'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.
The legal and confidentiality limits UK founders forget
Building in public has real limits that go beyond personal comfort, and they're worth knowing before something gets shared that can't be unshared. Anything about an identifiable employee — their pay, a performance issue, a difficult conversation — is personal data under UK GDPR, and sharing it publicly without a lawful basis and without the employee's knowledge is a genuine compliance problem, not just an awkward HR moment. The same caution applies to specific client details: a client's name, their situation, even an anonymised-but-identifiable version of their story, generally needs their permission before it becomes content, whatever your contract with them does or doesn't say about confidentiality.
Commercially sensitive numbers deserve the same care. Sharing your own revenue is a choice about your own business. Sharing a supplier's pricing, a landlord's rent, or a specific deal term with a named partner can breach a confidentiality clause you signed without necessarily meaning to — and 'I didn't think of it as confidential, I was just being transparent' isn't a defence that holds up if the other party disagrees.
A worked example of getting the balance right
A founder documenting the first year of a small subscription box business shared monthly revenue, customer numbers and the specific mistakes — a supplier who missed a delivery deadline before Christmas, a pricing change that didn't land well — without ever naming the supplier or identifying individual customers. The specifics that mattered to the audience (what happened, what it cost, what changed as a result) were all there; the specifics that could cause a real problem (who exactly was involved, what a named party's exact terms were) were left out. That's the actual skill in building in public — not deciding whether to be transparent, but drawing the line in the right place, consistently, post after post, rather than relearning it under pressure the one time it actually matters.
What to do this week
Before your next post, run it through a simple two-part check: does it name or clearly identify anyone else — an employee, a client, a supplier, a partner — without their knowledge, and does it reveal a number or term you're contractually obliged to keep confidential? If either answer is yes, that's not necessarily a reason not to post, but it is a reason to check first, not after. Most founders who get into genuine trouble with building in public didn't cross the line deliberately — they just never built the habit of pausing to ask.
Common questions
Can I share a client's story publicly if I don't name them?
Only if they genuinely cannot be identified from what you post, and in a small market that bar is higher than it looks. 'A hospitality client who came to us in March' is identifiable to anyone who knows them, which usually includes their staff, their suppliers and their competitors. Under UK GDPR, information that can be linked back to a living individual is personal data whether or not you used a name, and a sole trader's business story is often their personal story too. The safe version is to ask in writing and keep the reply. The safer version still is to write about the pattern you have seen across several clients rather than one recognisable case.
Do I have to publish my revenue anyway if I'm a limited company?
Not at present. Small companies and micro-entities currently file accounts at Companies House with no profit and loss account — in practice a balance sheet and a few notes — so turnover and margin stay private, which is why publishing revenue is a genuine choice rather than an inevitability. That is changing: under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, small companies and micro-entities will have to file a profit and loss account, a change confirmed for April 2028 after being deferred from the original April 2027 date. Worth knowing before you decide, because a founder who spends years being cagey about figures that become public anyway pays the cost of secrecy without the benefit.
Can sharing my numbers actually get me into legal trouble?
Your own numbers, no. Other people's, easily. A confidentiality clause in a supplier contract, a lease or a partnership agreement binds you regardless of how transparent you meant to be, and 'I was building in public' is not a defence if the other party sees it differently. Anything about an identifiable employee — their pay, a performance issue, why they left — is personal data under UK GDPR, and publishing it without a lawful basis is a matter for the Information Commissioner's Office, which can issue enforcement notices as well as fines. The working rule is simple: your revenue, your mistakes and your decisions are yours to publish; anyone else's numbers, terms or behaviour need their agreement first.
Will competitors use what I share against me?
Some will read it; very few will do anything useful with it. The information a competitor could actually act on — your pricing, your suppliers, your positioning — is mostly discoverable anyway by anyone willing to read your website or pose as a customer for ten minutes. What building in public reveals beyond that is judgement and sequence, which is precisely the part that cannot be copied without also doing the work. The genuine risk is narrower and worth guarding: a supplier relationship you negotiated hard for, a channel that is working before you have built a lead in it, and anything that tells a competitor exactly when you are cash-tight.
What happens if I announce a target publicly and then miss it?
Far less than you fear, provided you say so yourself before anyone has to ask. An audience built through building in public is not there for the wins, it is there for the working-out, and a post explaining why a target was missed and what you got wrong usually outperforms the post that set it. What damages trust is the silence: a founder who publishes monthly revenue while it climbs and goes quiet the month it drops has taught everyone reading precisely how to interpret their silence from then on. If you are not willing to publish the bad month, do not publish the good ones. Choose a level of disclosure you can hold in a bad quarter.
