Build in public: how transparency builds your brand faster than ads

Pieter Levels spent 10 years tweeting his revenue, his failures, and his product launches from wherever he was in the world. No team, no PR budget, no agency. By the time PhotoAI launched in 2023, he had 350,000 people waiting to amplify it. The product made $5,400 in its first week and hit $132,000 MRR eighteen months later.

That's not a marketing story. It's a brand story.

"Build in public" has become one of those phrases that gets repeated so often it stops meaning anything. Post your revenue. Share your milestones. Be authentic. You've heard it. But the founders who actually do it well aren't just running a content strategy - they're building a brand that compounds over time, one update at a time. The mechanics behind why that works are worth understanding.

What you're actually building when you build in public

Most advice about building in public focuses on the distribution angle. Share your progress, grow an audience, drive traffic. That part is real, but it's the surface.

What you're actually building is trust at scale. Trust, it turns out, is the main reason people buy from someone rather than someone else.

81% of consumers need to trust a brand before they'll buy from it. When you spend two years sharing every meaningful number, every frustration, every pivot - you're not building followers. You're building something that looks exactly like a brand reputation.

Something subtler is happening too. Every time someone sees your product name in a post about a real milestone - "we just hit $10K MRR for ShipFast" or "Remote OK crossed 2M monthly visitors" - they're forming a memory connection between that name and something real. Brand recall, earned through actual moments rather than ad frequency.

That last number is worth sitting with. Indie Hackers converts over 7x better than Product Hunt for launches. The community knows the founders. They've been reading the journey for months. Trust is already built before day one.

The names that built themselves in public

Some specific cases make this clearer. These are founders who turned the build-in-public approach into a genuine brand - and in several of them, the name they chose matters more than it first looks.

A pattern shows up here. The founders who are most identifiable aren't necessarily using the most memorable product names. They're using names that fit naturally into the kind of sentences they write in public. "We just launched a new feature in ShipFast" rolls off the tongue. "Bannerbear just crossed 50K MRR" is easily copy-pasteable. When you're building in public, your product name will be written hundreds of times in posts, replies, and threads - that sentence-fit matters more than most naming frameworks acknowledge.

The growth curve is slow, then it isn't

Here's something nobody warns you about clearly enough.

Pieter Levels spent ten years building his audience before PhotoAI had its breakout moment. Marc Lou spent two years before ShipFast's launch month hit $64K. Jon Yongfook spent months posting into the void before Bannerbear found its footing.

The compounding effect of build in public is real, but it runs on years, not months. The mistake most people make is treating it like a campaign - post for a few weeks before launch, see if it moves the needle, stop. That's not what this is.

It's more like investing. You're making deposits into a brand account that earns compound interest. The early deposits barely show up. The later ones multiply everything.

What to share, what to keep private

This is where most advice falls apart. "Be transparent" is not a strategy. Think of it as a signal/noise problem: does this information, if shared, give your audience something real? Or does it just create problems you didn't need?

One thing that catches people: the failure posts consistently outperform win posts. They feel risky but they pull more engagement and more trust. Anyone can post a win. Posting a real failure - with actual honesty about what went wrong - is rare enough that people remember it.

Your name is getting stress-tested whether you realize it or not

Here's a dimension of build in public that almost nobody talks about in relation to naming.

When you start posting about your product publicly, you're running an accidental naming test. You find out quickly whether the name is easy to mention in conversation. Whether people spell it correctly when they respond. Whether it scans clearly when it appears in the middle of a tweet. Whether it sounds ridiculous once you've said it a hundred times.

Bannerbear is one of those names that works in threads. "I just hit $30K MRR with Bannerbear" reads cleanly. The name has a clear visual - someone imagine a bear with a banner - and that sticks. Contrast that with a company called something like "OptimizeRev" or "GrowthSuiteAI" - try writing those names in 50 progress posts without cringing.

The founders who succeed long-term with build in public almost always have names that pass a simple thread test: does the name sit comfortably in sentences, does it have one obvious spelling, does it carry any personality at all? If you're planning to build in public, run that test on your name before you commit to it.

If you're naming something right now - or renaming it because the current name keeps making you wince when you tweet it - NameFirst can help you co-create options through conversation, which is a more honest process than picking from a generated list.

Where to actually build in public

Platform choice matters more than most people realize. The same post on X, LinkedIn, and Indie Hackers lands differently - the audiences want different things and they can tell when you haven't considered that.

X is still where build in public culture lives, mostly because the format - short posts, reply threads, screenshot-friendly numbers - maps naturally onto progress updates. Indie Hackers has a smaller audience but converts remarkably well, especially if you're building developer tools or B2B SaaS. Substack is worth considering if the narrative is complex and you want readers who'll stay with you across months. LinkedIn works, but it's a different crowd - they respond to professional milestones more than raw revenue screenshots.

Pick one. Post consistently for six months. See where you actually get replies from people who sound like your target customer. Add a second platform after that, not before.

The mistakes that quietly kill the brand

A few patterns keep showing up among founders who start strong and then stall.

Inconsistency is the most common one. Three weeks of daily posts, then silence for two months. Then a comeback post, then more silence. This is arguably worse for your brand than not building in public at all - it signals unreliability, and reliability is the whole thing you're trying to demonstrate.

Vanity metrics are the second trap. Follower count growth, Notion template downloads, Product Hunt upvotes - these mean very little to your audience. Revenue, user activation rates, churn reduction, things you actually made happen for real customers - those build credibility. The rest is noise, and experienced readers can tell the difference.

Then there's skipping the boring middle. Pieter Levels didn't go from zero to 600K followers overnight. There were years of posts that got 3 likes. Jon Yongfook was posting Bannerbear updates to tiny audiences for months before it clicked. The founders who get through that stretch are the ones who genuinely find value in documenting their process - not just the attention it generates. If you're building in public purely for distribution, you'll quit when the distribution doesn't come fast enough.

One more, and this one is specific to naming: changing your product name mid-journey without explanation. If you've built 6 months of brand recognition around one name, renaming requires a dedicated post about why. People who've been following along have attached your brand to that name in their head. A quiet rename is a jarring experience for exactly the audience you've been cultivating.

Starting without the audience

The most common objection: "I don't have an audience yet, so posting in public feels pointless."

That gets it backwards. You don't build in public because you have an audience. You build in public to create one. The early posts don't get engagement - that's expected. They create a searchable archive. They establish that you've been at this long enough to be worth following. They train you to articulate your thinking regularly, which - honestly - makes you a better founder regardless of whether anyone's watching.

Pieter Levels' first tweets got single-digit likes. Marc Lou explicitly said he started Twitter in November 2021 with no follower goal - just wanting a few people watching so he wouldn't launch into a void. It took him 8 months to hit 1,000 followers.

The archive is the asset. When someone discovers you today, they'll scroll back six months. You want something for them to find.

Name the thing. Start posting. The audience comes after, not before.

References and sources

• Building in Public: The Indie Hacker's Guide - BuildVoyage - platform strategy, beginner framework
• Build in Public: Complete Playbook for SaaS Founders - VibrantSnap - three-phase revenue approach
• Building in Public: 10-Year Distribution Strategy - SoftwareSeni - Pieter Levels deep dive
• My solopreneur story: $0 to $65K/month in 2 years - Marc Lou Newsletter - Marc Lou revenue trajectory
• How Pieter Levels Makes $210K+ a Month - Medium / The Startup - portfolio breakdown
• How BannerBear Grew to $50K MRR - 5to9.beehiiv.com - Jon Yongfook journey
• Reflecting on a Decade of Transparent Salaries - Buffer - Buffer's transparency results
• Indie Hackers Launch Strategy 2025 - Awesome Directories - 23.1% vs 3.1% conversion data
• Is Building in Public Overhyped? - EdWorking - honest critique and limitations
• The Ins and Outs of Building in Public - Upsilonit - what to share framework
• @levelsio: fly.pieter.com $0 to $1M ARR in 17 days - milestone tweet showing BIP payoff
• @levelsio: 4 out of 70+ projects made money, ~5% hit rate - failure rate transparency
• @marc_louvion: started Twitter Nov 2021, 8 months to 1K followers - building from zero