Kasra VaziriBuilding in Public: What It Costs and What It Pays
Building in public is a trade, not a gift. An honest ledger of the real payoffs (accountability, audience, feedback, distribution) and the real costs (noise, copycats, performative metrics, pressure) plus rules for doing it well.
Building in public looks like a free growth channel. Ship the thing, post the screenshot, watch the followers arrive. That's the pitch, and it's not entirely wrong. But building in public is a trade, not a gift — it pays in accountability, audience, and feedback, and it charges you in noise, comparison, and the quiet pressure of an audience watching. This is an honest ledger of both sides, and a few rules for doing it without losing yourself to the metrics.
I'll say the conclusion up front so the rest can earn it: building in public is worth it when you treat it as a practice with a point, and a tax when you treat it as a personality. The difference is whether you'd still do it with the follower count hidden.
What building in public actually pays
Start with the real payoffs, because they're real.
Accountability that you can't fake. When Pieter Levels built Hoodmaps, he livestreamed the whole thing — first line of code to the frontpage of Reddit. His own framing is the honest part: "I couldn't slack off, there was people watching me build." That's the mechanism. An audience converts your private intention into a public commitment, and public commitments survive the Tuesday afternoon when you'd rather not. You can get this with a single accountability partner, but a feed scales it.
An audience that compounds. The slow, boring magic of posting consistently is that it builds an asset you own — people who already trust you before you have anything to sell them. Arvid Kahl, who wrote two books on bootstrapping and audience-first business, shared his Stripe-verified MRR publicly and watched that transparency "attract financial and acquisition" interest. The audience came first; the opportunities followed. That ordering matters. Most people try to build the product and then find the audience. Building in public lets you do them at the same time.
Faster feedback than any survey. Posting a half-built feature and watching what people latch onto is the cheapest user research there is. You learn which problem you're actually solving — often not the one you thought — before you've sunk a quarter into it. Levels' own account of Hoodmaps is partly a story of the public solving his problems in real time while he built.
Distribution baked into the work. This is the underrated one. When the building is the content, you don't have a separate marketing function bolted on after launch. The launch is a milestone in a story people have already been following. Novelty helps too — building openly is itself a hook, which is exactly why the tactic worked so well for the first wave of indie makers.
What it actually costs
Now the invoice, because the people selling you the dream skip this part.
Noise, and a lot of it. The practice got crowded. As one Indie Hackers piece put it bluntly, the space is now drowning in "clickbaity 'look at my MRR' posts" that generate engagement and no traction. When everyone is sharing their numbers, sharing your numbers stops being a signal. You're not standing out; you're paying an entry fee to a saturated channel.
The echo chamber. Here's the trap nobody warns you about: build in public and your audience becomes other builders. They're a lovely crowd — supportive, engaged, full of advice — but they're not your customers. The same piece quotes a maker on builders who get stuck "building products for other indiehackers" and never "cross the chasm" into a real company. The applause is loudest from the people least likely to pay you.
Performative metric-chasing. Once a number is public, it starts steering you. You optimize for the thing you can post, not the thing that matters. MRR is shareable; retention curves and gross margin are not, so the public version of your business slowly diverges from the actual one. This is Goodhart's law wearing a hoodie: the metric becomes a target and stops being a measure.
The pressure of an audience. Copycats are real — sharing an idea early hands a head start to anyone better-resourced than you. But the heavier cost is psychological. An audience that watches you win also watches you lose, and the fear of losing in public makes people timid exactly when they should be bold. It's telling that Kahl, one of the practice's clearest advocates, now notes that building transparently online "carries increasing risks." When the evangelists add caveats, listen.
How to do it well
So: do it, but do it deliberately. A few rules I'd actually defend.
Pick what you're optimizing for, and it isn't followers. Decide upfront whether you're building in public for accountability, feedback, distribution, or audience — they're different goals with different tactics. If you can't name yours, you're posting for dopamine, and the algorithm will happily train you.
Share decisions, not just numbers. The durable content isn't your MRR screenshot; it's the reasoning behind a hard call — what you tried, what broke, what you'd do differently. Numbers are vanity; thinking is the thing people actually return for. Levels' livestream was compelling because you watched the choices, not a dashboard.
Build for customers, post for builders — and don't confuse the two. Keep a clear line between the people who applaud you and the people who pay you. If your roadmap is being set by replies from other makers, you've let the cheap feedback crowd out the expensive kind.
Protect the parts that should be private. Not everything needs to ship to the timeline. The struggling launch, the cofounder conflict, the pivot you're not sure about — some things need to settle before they're performed. Building in public is not the same as living without a backstage.
Run it as a campaign, not a life sentence. The best version is bounded: build this thing in public, ship it, take stock. Levels paid for Hoodmaps with a 36-hour launch sprint and weeks of intensity — concentrated, then done. An audience is leverage when you point it at something and a treadmill when you don't.
The honest summary is this: building in public is one of the highest-return things a small builder can do, right up until the moment the audience starts building you instead. Keep your hand on which direction that's running, and you get the accountability, the feedback, and the distribution without the performance swallowing the product. The work still has to be good. The public part just means more people get to watch you make it good — and, if you're honest about the costs, that's a feature.