The Playbook

Build in Public: Does It Still Work, and For Whom?

Everybody's "building in public" now. That's exactly why you have to ask what it's actually good for.

← All articles · distilled from real founder research

Pieter Levels turned a Google spreadsheet into a business by doing it in front of everyone. He tweeted the link to Nomad List — a public, editable sheet ranking cities for remote workers — and watched people add cities themselves as it spread across Reddit and Hacker News. The thing built itself, in public, because he let the crowd co-author it. Reported revenue landed somewhere around $20K–$40K a month, mostly solo. That's the dream version of build-in-public, and it's real.

But I want to be honest about who this actually works for, because I think a lot of people cargo-cult it and wonder why nothing happens.

Here's my take: building in public works when the building is the content. When your progress, your numbers, and your lessons are interesting to the exact people who'd buy from you. It does not work as a magic incantation you sprinkle on a product nobody wants.

Look at Jon Yongfook and Bannerbear. He blogged the whole thing — the Shopify-app phase, a post literally titled how he got his first 25 customers, and then a "$10K MRR" post that hit Hacker News and went viral. He grew a following of around 60,000 on Twitter doing this. Bannerbear reportedly climbed to ~$10K MRR, then ~$36K, then ~$50K. The public building wasn't decoration. It was the distribution.

Marc Lou is the clearest case of the compounding effect. He spent years building an audience on Twitter — shipping small products, sharing MRR transparently — before he strictly needed any of it. Then he launched ShipFast into that existing following and it reportedly hit around $141K MRR. In one stretch he went from roughly $8K MRR to $30K MRR in a single month. That doesn't happen without the years of public reps first. His own meta-lesson: distribution compounds. Sell early, stay transparent, iterate in public.

And there's a transparency-as-product move worth naming. Failory — a startup-teardown newsletter a teenager started in Buenos Aires — ran an open-metrics page publishing their revenue and stats. That openness was part of the draw. It's the same instinct behind the "/open" pages you see all over indie SaaS. People trust the founder who shows the receipts.

So who's it for? If I had to draw the line:

Build in public works if your audience is founders, builders, indie hackers, developers, marketers — people who find the how fascinating. It's why Twitter/X and Indie Hackers and Hacker News are the native soil. Felix Wong got his first ten VenturesList customers from building in public on Twitter "in a day or two." That's a builder-to-builders product finding builders.

It works much less well — and I'd say don't count on it — for pure B2C where your customer doesn't care how the sausage is made. The person buying scented candles or a toddler sippy cup is not following your MRR journey. Nobody's retweeting your churn graph to their aunt.

A few honest caveats from the research and from watching this play out:

The Moonlight founder's regret is instructive: he neglected SEO and confined his marketing to his local region. Building in public got him going, but it wasn't a complete growth strategy. Public building is a top-of-funnel and trust engine. It is not a substitute for the boring channels.

And there's survivorship bias baked into every "I built in public and made $40K MRR" thread. You're seeing the Levels and the Lous. You're not seeing the thousand quiet accounts posting daily updates to fourteen followers. The ones who won had something worth watching — a real product, real numbers, a real niche.

Here's where I land. Build in public if you're building for people who like to watch things get built, and if you're willing to actually share numbers instead of vibes. Do it as a way to compound distribution over months and years, not as a launch-week trick. And pair it with something durable underneath — SEO, a real product, a channel that doesn't depend on the algorithm liking you that week.

The transparency still works. It's just not a shortcut. It's a long game that happens to be fun.

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