Building in public — sharing genuine metrics, decisions, and struggles publicly as a business grows — has become a genuinely effective growth strategy for a specific set of businesses, trading the traditional instinct toward controlled, polished corporate communication for radical transparency that builds trust and audience precisely because it’s rare and genuinely differentiated from how most companies communicate.
Why Transparency Functions as a Genuine Growth Strategy
Sharing real numbers, real decisions, and real challenges publicly generates a level of trust and engagement that polished, carefully-controlled corporate communication structurally can’t replicate — audiences increasingly recognize and value authenticity specifically because it’s uncommon, and a founder or company willing to share genuine vulnerability alongside genuine success builds a different, often deeper kind of connection than curated success-only content produces.
What Building in Public Actually Involves
- Sharing genuine revenue, growth, or key business metrics publicly, on a regular cadence, rather than the traditional corporate instinct to keep this information entirely private.
- Documenting real decisions and their actual reasoning, including decisions that didn’t work out as hoped, not just retrospectively curated success stories.
- Sharing genuine challenges and setbacks as they’re actually happening, rather than only revealing struggle after it’s been successfully resolved and can be framed as a triumphant narrative.
- Engaging genuinely with audience questions and feedback about the shared information, treating the public audience as genuine participants in the journey rather than passive observers.
Why This Approach Particularly Suits Certain Businesses
Building in public tends to work particularly well for founder-led, personal-brand-adjacent businesses (connecting directly to the founder-led branding principles covered elsewhere), for products serving an audience genuinely interested in the entrepreneurial or building process itself, and for businesses in categories where trust and authenticity carry particular weight in the purchase decision.
The Genuine Risks Worth Weighing Honestly
Sharing real metrics and challenges publicly provides genuine information to competitors, can create difficult public moments during genuine setbacks, and requires a level of comfort with vulnerability and scrutiny not every founder or team genuinely has — these tradeoffs are real, not merely theoretical objections, and deserve honest consideration before committing to this specific transparency level.
Deciding What Genuinely Belongs in Public Versus What Doesn't
Building in public doesn’t require sharing literally everything — most practitioners draw a deliberate line, sharing genuine metrics and decisions while keeping certain genuinely sensitive information (specific customer details, certain competitive or legal-sensitive matters) private, similar to how ghostwritten executive content still requires judgment about what’s appropriate to share publicly.
Building a Sustainable Cadence for Public Sharing
A consistent, sustainable sharing cadence — monthly updates, for instance, following a similar consistency principle to any content strategy — builds accumulated trust and following over time better than sporadic, inconsistent sharing that doesn’t give an audience a genuine, reliable rhythm to follow and engage with.
Handling Public Reaction to Genuine Setbacks
When building in public includes sharing a genuine setback or difficult period, the response should follow similar principles to genuine brand crisis recovery — honest acknowledgment, specific detail about what’s being done, and follow-through — since the transparency that builds trust during good times needs to extend genuinely through difficult moments too, or the entire practice reads as curated positivity rather than genuine transparency.
Measuring Whether Building in Public Is Genuinely Working
Track audience growth and engagement specifically attributable to public-building content, alongside any measurable business impact (leads, customers, partnerships) that trace back to this specific transparency approach — this reveals whether the genuine vulnerability and disclosure risk is producing proportional business value, rather than assuming the approach is working simply because it’s currently trendy.
Where This Fits the Broader Strategy
Building in public trades traditional corporate communication control for genuine trust and differentiation, a strategy particularly well-suited to founder-led businesses and audiences that value authenticity. For the complete strategic framework, see our complete growth strategy guide for scaling a business.
Building in public works precisely because genuine transparency remains rare enough to be genuinely differentiating — but it requires real, sustained comfort with vulnerability and scrutiny, not just an appealing idea borrowed because it’s currently trendy.
