Build in public on X: a practical guide for founders

Where it came from

The idea is older than the hashtag. In December 2013, Buffer published every employee’s salary and the formula behind it, and it still publishes its revenue on a public page. In April 2015, Baremetrics launched Open Startups: seven companies, Buffer among them, sharing their live revenue dashboards. Founders called it the open startup movement. By the late 2010s, the phrase “building in public” had taken over, and indie makers on X turned #buildinpublic into a habit.

The best-known examples are solo founders. Pieter Levels set himself a public challenge to ship twelve startups in twelve months, and he has posted his products’ progress on X for years. Arvid Kahl has said that sharing his verified revenue helped him sell his company, FeedbackPanda.

Why it works

• People follow a story. “Day 40: first paying customer” is more interesting than a launch announcement, because readers watched you get there.
• Your audience exists before your launch. When you ship, the people who watched you build are the first to try it.
• You get feedback early. Post a draft of your pricing page, and you’ll hear what’s wrong with it before a customer does.
• It keeps you honest. A public weekly update is hard to skip.

What to share

• Numbers, with context. Revenue, signups, churn, traffic. A number on its own reads as a brag or a confession. Add what you think caused it, and it becomes a lesson.
• Decisions and why. Why you picked this price, cut that feature, or said no to that customer.
• Mistakes, specifically. Skip “I learned a lot this week”. Write “I emailed 400 people the wrong link and here is what I changed”.
• Work in progress. A messy screenshot gets more replies than a polished one, because people can see where to help.
• What you’re stuck on. A genuine question to people who’ve done it before is one of the best posts you can write.

What to keep back

Building in public has a cost, and it’s grown. In 2026, Arvid Kahl warned that AI tools make it far cheaper to copy a product someone describes in detail, and that the revenue level at which founders stop sharing has collapsed toward zero. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

• Share outcomes and lessons. If your exact acquisition channels and best-converting copy are your edge, keep them to yourself.
• Share customer stories with permission, and never customer data.
• Share ranges or growth rates if exact revenue feels like too much.
• Never share anything that belongs to someone else: a partner’s numbers, a private conversation, a client’s name.

How to keep a build log going

Most build-in-public accounts go quiet in the third week. The ones that last make it a routine, and don’t wait for the mood.

1. Pick a fixed update. One numbers post every Friday is enough of a spine. Everything else is extra.
2. Keep a running note. Write one line a day about what happened. On a quiet day, that note is your post.
3. Mix the formats. A week of “today I worked on…” gets dull. Rotate a number, a decision, a mistake, a question and a screenshot. The tweet ideas page has a founder set in twelve formats.
4. Reply to other builders. The build-in-public crowd on X is a community. The replies you leave under other people’s updates bring in as many followers as your own posts.
5. Write ahead. When you have energy, write the week’s posts in one sitting and schedule them, so a bad week doesn’t break the streak.

Sounding like yourself

The point of building in public is that people get to know a person. That’s lost the moment updates start to read like a press release, or like a chatbot wrote them: the “thrilled to announce”, the “journey”, the tidy lesson at the end. If you draft with AI, cut those. The free AI writing checker marks them for you, and PostInk discards drafts that contain them before you see them.