Building in public has been ruined by people who only share wins.
You know the posts. “Hit $10k this month.” “Just crossed 10,000 followers!” Everything in those posts is technically true. Nothing in those posts is useful to the person watching.
The original point of building in public was something different: documenting the actual process — including what didn’t work — so the people watching could learn something real.
A business built on honesty using a “building in public” strategy that only shows the highlights is still just performing. And the audience knows.
What building in public actually means
It means sharing the process, not the highlight reel. Specifically: the numbers that didn’t move, not just the ones that went up. The strategy you tried, what happened, and what you changed. The month where you almost quit. The product that got no sales until you changed the title. The boring, real, iterative version of building something.
The reason it works: people who watch you navigate uncertainty become far more loyal than people who watch your highlight reel. When you share a loss, your wins become credible. When everything is a win, your audience assumes you’re performing. Because you are.
The format that makes it useful
Not “struggling today but staying positive.” Not “big announcement coming soon!”
The format that builds trust: Specific number. Specific action taken. Specific result. Specific conclusion or next step.
“I had 47 views on my Etsy listing last week. Zero sales. Changed the title from ‘Digital Planner’ to ‘Weekly Planner Template for Google Sheets — Instant Download.’ Views went to 112. One sale. Testing the thumbnail image next.”
That’s a useful post. It proves you’re actually doing the thing. It gives the reader a specific action they can take. It shows the experiment and the result.
What you don’t have to share
Building in public doesn’t mean complete transparency about everything. You don’t have to share your revenue until you’re ready to. You don’t have to share your full strategy or product roadmap. You don’t have to document every setback publicly.
The things useful to share: experiments and their specific results, decisions you made and why, things you learned from failures (after processing them enough to be useful), things you wish someone had told you earlier.
The things that are yours to keep: numbers you’re not ready to share, relationships with buyers or collaborators that are private, anything that if published today you’d regret tomorrow.
Building in public is not an obligation to narrate everything. It’s a commitment to showing the real version of the work when you do share.
The one thing most people get wrong
They start building in public and immediately share their aspirations instead of their actions. “Starting my digital product journey today. Excited to see where this goes!” That’s not building in public. That’s announcing an intention.
Building in public starts when you do something. When you build the first version and it takes twice as long as you thought. When you put the product live and nobody buys it for three weeks. When you change the pricing and something shifts.
Document the doing. Not the planning to do.
Why the honest version converts better
Trust is the mechanism. When you share the real version — the numbers, the failures, the iterations — you separate yourself from everyone else who only posts wins.
The buyer who eventually finds your product has probably been sold to by a dozen people showing highlight reels. When they find you — someone who documented the $31 month, the product that didn’t sell, the title change that finally moved the needle — they don’t need to be convinced you’re trustworthy. You’ve already proven it. The sale is almost a formality at that point.
Anyway.
Document what you did and what happened. Specific numbers. Specific actions. Specific results. That’s the whole format. The audience trusts the wins because they’ve seen the losses.