Why do most Founders share their progress online AKA (Building in public)
Ten years ago, if you were building a startup, almost nobody knew about it until it launched. Maybe a few friends knew. Maybe your co-founder's mom asked how "the app thing" was going. But the day-to-day grind, the failed experiments, the revenue numbers, the pivots, none of that was public. Founders worked in private and showed up with a finished product, or they quietly disappeared and nobody noticed.
Today the opposite is true. Open Twitter, sorry, X, or Indie Hackers on any given day and you will see founders posting revenue screenshots, MRR milestones, "day 47 of building," failed launches, pivots, lessons learned, and behind-the-scenes screenshots of half-finished dashboards. Some of these founders have ten followers. Some have a hundred thousand. The behavior is the same.
So the real question worth asking is not "should founders build in public." That debate is mostly settled. The real question is: why are founders actually doing this? And I do not mean the answer you find in every "10 benefits of building in public" listicle. I mean the deeper, less comfortable reasons that rarely get said out loud.
Let's get into it.
Building in Public Started as Documentation, Not Marketing
Go back and look at the earliest examples of what we now call building in public. Founders like the early Buffer team publishing their revenue numbers, or solo developers posting weekly updates on tiny blogs nobody read. The original intent was not growth hacking. It was documentation.
These founders were writing things down because building a company is disorienting. You lose track of time. Weeks blur together. You forget what you tried three months ago and why it failed. Writing a public update was, at first, just a structured way to keep a journal. The "public" part was almost incidental. Some of these founders would have written the same notes privately if there wasn't an audience.
What changed is that people started reading these journals. And once people started reading, founders noticed something: documenting the journey brought in users, investors, and opportunities they never expected. The marketing benefit was discovered, not designed.
This matters because it explains why a lot of "building in public" advice today feels hollow. When marketing becomes the primary goal instead of the byproduct, the writing changes. It becomes performative. The honesty that made the original posts valuable starts to disappear, replaced by content that is optimized for engagement rather than truth.
The founders who still get real value from building in public today are usually the ones who kept the original spirit: write it down because you need to process it, not because you need the views.
Founders Are Looking for Validation More Than Feedback
Here is something most founders will not admit, including to themselves.
When you ask a founder why they post updates, the answer is almost always some version of "I want feedback" or "I want to stay accountable." Those are the socially acceptable answers. They sound disciplined and humble.
But if you actually look at what happens after most "building in public" posts, very little real feedback comes through. A founder posts "just shipped feature X, what do you think?" and gets fifteen replies that say "looks great" or "congrats" or a fire emoji. That is not feedback. That is acknowledgment.
And acknowledgment is exactly what most founders are actually looking for.
Building a startup is one of the loneliest things a person can do. You spend hours, sometimes days, working on something that nobody around you fully understands or cares about. Your non-founder friends ask "how's the app going" the same way they'd ask about the weather. Your family is supportive but has no real frame of reference for what you are doing.
So when you post an update and ten strangers on the internet respond, even with something as small as "nice progress," it fills a real gap. It is proof that someone, somewhere, is paying attention to something you have poured months of your life into. That is not a weakness. It is human. But it is also worth being honest about, because if you mistake validation for feedback, you can end up building based on applause instead of insight.
The founders who get real feedback are usually the ones who ask specific, narrow questions in places where people are willing to disagree with them. That is a very different activity than posting a milestone and waiting for likes.
Building in Public Creates Social Pressure That Replaces Discipline
This one is rarely discussed, but it might be one of the most practically useful effects of building in public.
When you tell nobody about your goals, quitting is invisible. You can abandon a project on a random Tuesday and the only person who knows is you. There is no cost. No explanation needed.
But the moment you post "I'm building X and aiming to launch by end of month" to even a small audience, something shifts. Quitting now has a social cost. Going quiet has a social cost. People will notice the absence. Some might even ask what happened.
This is, in effect, an outsourced discipline system. Founders who struggle with consistency often find that public commitments work where private ones fail. It is the startup version of telling your friends you're running a marathon so you can't back out.
The benefit here is real. I have seen founders ship features faster, finish launches on time, and push through slow weeks specifically because they didn't want to post "still working on it" for the fifth week in a row.
But there is a downside that gets less attention. When social pressure becomes the primary motivator, founders start making decisions based on what is easy to post about rather than what the business actually needs. Sometimes the most important work in a startup is invisible. Fixing technical debt. Having a hard conversation with a co-founder. Sitting with a problem for two weeks without a "win" to show. None of that photographs well. And founders who have built their motivation around public updates can start avoiding the unglamorous work because it doesn't generate content.
So the pressure cuts both ways. It can push you toward consistency, or it can quietly push you toward optimizing for what looks good rather than what works.
The Hidden Reason Nobody Talks About: Distribution
This is, in my opinion, the real reason building in public has exploded over the last several years. And it has very little to do with transparency or community or accountability.
It's distribution.
Here's the thing about distribution that most early founders don't understand until it's too late. Building a great product has never been the hard part for most startups. The hard part has always been getting people to know the product exists. Distribution is the bottleneck, not features.
And distribution is incredibly expensive to buy and incredibly slow to build, unless you already have an audience.
Founders who document their journey consistently, over months and years, end up with something most founders never get: a group of people who already know who they are, what they're building, and why they're building it, before they ever launch anything.
When that founder eventually ships a product, they are not starting from zero. They have an audience that has been following the story for a year. Some percentage of that audience becomes early users just because they've been emotionally invested in the journey. This is not marketing in the traditional sense. It's more like... pre-built trust.
This is why you'll notice that a lot of founders who seem to be "just sharing their journey" are, often without realizing it, building their most valuable asset. Not the product. The audience around the product. The product can change, pivot, fail, and relaunch as something else entirely. But if the audience stays, the founder still has distribution for whatever comes next.
This is also why some founders keep posting even when their current product clearly isn't working. They're not posting because they believe in that specific product anymore. They're posting because they understand, consciously or not, that the audience itself is the asset worth protecting.
Why X Is No Longer the Perfect Home for Building in Public
This section needs some nuance, because X (formerly Twitter) is still where a huge amount of building in public happens, and for some founders it still works extremely well.
But the platform has changed, and so has the culture around it.
A few years ago, building in public on Twitter often meant honest, slightly messy threads about what wasn't working. Founders would post about churn problems, failed pricing experiments, awkward customer conversations. It felt like reading someone's notebook.
Today, a huge portion of "build in public" content on X looks more like a highlight reel. Revenue screenshots with dramatic framing. "How I went from $0 to $50k MRR in 90 days" threads. Growth charts that go up and to the right. Posts engineered around hooks, curiosity gaps, and engagement bait.
None of this means X is bad, or that founders using it are doing something wrong. It means the platform now rewards a different kind of content than it used to. The algorithm favors posts that generate quick reactions, screenshots, and shareable moments. It does not particularly reward long, nuanced reflections on what went wrong and why.
The practical effect of this is that founders on X can find themselves optimizing for the wrong metrics without realizing it. You post something, it gets a lot of likes, and your brain registers that as success. But likes are not customers. Impressions are not revenue. A founder can spend hours crafting the perfect "build in public" post and walk away feeling productive, while the actual business made zero progress that day.
This is the trap. Engagement on X can start to feel like progress. It isn't. It's a parallel activity that sometimes overlaps with progress and sometimes doesn't.
For founders who still want to use X, the advice that seems to hold up is: post because you have something to say, not because it's "time to post." The moment building in public becomes a content calendar item rather than a genuine update, it starts to lose the thing that made it valuable in the first place.
The Rise of Community-Centered Building in Public
While X gets most of the attention, a quieter shift has been happening. More founders are choosing to share their progress inside communities rather than on open social feeds.
The difference matters more than it sounds.
On a social feed, your post exists for a few hours, gets whatever engagement it gets, and then disappears into the timeline forever. In a community, your post often stays visible, searchable, and part of an ongoing conversation. Someone reading it six months later can still respond, ask a question, or learn something from it.
Indie Hackers has been doing this for years. Long-form updates, revenue numbers with actual context behind them, founders responding to each other's posts with real questions instead of just emojis. Reddit communities like r/startups, r/SaaS, and r/Entrepreneur work similarly, though the culture there leans more toward blunt feedback and skepticism, which some founders find more useful than encouragement.
Newer communities, like Founders Today, are part of this same shift. They're built specifically around the idea that founders want a place to share updates, get product feedback, and connect with other builders without the noise and performance pressure of a massive open platform. The audience is smaller, but it's made up almost entirely of people who actually understand what you're talking about, which changes the quality of the conversation.
This isn't a rejection of public sharing. It's a refinement of where that sharing happens. Founders are increasingly choosing depth over reach. A thoughtful comment from another founder who has dealt with the exact problem you're facing is often worth more than a hundred generic "keep going!" replies.
Building in Public Has Become a Trust Signal
There's another layer to this that goes beyond the founder's own motivations: how building in public affects the people on the other side, the users, customers, and partners.
Increasingly, people want to know who is behind the products they use. Anonymous companies feel cold. A faceless "Team" signature at the bottom of a support email doesn't build much trust. But a founder who has been visibly building something for a year, who has talked openly about what's working and what isn't, feels different. There's a person there. Someone accountable.
This shows up in small but real ways. Customers are more forgiving of bugs and downtime when they feel like they know the person fixing them. Early users are more willing to give detailed feedback to a founder they've been following than to a support ticket form. Even investors, when evaluating early-stage companies, sometimes look at how a founder has communicated publicly as a signal of how they think and operate.
Transparency, in this sense, isn't just a nice value to have. It's becoming a competitive advantage, especially for small teams competing against companies with much bigger budgets. A two-person startup can't out-market a well-funded competitor, but it can out-trust them, if the founder is willing to be visible and honest along the way.
The Dark Side of Building in Public
Now for the part that doesn't get talked about enough.
Building in public has a shadow side, and it's worth taking seriously, because it affects real people, not just abstract "founder mental health" statistics.
The first problem is revenue envy. Scroll through any startup community long enough and you'll see a constant stream of "hit $10k MRR" or "$100k in our first year" posts. For the founder posting it, it might be a genuinely exciting milestone. But for the hundreds of founders reading it who are stuck at $200 MRR after a year of work, it can feel like everyone else is winning except them. This comparison trap is corrosive. It's also based on incomplete information, because nobody posts "still at $0 after 8 months and starting to wonder if this is worth it."
This leads to the second problem: cherry-picked success stories. The internet doesn't show you a representative sample of outcomes. It shows you the outcomes people chose to share. Survivorship bias is baked into the entire culture of building in public. For every founder posting a growth chart, there are probably ten who quietly shut down and never posted about it at all. But you'd never know that from scrolling the feed, because silence doesn't generate content.
The third problem is the pressure to manufacture wins. When your audience expects regular progress updates, and progress isn't always linear, some founders start to stretch the truth. A flat week becomes "exciting developments coming soon." A feature that barely works becomes "just shipped something huge." This isn't always conscious dishonesty. It's often just the slow erosion that happens when you feel like you need to have something positive to say on a schedule.
And finally, there's burnout. Building a startup is already exhausting. Adding the responsibility of maintaining a public presence, responding to comments, keeping up appearances, and feeling like your worth is tied to engagement numbers, adds another layer of pressure on top of an already heavy load. Some founders have quietly stepped back from building in public not because their startup failed, but because the act of sharing had become its own job, separate from the actual business, and they simply didn't have the capacity for both.
The healthiest version of building in public seems to be the one closest to its original form: occasional, honest, and not tied to your sense of self-worth. The moment it becomes a performance you feel obligated to keep up, something has gone wrong, even if the metrics still look good from the outside.
The Future of Building in Public
If the last decade was about founders discovering that sharing their journey could build an audience, the next phase seems to be about founders becoming more selective about how and where they do it.
A few patterns seem to be emerging. Founders are gravitating toward smaller, more focused communities rather than chasing reach on massive platforms. The value of a hundred engaged readers in a niche community is starting to outweigh the value of ten thousand passive impressions on a feed.
There also seems to be a growing appetite for longer, more reflective writing again. Not every update needs to be a punchy one-liner optimized for retweets. Some of the most valuable posts I've read in the last year have been long, slightly messy reflections on a hard decision, posted on a personal blog, that never went viral but were genuinely useful to the handful of people who read them.
Trust is also becoming more important than personal branding. The founders who will benefit most from building in public over the next few years are probably not the ones chasing follower counts, but the ones who consistently show up as themselves, admit when things aren't working, and build a reputation for honesty over time. That kind of trust compounds in ways that follower counts simply don't.
So Why Do Founders Really Share Their Progress Online?
If you made it this far, you already know the answer isn't simple. It's not just marketing. It's not just accountability. It's not just community.
It's validation in a lonely process. It's distribution disguised as documentation. It's social pressure that sometimes replaces discipline and sometimes distorts priorities. It's a trust signal in a world full of faceless companies. And for some founders, it's become a source of comparison and pressure that actively works against their wellbeing.
The founders who get the most out of building in public aren't the ones with the biggest audiences or the most viral threads. They're the ones who kept the original spirit alive: write it down because it helps you think, share it because it might help someone else, and stay honest even when the truth isn't impressive.
Everything else, the audience, the opportunities, the trust, tends to follow from that. Not the other way around.
FAQ on why founders share progress online and build in public
Why do founders build in public instead of working quietly until launch?
Many founders share progress online because building in public reduces isolation and creates momentum long before launch day. It helps turn the messy startup journey into a narrative people can follow, which can attract early users, collaborators, and future supporters. From an entrepreneurial perspective, it is also a low-cost way to build trust and attention before spending heavily on marketing. For many founders, public sharing becomes both a reflection tool and an early distribution channel.
Is building in public mainly about marketing?
Not entirely. It often starts as documentation, a way to track experiments, decisions, and lessons while building a company in a chaotic environment. Over time, founders realize that these updates can also generate awareness, credibility, and inbound opportunities, so marketing becomes a byproduct. The smartest entrepreneurs treat it as honest communication first and promotion second, because audiences can quickly sense when every update is engineered for attention.
Why do founders say they want feedback when they may actually want validation?
Founders often ask for feedback, but what they really need in the moment is acknowledgment that their effort matters. Startup building can feel lonely, and even small public reactions create a sense that someone is paying attention to the work. That emotional boost can be useful, but it becomes risky when applause is mistaken for product insight. Entrepreneurially, the key is to separate encouragement from evidence and seek real feedback in spaces where people will challenge your assumptions.
How does building in public help with startup accountability?
Public updates create social pressure, and that pressure can help founders stay consistent when motivation drops. Once a goal is shared openly, abandoning it feels more visible, which can push people to ship faster and follow through. This can be powerful for solo founders and early teams that need an external structure to maintain discipline. Still, business owners should be careful not to perform progress just to satisfy an audience instead of doing the less visible work that actually moves the company forward.
What is the hidden business reason building in public has become so popular?
The biggest hidden reason is distribution. A founder who shares useful updates over time builds an audience that already knows their story, their product direction, and their values before any formal launch. That means they are not starting customer acquisition from zero, which is a major entrepreneurial advantage in crowded markets. In many cases, the audience becomes as valuable as the product because it can support future launches, pivots, and partnerships.
Why is X no longer the perfect platform for building in public?
X still works for some founders, but the platform increasingly rewards fast, attention-grabbing content rather than thoughtful, nuanced reflection. That can pressure entrepreneurs to optimize for likes, screenshots, and viral hooks instead of customer learning and business progress. The result is that engagement can feel like traction even when revenue, retention, and product quality are unchanged. Founders who use X well usually treat it as one distribution layer, not the core of their startup strategy.
Are communities better than social feeds for building in public?
For many founders, yes. Communities often create better conversations because members share context, return to older discussions, and offer more practical feedback than general social media audiences. This makes public sharing more useful for product learning, founder support, and long-term relationship building. If you want a broader playbook for audience-building and launch visibility, this guide on how to launch a startup on social media pairs naturally with building in public.
How does building in public become a trust signal for customers and partners?
When founders consistently share what they are building, why they are building it, and what is not working yet, they become more human and more credible. Customers are often more patient with small startups when they feel there is a real person behind the product rather than a faceless brand. Partners, early hires, and even investors may also see transparent communication as a sign of maturity and founder quality. In startup terms, trust compounds, and public honesty can become a genuine competitive edge.
What are the biggest risks of building in public?
The main risks are comparison, performative updates, and burnout. Constant exposure to other founders’ wins can distort reality and make slow progress feel like failure, even when a business is developing normally. Some founders also begin stretching minor milestones into content just to keep their audience engaged, which can weaken both honesty and focus. Over time, maintaining a public presence can become a second job, so entrepreneurs need clear boundaries if they want building in public to support the business rather than drain it.
What is the healthiest way for founders to build in public?
The healthiest approach is selective, honest, and aligned with actual business goals. Founders should share when they have something meaningful to document, reflect on, or test, not simply because an algorithm or content calendar demands it. This keeps the practice useful for learning, trust-building, and audience growth without turning it into a performance. The most effective entrepreneurial mindset is simple: document reality, extract lessons, and let credibility grow from consistency.
About the Author
Violetta Bonenkamp, also known as MeanCEO, is an experienced startup founder with an impressive educational background including an MBA and four other higher education degrees. She has over 20 years of work experience across multiple countries, including 5 years as a solopreneur and serial entrepreneur. Throughout her startup experience she has applied for multiple startup grants at the EU level, in the Netherlands and Malta, and her startups received quite a few of those. She’s been living, studying and working in many countries around the globe and her extensive multicultural experience has influenced her immensely.