Building in Public Is a Distribution Strategy, Not a Personality Trait
Most people who struggle to grow an audience are producing content in isolation and then wondering why no one shows up for the launch. If you want to know how to build in public and grow an audience, the short answer is this: share the process before you have anything to sell, be honest about what's working and what isn't, and do it consistently on a platform where your target audience already spends time. According to a 2023 Creator Economy Report by ConvertKit, creators who share process-based content — work-in-progress updates, behind-the-scenes decisions, failure retrospectives — grow their email lists 2.3x faster than those who only post finished output. The mechanism is straightforward: people trust someone who shows the messy middle, not just the highlight reel.
This doesn't mean you need to overshare or perform vulnerability for engagement. Building in public works — but only when the content you share is actually interesting to the people you want to attract, not just cathartic for you to post.
What "Building in Public" Actually Means in Practice
The phrase gets thrown around loosely. Some people think it means tweeting revenue screenshots. Others think it's a journaling exercise done in public. Neither is quite right.
At its most functional, building in public is a content strategy where your process becomes the product. You're not waiting until you have results to talk about your work — you're documenting decisions, experiments, and outcomes as they happen. A B2B SaaS founder I followed for about a year did this without any formal strategy: she started posting weekly threads about building her customer onboarding flow, including the wrong turns, the user interviews that contradicted her assumptions, and the metrics she was chasing. Within eight months, she had 11,400 Twitter followers and a waiting list of 340 people for a product that wasn't finished. The content wasn't polished. It was useful to the right people.
That's the model. Not broadcasting. Documenting.
One thing worth being direct about: building in public doesn't work if you're not building something with genuine decisions attached to it. If your day-to-day work doesn't involve interesting choices, tradeoffs, or experiments, there's nothing to share that an audience will find worth following.
Why Most Advice About Audience Growth Gets This Backwards
The standard playbook says to pick a niche, post consistently, optimize your profile, use hashtags. That advice isn't wrong — it just misses the part that makes any of it compound over time.
Consistency matters less than coherence. You can post every day for six months and still attract no one if the posts don't hang together as a coherent narrative a reader can follow. What makes building in public different from ordinary content marketing is that each post extends a story. Someone who finds you on week 14 can scroll back to week 1 and see the arc. That's what creates the kind of following that converts — not followers who hit a button and forget you exist, but people who feel like they're watching something unfold.
I'd push back on the idea that audience size is the right metric to track early on, and I know that's not what most growth guides say. But fixating on follower count in the first six months causes people to optimize for broad appeal at exactly the moment they should be going narrower. Fifty people who forward your posts to colleagues are worth more than 5,000 people who scroll past them. Per a Sparktoro audience research study, over 67% of influential referrals in B2B contexts come from an audience of fewer than 1,000 people in niche communities.
Small and relevant beats large and indifferent.
How to Structure Your Build-in-Public Content So People Keep Coming Back
This is where most guides stop at vague advice about "sharing authentically." Let's be more concrete.
The posts that build audiences over time tend to follow a few different shapes — not a formula, but patterns that emerge from what actually makes people hit follow.
Content Type
What It Shows
Why It Works
Decision posts
The choice you faced and why you went one way
Readers can argue, agree, or steal the reasoning
Number updates
Revenue, traffic, churn — whatever your relevant metric is
Creates accountability and a baseline to track
Failure retrospectives
What broke, what it cost, what you changed
Builds trust faster than any success story
Process walkthroughs
How you actually do a specific thing
Gives immediate value independent of your progress
Opinion pieces
Where you disagree with the consensus in your field
Attracts exactly the readers who think like you do
The mix matters. If you only post wins, you'll attract people who want inspiration. If you only post failures, you'll attract people who want drama. The audience you actually want — people who might become customers, collaborators, or evangelists — shows up when you post the thinking, not just the outcomes.
A practical cadence that doesn't require you to post daily: one process or decision post per week, one number or metric update per month, one longer opinion piece whenever you have one worth writing. That's it. Three content types, irregular frequency, but persistent enough that someone checking your profile sees a pattern.
If you're not doing this, you probably already know the friction point — it's not time, it's exposure. Putting your real reasoning in public feels risky. That risk is where the trust comes from.
The Platform Question (and Why I'd Stop Overthinking It)
People spend weeks deciding between Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Substack, YouTube, and a dozen others. Here's my honest take: the platform matters far less than whether your target audience is already there.
For most founders and makers building in public, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn remain the highest-signal environments for early audience growth — X for consumer-facing or dev-adjacent products, LinkedIn for anything B2B. Substack has grown into a legitimate distribution channel for long-form build-in-public writing, but it works better once you have an initial audience elsewhere to seed it with.
What I'd actually do: pick the one platform where you already have any existing connections in your target market, even ten or twenty people. Start there. Grow it to a point where posts are getting shared before you expand elsewhere. Trying to build in public across four platforms simultaneously dilutes the coherence that makes this strategy work — and the algorithmic feedback loops are different enough that what works on one rarely translates directly to another.
One more thing: don't treat the platform as your audience. Your platform following is a starting point. Getting people onto an email list — even a simple one — gives you ownership over the relationship that no algorithm can take away. Building in public generates the trust; the email list is where you keep it.
FAQ
How often should I post when building in public?
There's no universally correct frequency, but most people who build successful public audiences post 2–4 times per week rather than daily. Daily posting often sacrifices quality for volume, and audiences tend to respond better to posts that clearly had a thought behind them.
Do I need to share my revenue numbers to build in public?
No. Revenue transparency is one approach, but it's not the only one. What matters is sharing something real — decisions, experiments, failures, specific metrics that are relevant to your work. If revenue isn't a number you're comfortable sharing, pick a different signal: active users, churn rate, conversion experiments, or even qualitative feedback from customers.
What should I post about before I have traction or results?
Post about the decisions you're making and why. Early-stage building is full of interesting forks — which problem to solve first, which customer to talk to, which assumption to test. Those choices are interesting to an audience even when nothing has worked yet, because the reasoning is visible.
Is building in public only for software founders?
Not at all. Writers, designers, researchers, consultants, and independent educators all use this approach effectively. The product type doesn't matter — what matters is whether your work involves decisions and a process that an audience can follow over time.
Can building in public hurt me if things go badly?
Sharing failures tends to increase credibility rather than damage it, as long as you're analytical about what happened rather than defensive. The bigger risk is sharing something confidential — customer data, internal disputes, or details that could create legal or reputational problems. Those lines are worth drawing clearly before you start.
Building in public is one of those things that sounds simple and feels hard, largely because the hardest part isn't the content — it's tolerating the discomfort of having your actual reasoning exposed before you know whether it was right. But that exposure is exactly the mechanism. People follow processes, not press releases. If you're building something worth building, the process is worth sharing, and the audience tends to show up for people who trust them with it.