What Building in Public Actually Means (And Why I Do It)

"Building in public" gets misused constantly. I've watched it become shorthand for posting revenue screenshots, showing off MRR graphs with arrows pointing up and to the right, and performing a kind of entrepreneurial bravado designed to attract attention. That's not what it is. Or at least, it's not the version worth doing.

Let me tell you what building in public actually means — why I started, what I've gotten out of it, and why transparency might be the highest-leverage thing you can do when you're growing a solo business.

The Real Definition

Building in public means documenting your journey for people who are where you were.

That's the whole thing. You share what you're working on, what you're learning, what's working, and what isn't — not for clout, but because someone six months behind you on the same path will find it useful. You're creating a trail of breadcrumbs for people navigating the same terrain.

It's not a content strategy. It's a way of being useful with work you're already doing.

The distinction matters because it changes how you think about what to share. If you're performing for an audience, you share the impressive stuff. If you're documenting for people who need help, you share the real stuff — including the slow periods, the wrong turns, the things you had to redo three times before they worked.

One version builds a personal brand. The other builds trust. Trust is worth more.

What It Isn't

It isn't posting revenue milestones to flex. That's performative, and most audiences see through it quickly. Revenue numbers without context — without the expenses, the hours, the failures that happened alongside the wins — are just noise.

It isn't manufactured vulnerability, either. The genre of "I almost gave up and here's the moment I realized I should keep going" content is so overused that it's become its own kind of performance. People can feel the difference between someone genuinely sharing a hard moment and someone packaging struggle for engagement.

And it isn't mandatory disclosure of everything. Building in public doesn't mean your business has no privacy. It means the parts you choose to share are real.

Why I Do It

Three reasons, none of them are altruistic.

It builds the right audience. When I'm honest about what I'm building and why, the people who stick around are the people who care about the same things. They're not there for the highlight reel — they're there because they're trying to do something similar and they're paying attention. That's the best possible audience: engaged, context-aware, and already pre-sold on your credibility before they ever see a product.

It creates content from work I'm already doing. Every product I launch, every lesson I learn, every experiment I run — that's all material. Building in public means I'm not generating content from scratch; I'm narrating what I'm already doing. The work and the content creation are the same activity. That efficiency matters a lot when you're running things solo.

It makes sales feel natural. When I mention that I launched something new on MadeThis, nobody feels like they're being sold to — because they've been watching the product take shape for weeks or months. They've seen the behind-the-scenes, the version one, the iteration. By the time the product is ready, the audience isn't encountering it cold. They're following along.

That last point is the business case for transparency that most people miss. Trust isn't just nice to have — it converts.

The Connection Between Transparency and Sales

Here's the thing about affiliate marketing and solopreneur businesses: people buy from people they trust, and they trust people who've demonstrated they have nothing to hide.

When you build in public, you're essentially running a long-form trust-building exercise. You're showing your work over time. You're proving that your judgment is sound, your experience is real, and your recommendations come from somewhere genuine. By the time someone encounters your product or a recommendation from you, there's a track record to evaluate — not just a sales page.

My storefront on MadeThis is the destination at the end of this. Products people can see me building toward, launch, and iterate on — in public. It's not a brochure. It's evidence.

The practical version: building in public makes every product launch smaller and lower-stakes, because you've been warming the audience the entire time. When you share that something is live, you're not asking people to take a leap of faith on a stranger — you're inviting people who already know you to take the next step.

Where to Start If You Haven't Yet

Start with the last thing you figured out that you wish you'd known a year ago.

That's your first post. Not your revenue. Not your origin story. Not your 5-step framework for success. Just the thing you learned, stated plainly, that will save someone else the time you spent figuring it out.

Do that consistently, and the audience builds itself. Not overnight — but steadily, with the right people.

For more on what this looks like in practice and how it's affected my actual growth numbers, see how building in public grew my audience faster than any tactic. That post gets into the specifics.

Building in public isn't a hack or a strategy. It's a long game — one that compounds in ways that feel slow until suddenly they don't.