Building in Public: Free Distribution or Expensive Distraction?
Building in public has become a genre unto itself — a content format and a community and an aesthetic simultaneously. The visible iteration, the revenue screenshots, the honest postmortem, the monthly recap with the chart going up and to the right: these are now recognizable templates that a substantial audience has formed around and a substantial number of founders have adopted as their primary distribution strategy. Whether it works depends almost entirely on a question most people don’t ask before they start.
The question is: what is this for? Building in public serves two fundamentally different functions, and confusing them is the source of most of the wasted effort in the category. The first function is learning and accountability — using public commitment and external observation to sharpen your thinking and maintain execution discipline. The second function is distribution — building an audience of potential customers, collaborators, or amplifiers while building the product simultaneously. These functions overlap but they are not the same, and the tactics that serve one often underserve the other.
For learning and accountability, building in public works reliably and cheaply. The act of articulating what you’re building and why, publicly, forces clarity that private thinking rarely achieves. Explaining your reasoning to an external audience, even a small one, exposes logical gaps that felt invisible when you were the only audience. The accountability structure — having said you’d do something where someone might notice if you don’t — produces execution consistency that many solo operators genuinely need. These benefits are available from a small and engaged audience and don’t require scale to function.
For distribution, the math is considerably less reliable. The audience for building-in-public content is predominantly other builders and founders, which means your distribution is saturated with competitors and complementors but thin on actual customers. If your business sells to other bootstrapped operators, this coincidence of audience is genuinely useful. If it sells to restaurants, HR departments, or anyone outside the indie founder universe, the audience you’re building with your building-in-public content is largely irrelevant to the audience you need to grow the business.
The time cost is also worth pricing honestly. Consistent building in public — with the engagement, the threads, the updates, the community interaction that turns passive broadcasting into actual distribution — is a significant content commitment. For a solo operator, it competes directly with building the product and creating the content that might actually drive customer acquisition. The opportunity cost of an hour spent crafting a Twitter thread about your revenue milestone is an hour not spent on the work that generated the milestone. That tradeoff is often worth making, but it should be a conscious calculation rather than a default behavior because it feels like it should work.
The building-in-public approach is most clearly justified when the process of building is itself the product — when the documented journey is what an audience wants to consume and what a sponsorship or a course or a newsletter can monetize. This is a real model, and for a specific type of person with a specific combination of storytelling skill and genuine operational depth, it is excellent. For everyone else, it is one distribution channel among many, with a specific audience profile that may or may not overlap with the customer profile, and with a time cost that should be weighed against alternatives.
The honest version: build in public if the process helps you think, if the audience is your customer, or if the documentation is itself a product you can monetize. Don’t build in public because it looks like what successful founders do. What successful founders do is usually whatever worked for them specifically, described in terms universal enough to obscure how situational it was.