Build in Public: How Sharing Your Journey Gets You Users

What Build in Public Actually Means

Build in public is often misunderstood as "post every feature you ship." It's more than that.

Build in public means making your entire journey visible — the wins, the failures, the doubts, the pivots, the lessons. It's treating your startup process as content, not keeping it behind closed doors until you have something perfect to announce.

Why It Works

People want to follow a journey, not consume announcements.

When you only share finished things — "We launched X feature today!" — you're competing with every other startup announcement for attention. These posts are forgettable.

When you share the process — "I've been trying to figure out why our activation rate is 12% when it should be 30%. Here's what I've tried and what's not working." — you're sharing something unique. No one else has your exact problem, your exact numbers, your exact journey.

That specificity is what creates genuine followers.

The Content Formula

Type 1: Progress updates (weekly)

What did you ship this week? What took longer than expected? What surprised you? Share the real version — not the polished press release.

Example: "Week 12 update: got our first paid subscriber. Also found out our email deliverability was broken for 3 weeks — 0 confirmation emails going out. Fixed it. Users who signed up during that period got a manual apology and 30 days free."

Type 2: Lessons from failures (as they happen)

What didn't work? What would you do differently? What assumption was wrong?

Example: "We spent 3 weeks building a feature nobody asked for. Classic. Here's the validation process we're using going forward."

Type 3: Behind-the-scenes process

How do you do the things you do? What tools, what workflow, what decisions?

Example: "Here's exactly how I batch a full week of social media posts in 90 minutes using SocialMate + ChatGPT. [thread]"

Type 4: Numbers (when you can share them)

MRR, user count, churn rate, traffic numbers. Specific data is memorable.

Example: "MRR: $847. Target: $1,000. 17 paid users. Churn: 2 users this month. Here's why I think they left and what I'm changing."

Platforms for Build in Public

**Bluesky** — growing fast in the indie maker community. High engagement per follower. Great for daily updates and threads.

**X/Twitter** — still has the largest #buildinpublic community. Higher volume required but also higher potential reach.

**LinkedIn** — best for longer weekly retrospectives. Professional audience includes potential enterprise customers and investors.

**Discord/Telegram** — for your most engaged followers. Share things here that are too raw or detailed for the public feed.

The Compounding Effect

Build in public compounds over time. Each update is a data point. After 50 updates:

The founder who's been building publicly for 6 months has an enormous advantage over the one who announces a polished product from nowhere.

Scheduling Your Build in Public Content

SocialMate's SOMA system can generate build-in-public style posts from your project update notes. Upload your weekly CLAUDE.md or project notes, and SOMA generates platform-native updates for each connected platform.

The manual version: batch your updates once per week using SocialMate's Compose and schedule them across platforms. 90 minutes on Sunday = a week of authentic presence across Bluesky, LinkedIn, Discord, and X.

Try SocialMate free at socialmate.studio — all plans include 7-platform scheduling.