How to Build in Public to Grow Your SaaS

What Building in Public Actually Means

Building in public means sharing the process of building your startup — the metrics, the decisions, the failures, the pivots — as it happens, with your audience. It is not the same as posting product announcements or writing retrospective case studies. It is live, ongoing transparency that lets your audience follow your journey in real time.

The practice became mainstream in the indie hacker and bootstrapped SaaS community around 2018–2020, and it has produced some of the most successful organic growth stories in early-stage SaaS. Founders who build in public consistently outperform peers who market through conventional channels in the 0–100 customer stage, because they are building something that conventional marketing cannot buy: genuine audience trust.

But done badly, building in public is performative at best and reputation-damaging at worst. This guide explains how to do it well.

Why It Works

Building in public works because it creates several compounding advantages simultaneously:

• Audience before product: By sharing your process while you are building, you accumulate an audience of people interested in your domain before you have a product to sell. When you launch or add features, you have warm readers, not cold strangers.
• Trust signals: Showing real metrics, real failures, and real decision-making is far more credible than polished marketing copy. Audiences are increasingly skeptical of corporate messaging — authentic, imperfect founder content cuts through that skepticism.
• Free customer research: Sharing problems you are solving attracts people with the same problems. The comments and DMs you receive are a continuous customer discovery feed.
• Accountability loop: Publishing goals publicly creates external accountability. Founders who share weekly metrics consistently report higher follow-through on targets than those who track privately.
• SEO and content flywheel: Threads, posts, and updates shared publicly generate backlinks, social shares, and search traffic over time. A Twitter/X thread about your pricing experiments from 18 months ago may still be driving traffic to your site today.

What to Share

The most impactful content categories for building in public:

• Revenue and growth metrics: MRR milestones, trial numbers, conversion rates. The Indie Hackers community normalized monthly revenue updates; audiences genuinely engage with these. You do not have to share exact numbers — percentage growth and milestone markers work well if you prefer not to disclose revenue specifics.
• Product decisions and their rationale: Why you built feature X, why you cut feature Y, what customer feedback led you to pivot. These posts are educational for your audience and build enormous credibility as a thoughtful founder.
• Failures and what you learned: A campaign that flopped, a launch that underperformed, a technical mistake that cost you time. Failure posts consistently get more engagement than success posts because they are relatable. The audience trust you build by sharing honest failures is worth more than any number of polished success announcements.
• Behind-the-scenes processes: How you do customer interviews, how you prioritize your roadmap, how you handle support. These posts attract both potential customers and founders who are building similar companies — both are valuable relationships.
• Data insights from your platform: If your SaaS generates interesting data, share aggregated, anonymized insights from it. "We analyzed 1,000 marketing dashboards in our platform — here is what separates the ones that get used from the ones that do not." This kind of content is unique to you and positions you as a domain authority.

What Not to Share

Building in public has real limits. Things you should not share publicly:

• Customer-specific data or conversations without explicit permission
• Information about employees, contractors, or co-founders that they have not approved for public sharing
• Details that give competitors a material advantage (unreleased roadmap items, acquisition conversations, pricing strategy specifics)
• Investor or board communications
• Financial details that could harm fundraising conversations or customer trust

The rule of thumb: if it primarily helps your audience understand your journey and does not harm anyone involved in your business, it is probably shareable. When in doubt, ask the people involved.

Where to Build in Public

Platform selection matters because different platforms have different audiences and content formats:

• Twitter/X: The original build-in-public platform. Best for milestone updates, quick insights, threading a product story. The indie hacker and SaaS founder community is most active here. High velocity, shorter content.
• LinkedIn: Better for B2B audiences. The same build-in-public content performs well on LinkedIn with a slightly more professional tone. Longer posts and document carousels outperform short updates here.
• Indie Hackers: A dedicated community for bootstrapped and early-stage SaaS founders. Monthly revenue updates and milestone posts get genuine engagement from a highly relevant audience. Also excellent for SEO — Indie Hackers posts rank well in Google for SaaS-related searches.
• Newsletter / blog: Longer-form build-in-public content — monthly retrospectives, quarterly reviews, deep dives into specific decisions — belongs in a newsletter or blog. This builds a direct audience you own, independent of any platform algorithm.

Start with one or two platforms rather than trying to be everywhere. Consistency matters more than reach in the early stages.

Building a System for Consistent Sharing

The founders who succeed with building in public are not the most naturally open people — they are the most consistent ones. Openness without a system leads to sporadic posting and eventual abandonment when things get busy.

Build a weekly rhythm:

1. Track weekly metrics: Keep a running document of your key metrics — MRR, trials, conversion rate, churn, traffic. Update it every Friday.
2. Draft a weekly update: Using your metrics document, write a 200–400 word summary of the week. What happened, what you shipped, what you learned, what you are working on next. This takes 15–20 minutes once you have the template.
3. Publish and engage: Post the update on your chosen platform(s) and then spend 20 minutes responding to comments and engaging with others in the same community.

Monthly retrospectives work better on a blog or newsletter: 500–1,000 words covering the full month's progress, major decisions, lessons, and goals for the next month. The monthly cadence lets you reflect on patterns and trends that weekly updates miss.

Converting Your Audience Into Customers

Building an audience is not the goal — it is a means to building a sustainable business. The conversion from build-in-public audience to paying customer is gentler than cold marketing but requires intentional design.

Make your product accessible and visible in every piece of content without being pushy. Mention what you are building in your bio, in your update posts, in relevant comments. When you share a data insight or a product decision, link to the relevant part of your product naturally in context.

Launch events are where build-in-public audiences convert most strongly. If you have been sharing your journey for 6 months and you launch a new feature or a major product update, your audience is primed to try it. They know the backstory. They trust you. They want you to succeed.

Track which content types drive trial signups and product visits. Tools like MarketiStats let you see traffic from social channels alongside your trial and conversion data, so you can quantify which build-in-public posts are actually driving growth, not just engagement.

Dealing With the Discomfort

Most founders who have not built in public before underestimate the psychological barrier. Sharing real metrics, real failures, and real uncertainty feels exposing — especially when things are not going well.

A few reframes that help: Your audience is not your competition. The people who follow your journey are founders, potential customers, and supporters — not people who will use your vulnerability against you. The founders who have built the largest audiences are consistently the most honest about their struggles, not their successes.

Also: nobody is paying as much attention as you think. What feels like a public admission of failure to you is an interesting data point to your audience. The posts you are most afraid to publish are usually the ones that resonate the most.

Summary

Building in public is one of the most effective growth strategies available to early-stage SaaS founders because it creates audience trust, demand generation, and customer research simultaneously. Share metrics, decisions, and failures consistently on the platforms where your audience lives. Build a weekly system so consistency survives busy periods. Be patient — the compounding effect of six months of consistent building in public is dramatic, but it requires actually showing up for six months to see it.