossible to create through intentional content marketing alone — because the volume comes from the practice, not from a content calendar.

Starting Without an Audience

The biggest objection: "Building in public only works if you already have followers."

This is wrong. The audience grows because of the content, not before it.

Start with 0 followers. Post your first technical decision. Share your first week's metrics (even if they're embarrassing). Write about the problem you're solving and why you're building this.

The audience comes to people who are consistently interesting. Consistency is the requirement. The audience follows from it.