Build in public

Building in public means sharing the journey of creating your product openly, the metrics, the decisions, the wins and the failures, usually on social platforms or a newsletter, as you go. Instead of working in stealth and launching to silence, you build an audience alongside the product, so there's a warm crowd ready when you ship.

The payoff for a lean founder is distribution and feedback bundled together. Followers become your first users, your testers, your referrers and sometimes your hires. Transparency builds trust faster than polished marketing, and the accountability of a public goal keeps you moving. Revenue screenshots and honest post-mortems travel further than any ad.

In practice it's a handful of small habits. Say you're posting your monthly numbers on LinkedIn: rather than rebuild a screenshot each time, you wire a live revenue chart in Databox and share the same dashboard every month, so the growth line tells the story for you. Say a few hundred people start following the journey, you don't want to leave them on a platform you don't own, so you funnel them into a newsletter in Brevo and email the updates directly, building a list that's yours. And say you want the daily build-log itself to compound, you draft and schedule the LinkedIn posts in Taplio so showing up in public doesn't eat your whole morning.

The costs: it's a real time commitment, it exposes you to copycats, and it tempts you to optimise for applause rather than customers. Done well, it's a free, compounding distribution channel. Done badly, it's performance art that distracts from the actual work. Share to attract buyers, not just an audience.