Building in Public: Your Startup's Secret Growth Engine

6 min read

The startup playbook is being rewritten in real-time on Twitter threads, YouTube videos, and founder blogs. While traditional wisdom preaches stealth mode and NDAs, a growing movement of successful founders is doing the exact opposite—they're sharing everything. Welcome to the world of building in public, where transparency isn't just a feel-good value, it's a genuine competitive advantage.

What Building in Public Really Means

Building in public refers to companies and startups that deliberately choose to share the entire process of product or company creation with the public. Unlike stealth startups that avoid attention, BIP startups are open and transparent about their progress, continuously sharing insights like previews or current metrics via social media.

This isn't about posting the occasional company update. It's about inviting your audience into the messy, uncertain, exhilarating journey of building something from scratch. Founders share revenue numbers, failed experiments, customer conversations, strategic pivots, and honest reflections on what's working and what isn't.

Think of it as the anti-press release. Instead of polished announcements crafted by PR teams, you're getting raw, unfiltered insights directly from founders still figuring things out.

Why Transparency Wins in Today's Startup Landscape

The numbers tell a compelling story. 90% of startups fail, with 1 in 5 shutting down within the first 12 months. In this high-stakes environment, anything that increases your odds deserves serious consideration. Building in public does exactly that.

According to a report from NielsenIQ, 72% of consumers consider transparency to be either "important" or "extremely important" when it comes to choosing whom to buy from. This isn't a niche preference—it's mainstream consumer behavior.

The Trust Multiplier

Joel Gascoigne, Buffer's co-founder, told The Next Web that transparency has increased the level of trust both between team members and with customers. This trust creates a defensible moat that copycats can't replicate. Anyone can copy your features, but they can't copy the authentic relationship you've built with your community.

Transparency cultivation regarding your decisions and processes definitely influences a startup's reputation, trustworthiness, and brand loyalty. When you're vulnerable about your challenges and honest about your limitations, people root for you. They become invested in your success.

Feedback Before You Need It

Listening to your potential buyers and accepting feedback to mold and shape your product around their needs is a surefire way to find product-market fit. Remember, 42% of startups fail because they build products nobody wants. Building in public gives you constant reality checks before you've invested months or years in the wrong direction.

By building a product in public view, a startup can allow users to engage with the product, collect feedback, and tweak the product to meet market demands. You're essentially running continuous user testing with a self-selected group of engaged potential customers.

Real Founders, Real Results

This isn't theoretical. Successful companies have proven the model works across different industries and business models.

Nathan Barry's intentions were to create a tool that would generate $5,000 of revenue within the first six months, and he was going to blog through the entire process, sharing details about everything. That transparency helped him build ConvertKit (now Kit), which has become a major player in the email marketing space.

Lemlist grew from $0 to $20M ARR in 5 years bootstrapped, with founder Guillaume Moubeche consistently sharing insights on growing a profitable SaaS business without venture capital. His transparency attracted customers who valued the bootstrapped approach and wanted to learn from his journey.

Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra utilized the build in public model to find out how he could rework existing email processes to meet consumer demands. The result? A waitlist that became legendary in tech circles and a product people genuinely wanted to pay $30/month for.

Practical Ways to Start Building in Public

You don't need to share your entire cap table on day one. Start small and build your transparency muscle gradually.

Choose Your Platform Wisely

The most impactful tool in this space is Twitter, which allows people to personally engage with others and broadcast information to the masses. But that's not your only option. LinkedIn works well for B2B founders. TikTok and YouTube suit founders comfortable with video. Newsletters give you direct access to engaged subscribers.

Pick the platform where your potential customers actually spend time, not just where everyone says you should be.

What to Share (and What to Skip)

Building in public doesn't mean sharing everything indiscriminately. Here's what resonates:

What to protect? Sensitive employee information, detailed competitive strategy that would genuinely harm your position, and anything that violates customer privacy or legal agreements.

Build a Sustainable Rhythm

Livestreaming your work takes building in public to its extreme example, but the benefit is that it won't add extra workload, as other channels do. Find a cadence that doesn't burn you out. Weekly updates work for some founders. Others prefer daily micro-updates or monthly deep dives.

Consistency matters more than frequency. Your audience wants to follow a narrative arc, not random broadcasts.

Navigating the Risks

Let's address the elephant in the room: What if competitors steal your ideas?

Some people might not be comfortable with building in public because they're afraid of their ideas being stolen. Once any product becomes popular, it's normal to see copycats. But what no other entrepreneur can copy is the product's execution and the connection the business has with its audience.

Baremetrics founder Josh Pigford noticed similar products coming out after making his numbers public, but none of them had any sort of negative impact on Baremetrics's growth. The data consistently shows that copycats aren't the threat most founders imagine.

The bigger risk? Not building the authentic connections that transparency enables. In a market where first-time founders have only an 18% success rate, while entrepreneurs who have already built a successful business enjoy 30% odds, you need every advantage you can get.

The Mental Health Benefit Nobody Talks About

Here's something that doesn't show up in the metrics but matters enormously. One unexpected benefit of building in public was to mental health, since founders no longer felt compelled to keep negative thoughts bottled up. By sharing both disappointments and successes, founders were able to clear their minds and help others avoid their mistakes.

The founder journey can be isolating. Building in public creates accountability and community exactly when you need it most.

Your Move

Building in public isn't a magic bullet. First-time startup founders have an 18% success rate whether they build in public or not. But this approach gives you tangible advantages: faster product-market fit, stronger customer relationships, and an engaged audience before you even launch.

The question isn't whether you can afford to build in public. Given that around 50 million new startups are established every year, meaning on average 137,000 startups are launched every day, the real question is whether you can afford not to. In a crowded market, authenticity and transparency might be your most defensible competitive advantages.

Start small. Share one honest update this week about what you're building and why. You might be surprised by who shows up to help, who offers valuable feedback, and who becomes your first customer. That's the power of building in public—turning strangers into stakeholders, one transparent post at a time.

For more on entrepreneurship and startup strategy, check out insights from entrepreneurship research and the Global Startup Ecosystem Report for data-driven perspectives on what makes startups succeed.