'Building in public' — sharing your revenue, your mistakes, your decisions, sometimes in near real time — has become a genuine growth channel for a certain kind of founder. Done well, it builds trust and audience faster than almost any other marketing approach available to a small business with no budget.
Why it works when it works
People are more receptive to a founder admitting a launch didn't work and explaining why, than to a founder claiming everything is going brilliantly all the time. Vulnerability, used deliberately rather than performed, reads as trustworthy, and trust is the actual currency that turns strangers into customers.
It also does something subtler: it turns an audience into invested observers rather than passive followers. People who've watched a founder work through a genuine setback in public tend to root for the eventual win in a way they wouldn't if they'd only ever seen the polished result. That emotional investment is difficult to manufacture any other way, and it's a large part of why building in public converts strangers into customers faster than conventional marketing content.
The real costs
It's genuinely uncomfortable to share numbers publicly, and that discomfort doesn't fully go away with practice — it just becomes more manageable. Competitors get to see your playbook in something close to real time. And there's a specific trap where the performance of transparency starts to matter more than the business itself, where founders end up making decisions partly for the story it'll make rather than because it's the right call.
There's also a psychological cost that gets underestimated: sharing a setback publicly means processing it in public too, before you've necessarily had time to think it through privately first. Founders who build in public well tend to develop a habit of giving themselves at least a day of private reflection before turning a setback into content, precisely to avoid narrating a reaction they haven't fully worked through yet.
Building in public should serve the business. The moment the business starts serving the content, something has quietly gone wrong.
Who this actually suits
Building in public tends to work best for founders who are already reasonably comfortable being visible, and for businesses where the founder's judgement and personality are genuinely part of the product — coaching, consulting, certain kinds of ecommerce brands, agencies. It tends to suit less well businesses that depend on discretion, where clients or customers would be uncomfortable seeing their situation used as content, even indirectly and anonymised.
What's actually worth sharing
Lessons and decisions travel better than raw numbers for most small UK businesses — what you tried, what happened, what you'd do differently. Full revenue transparency works for a specific kind of audience and a specific kind of founder; it isn't a requirement to get the benefits of building in public. Share what you're genuinely comfortable defending in a conversation, and build from there.
A useful filter before posting anything: would you be equally comfortable explaining this decision to a customer who asked about it directly, in person? If yes, it's probably fine to share. If the honest answer is you'd give a customer a softer, edited version, that's worth noticing before it goes out to a much wider audience than one customer.
