Building in public, and what it costs
It is the cheapest distribution available to a solo founder, and it quietly commits you to things: the revenue screenshot, the audience for the pivot, the performance of shipping.
The short version
- It is distribution, not product research. Your followers are mostly other founders.
- Share decisions, not dashboards. Revenue screenshots attract the wrong audience.
- Four real costs: the commitment, the performance, the wrong feedback, the audience you cannot pivot.
- Faceless works. Screens, changelogs and numbers need no camera.
- Two or three short posts a week beats a monthly essay.
What building in public actually buys
Distribution, at a price a solo founder can afford, which is nothing but attention. A product built silently launches to nobody; a product built in the open launches to people who watched it being made and already understand what it is. That is the whole of the case, and it is a strong one.
It buys three other things worth naming. It forces a weekly articulation of what you are doing, which catches drift earlier than any planning document. It produces a public record that functions as credibility later. And it creates a reason to post at all: the hardest part of any content habit is having something to say, and shipping generates material automatically.
Nobody is going to discover your SaaS. Building in public is how you make the discovery cheap.
What it does not buy
Validation. The audience that follows a build is overwhelmingly other people building things (founders, developers, the indie-hacker adjacent), and they are enthusiastic, generous with advice, and almost never your customer. Mistaking their encouragement for demand is the most expensive error in the format.
- Replies are not signal. "This is great, I'd use this" costs nothing and predicts nothing (how to validate a SaaS idea).
- Followers are not a waitlist, and a waitlist is not customers (the waitlist, and what it is worth).
- Founder feedback skews technical. They will discuss your stack and ignore your pricing, which is the reverse of what matters.
- A popular build does not mean a viable product. Plenty of well-followed builds launched to their own audience and nobody else.
The four costs
| Cost | What it looks like | Mitigation |
|---|---|---|
| Commitment | A direction announced is hard to abandon | Share what you did, not what you will do |
| Performance | Shipping for the audience, not the user | Decide the roadmap before you post it |
| Wrong feedback | Building what founders suggest | Weight paying users above repliers |
| A stuck audience | Followers who came for the old idea | Post about the problem, not the product |
The performance cost is the sneaky one. Once an audience is watching, shipping something visible every week starts to feel obligatory, and visible work is not the same as valuable work. The unglamorous month of fixing onboarding produces no posts and more revenue than the month of shipping features that photograph well.
What to share, and what to keep
Share the reasoning: the decision you made, what you tried, what broke, and what you learned about the problem. Keep back anything that identifies a customer, anything under an agreement, security detail, and any plan you have not committed to, because announcing a direction is what makes changing it expensive.
| Share | Keep back |
|---|---|
| A decision and why | A plan you might change |
| Something that broke, and the fix | Security detail of how it broke |
| A screenshot of the product | Anything with customer data in it |
| What a user told you, anonymised | Who the user was |
| A number you can stand behind | Numbers you are quoting to look bigger |
| What you got wrong | Anything you are contractually bound on |
The revenue screenshot problem
Revenue posts are the most-shared form of building in public and the least useful. They travel because they are aspirational, which means they reach people who want to be founders rather than people who want your software, and a follower who came for the MRR chart has no interest in the product it came from.
There is a version that works: a number in service of a point. "Churn was 9% and here is what was causing it" is a revenue post that teaches something and attracts people with the same problem. "$4,200 MRR 🚀" is a post about you. The first builds an audience that overlaps with your market; the second builds one that overlaps with your competitors.
And once you post numbers, you have started a series. A quiet month becomes conspicuous, which is a pressure nobody needs while running a business alone.
Doing it without a face
Almost none of the format requires a person on camera. Screen recordings, changelogs, before-and-after screenshots, a decision written out, a chart: the material of building in public is inherently faceless, which makes it the most natural content type a faceless technical brand has.
- Screen recordings of the thing working. The single most persuasive artefact you own.
- A public changelog that doubles as posts. Ship, then post the line you already wrote.
- Before and after screenshots of an interface you improved.
- The decision, written out. "Two options, here is why I picked the second" is the most repliable thing you can post.
- Anonymised user quotes. Real language from real people, without naming them.
Where to post it depends on who you sell to. Threads vs X covers that choice, and for a technical product the answer is usually X, where the build-log format is native and the audience is already there.
A rhythm that survives
- Two or three short posts a week, each about one real thing that happened. Not a weekly essay: those get skipped when the week is bad.
- Post the decision on the day you make it. The reasoning is fresh and the post writes itself.
- One screenshot a week of something visible, whether or not it is finished.
- Reply for the hour afterwards. The conversation is worth more than the post, and it is where the first customers come from.
- Say the uncomfortable thing occasionally. The month nothing worked is the post people remember, and the one that makes the good months believable.
- Do not post during the boring stretch. Post about it. "Three weeks on billing edge cases" is a real post and the honest picture of the work.
The founders who get the distribution out of this are not the ones with the best numbers. They are the ones still posting in month eleven, about a product that is slightly better than it was in month ten, which is the same conclusion as everything else on this blog, and the reason it keeps turning up.
Frequently asked questions
Does building in public actually work?
For distribution, yes: it is the cheapest way for a solo founder to be found by the people who might buy. For product decisions it is weaker: the people following your build are usually other founders, not your customers, and their feedback reflects that.
Do I have to share revenue numbers?
No. Revenue screenshots are the most-shared version and the most misleading: they attract other founders rather than customers. Sharing decisions, problems and what you tried is more useful to read and commits you to less.
Can you build in public with a faceless brand?
Yes. Screen recordings, changelogs, decisions and numbers all work without a face. What you lose is the personal-story angle; what you keep is everything that made the format work in the first place.
What should you not share?
Anything that identifies a customer, security detail, anything under an agreement, and decisions you have not actually made yet. Announcing a direction publicly makes it expensive to change your mind.
How often should you post about the build?
Little and often beats a monthly essay. Two or three short posts a week, each about one real thing that happened, is sustainable and gives the algorithm something to work with.
The system behind this, written down
Everything above is the map. The Income Loop is the work inside it: modules 0–6 from the problem you solve to the offer that pays for it, plus ten traffic paths: the deeper post banks, the content sales systems and the full software build sequence, in one place.
Get The Income LoopNot ready to pay for anything? The Basic Income Loop is free and includes a complete seven-day starter for Threads, Instagram or software, enough to find out which one suits you before spending anything.