What Does "Build in Public" Mean?
Building in public means sharing your startup's progress transparently with the world — revenue milestones, user counts, product decisions, failures, and lessons learned — typically through social media, newsletters, or a public portfolio.
The concept became popular in the indie hacker community around 2018–2020, with builders like Pieter Levels (@levelsio) and Jon Yongfook demonstrating that radical transparency could itself become a growth channel.
Why Builders Share Revenue Numbers
There are three distinct motivations behind sharing revenue publicly:
1. Trust and credibility: "I made $X last month from Y customers" is the strongest possible social proof for a solo product. It signals that real people pay for the thing you built.
2. Distribution: Revenue milestones go viral in the indie hacker community. A tweet about crossing $1K, $10K, or $100K MRR gets more engagement than almost any other content because it's aspirational and concrete.
3. Accountability: Public commitments create follow-through. Knowing that your audience is watching makes you ship more consistently.
The Credibility Problem — And How Makerfolio Solves It
Anyone can tweet "I made $10K last month." The build-in-public movement has always had a verification problem: claims without proof are just stories.
Makerfolio connects directly to your Stripe and Polar accounts and displays your verified MRR on your public profile — meaning the numbers are cryptographically tied to your actual payment processor, not self-reported. It's the difference between "I claim to make $5K MRR" and "Makerfolio has verified $5K MRR from my Stripe account."
What to Share (and What Not To)
High-value content to share publicly:
- Monthly MRR updates with context (what drove growth/decline)
- Feature launches and the reasoning behind them
- Failed experiments and what you learned
- Conversion funnel insights (traffic → trial → paid)
- Customer conversations that shaped product decisions
Keep private:
- Individual customer data or identifiable information
- Pricing experiments before you've validated them
- Team/co-founder conflicts (resolve privately)
- Acquisition conversations until they're closed
Build in Public vs Shameless Self-Promotion
The builders who do this well share the journey, not just the wins. An audience follows you because they're learning something about building, not because you're constantly announcing milestones.
The best "build in public" content is specific, honest, and useful to other builders. "We grew from $2K to $3K MRR — here's the one SEO article that drove 80% of new signups" is 10x more valuable than "Crossed $3K MRR!!!"
Tools for Building in Public
- Makerfolio: public portfolio with verified MRR, project showcase, and achievement badges
- Twitter/X: most active indie hacker community
- Indie Hackers: forum and milestone posts
- Substack/Beehiiv: longer-form monthly updates