Building in public: a practical guide for SaaS founders

Building in public sounds simple: share what you're working on, and an audience will form around you. In practice, many founders try it for two weeks, post a few screenshots to silence, and quietly stop.

The founders who make it work don't have a magic formula. They treat building in public as a habit with a clear purpose, not a broadcast. This guide covers how to do that: what to share, where, how often, and what to keep to yourself.

Why build in public at all?

Building in public isn't about vanity. Done well, it does a few useful things at once:

• It builds trust before launch. People who watched you build are far more likely to try your product when it ships.
• It creates a feedback loop. Sharing early designs and decisions invites input while changes are still cheap.
• It attracts peers. Other founders become friends, collaborators, and sometimes your first customers or advocates.
• It keeps you accountable. Public commitments are harder to quietly abandon.
• It compounds. Each post is small, but a year of them adds up to a body of work people can discover.

It's not a replacement for talking to customers or building a good product. It's a multiplier on both.

Decide what you're building in public for

Before you post anything, decide who you want to reach. This choice shapes everything else.

If your goal is...	Your audience is...	Share more of...
Getting customers	Your target users	Problems you're solving, product updates, user stories
Connecting with peers	Other founders	Revenue lessons, tooling, mistakes, decisions
Recruiting or investors	Industry insiders	Traction, vision, team culture
Personal accountability	Yourself and a small circle	Weekly goals and honest progress

A common trap: building a founder audience when your customers are, say, dental office managers. Founder followers are great for support and learning, but they won't buy dental scheduling software. If your customers aren't founders, make sure a good chunk of your posts speak to them.

What to share

The best building-in-public content is specific, honest, and a little vulnerable. Here are reliable formats.

Progress updates

Weekly or monthly updates on what you shipped, what you learned, and what's next. Keep them consistent in format so followers know what to expect.

Example (hypothetical): "Week 6 of building a meal-planning app for parents: shipped grocery list export, rewrote onboarding after three users got stuck at step two, and next week I'm testing a family-sharing feature."

Decisions and trade-offs

Explain why you chose one path over another: pricing, tech stack, a feature you cut. Decisions are more interesting than announcements, and they invite thoughtful replies.

Behind-the-scenes work

Rough designs, before-and-after screenshots, a short screen recording of a new feature. Visual posts are easy to consume and show real progress.

Mistakes and lessons

The launch that flopped, the feature nobody used, the week you lost to a bug. Honest failure posts often resonate more than wins, because everyone has been there.

Numbers, if you're comfortable

Some founders share revenue, signups, or churn openly. It can build trust and attention, but it's entirely optional. Share only what you'd be comfortable with competitors, customers, and future investors seeing.

What not to share

Transparency has limits. Keep these private:

• Customer data or identifiable details without explicit permission.
• Security details about your infrastructure or known vulnerabilities.
• Your unvalidated secret sauce, if your edge depends on something easily copied. Most ideas are safe to share, since execution matters more, but use judgment.
• Unfiltered frustration about customers, competitors, or partners. It's permanent and searchable.
• Anything that makes you anxious to post. Building in public should be sustainable, not stressful.

Where to build in public

Pick one primary platform and one secondary. Trying to be everywhere leads to burnout.

• X/Twitter has a large, active founder community and a culture of short progress posts.
• LinkedIn works well for B2B products and professional audiences.
• Indie Hackers is built for founder updates and milestone posts.
• Reddit niche communities work if you contribute genuinely, but most have strict self-promotion rules.
• A blog or newsletter gives you an owned channel that no algorithm can take away. Repurpose your best social posts into longer pieces.
• Launch platforms like UpstartApps give your building-in-public story a payoff moment. When you launch, the people who followed along have a place to show up and support you.

Make it a sustainable habit

Consistency beats intensity. A sustainable rhythm might look like this:

• Daily (optional): One short post or reply-heavy engagement session of fifteen minutes.
• Weekly: A structured progress update.
• Monthly: A longer reflection or metrics post, possibly on your blog.
• At milestones: Launch announcements, version releases, and retrospectives.

A few habits that make it easier:

• Keep a running note of small wins, screenshots, and lessons during the week, so you're never starting from a blank page.
• Batch-write posts when you have energy, and schedule them.
• Spend as much time replying to others as posting yourself. Building in public is a conversation, not a megaphone.

Connect it to your launch

Building in public pays off most when it leads somewhere. Plan your story around a launch:

1. Months before: Share the problem, your early research, and first designs.
2. Weeks before: Share beta feedback and start a waitlist.
3. Launch week: Announce your launch date, then go all in with the launch day checklist.
4. After launch: Share what happened, honestly, including what you'd do differently.

The people who followed your journey become your first wave of supporters, commenters, and users.

A building-in-public starter checklist

• One target audience written down
• One primary and one secondary platform chosen
• A weekly update format and schedule
• A running notes file for wins, lessons, and screenshots
• A clear list of what you won't share
• Fifteen minutes a day for replies and engagement
• A launch date your story builds toward

Start sharing this week

You don't need a big following to start building in public. You need something to say, a consistent rhythm, and the willingness to show your work before it's perfect. Start with one honest update this week and keep going.

When your story is ready for its big moment, submit your product to an upcoming launch week, or pick a featured launch to make sure your followers can find you at the top of the page. For what comes after, read the first 100 users playbook.