Why We Build in Public (And Why You Should Too)

This post will share our metrics. Our revenue (spoiler: we’re pre-revenue). Our strategy. Our mistakes. Our next moves.

Why? Because writing this publicly forces us to think clearly. Because transparency is our unfair advantage. Because the people we want to attract—founders who build real products—don’t trust companies that hide behind marketing speak.

This is why we chose to build Vibery in public. And why you might want to do the same.

What “Building in Public” Actually Means

Building in public isn’t posting Twitter updates about your launch date. It’s not performative transparency. It’s a commitment to sharing the substance of what you’re building while you’re building it.

What it includes:

• Metrics: Revenue, signups, churn, CAC, retention—the real numbers, not cherry-picked wins
• Process: How you make decisions, what you’re testing, what failed
• Learnings: Post-mortems on mistakes, frameworks you’ve developed, insights from experiments
• Roadmap: What you’re building next and why (even when competitors can see it)
• Struggles: The hard parts nobody talks about—cash flow anxiety, team conflicts, product pivots

What it doesn’t include:

• Customer data or private conversations
• Competitive intelligence about specific deals
• Team salary details (unless you choose open salaries)
• Anything that violates trust or privacy
• Proprietary technology that’s truly defensible (rare)

The distinction matters. Building in public is radical honesty about your journey, not reckless oversharing of confidential information.

Most companies default to secrecy. Building in public flips that default. You share unless there’s a specific reason not to. The burden of proof shifts from “why should we share this?” to “why shouldn’t we share this?”

Why Product Studios Benefit More Than Traditional Companies

The product studio model amplifies the benefits of building in public. Here’s why:

Portfolio visibility creates compounding effects. When you’re building multiple products simultaneously, each public update demonstrates capability across different domains. Sharing Vibery Edu’s progress signals we can build education products. Sharing our next AI tool signals we can build developer products. Traditional companies get one shot to demonstrate expertise. Studios get multiple shots.

Equity partnerships require trust. Founders considering a product studio aren’t just buying a service. They’re choosing a business partner who’ll own 10-25% of their company. Transparency builds trust faster than any pitch deck. When we share our process, metrics, and reasoning, potential partners can evaluate whether our approach matches their needs.

Community becomes deal flow. Agencies advertise for clients. Studios attract founders through demonstrated expertise. Building in public is how you demonstrate that expertise at scale. Every post is proof of how you think. Every metric is proof you ship. Every learning is proof you iterate.

Network effects between products. When we share what we learned building Vibery Edu, founders building in EdTech pay attention. When we share infrastructure patterns for AI products, developer tool founders reach out. Building in public turns each product into marketing for the next.

The traditional company playbook—stealth mode, big reveal, controlled messaging—makes sense when you have one product and infinite marketing budget. Product studios have multiple products and limited budget. Transparency is how we punch above our weight.

Five Concrete Benefits (With Real Examples)

1. Customer Acquisition Through Teaching

The pattern: Share what you’re learning. Attract people solving similar problems. Convert them when you solve their problem.

Example: Pieter Levels built 70+ projects in public, documenting every step. He didn’t advertise Nomad List or Photo AI. He shared his process on Twitter, wrote blog posts about his stack, livestreamed coding sessions. His audience grew from 0 to 500K+ followers. When he launched products, thousands of people already trusted his ability to ship.

Result: $4M+ in annual revenue across his portfolio with zero advertising spend. His audience is his distribution.

Example: Sahil Lavingia / Gumroad posted monthly revenue reports starting when Gumroad was tiny. He shared why they pivoted from VC growth to profitability. He posted the good metrics (creator earnings) and bad metrics (their own revenue struggles). The transparency built a community that stuck with them through near-death moments.

Result: Gumroad survived when 90% of their cohort died. The community became their safety net. They’re now doing $20M+ annual GMV with a tiny team.

How this applies to Vibery: Every post we write about building products is evidence we know how to build products. Every framework we share is proof we think systematically. Founders searching for “how to validate an AI product idea” will find our content. Some percentage will want help executing. That’s our funnel.

2. Talent Attraction Without Recruiter Fees

The pattern: Document your culture and process. Attract people who want to work that way. Hire from your audience.

Example: Buffer shared their open salary formula publicly. Every employee’s compensation became transparent. Most companies thought this was insane. But it attracted talent that valued transparency and equity. Buffer’s applicant quality went up while recruiter costs went to zero.

Result: They built a fully remote team before “remote work” was trendy. Top talent applied directly because they aligned with Buffer’s values. No recruiter fees. No job ads. Just public documentation of who they were.

Example: Basecamp (now 37signals) wrote books about their process. “Remote,” “Rework,” “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work.” Each book was a manifesto for how they work. People who agreed applied. People who disagreed self-selected out.

Result: Nearly every hire came from their audience. They didn’t need to convince candidates they had good culture. The candidates already believed it because they’d read the books.

How this applies to Vibery: When we share how we make decisions, our approach to co-building, our philosophies on AI tooling—we’re filtering for people who think similarly. The engineers who reach out already understand how we work. The hiring conversation starts at “do we want to work together?” instead of “let me convince you our culture is good.”

3. Faster Feedback Loops

The pattern: Share work-in-progress. Get feedback before you’re locked in. Iterate faster than competitors in stealth.

Example: ConvertKit shared monthly revenue reports including exact numbers—MRR, churn rate, subscriber count. When metrics looked bad, their community told them why. When they tested new features, power users gave feedback immediately. They iterated faster because they had real-time input from actual users.

Result: They grew from $0 to $29M ARR in 8 years, beating established competitors (Mailchimp, AWeber) in the creator economy niche. Speed came from feedback, not from secret advantages.

Example: Notion built in semi-public through their community. Beta users got early access and shaped the product direction through forums and feedback. Features got validated or killed based on real usage, not internal assumptions.

Result: Product-market fit came faster because they weren’t guessing what users wanted. They were watching what users did.

How this applies to Vibery: When we share our roadmap and reasoning, founders considering our studio can tell us if our approach matches their needs. When we post about a new framework, practitioners can point out edge cases we missed. We learn faster because we’re learning publicly.

4. Accountability and Focus

The pattern: Public commitments create external accountability. Harder to drift. Harder to quit.

Example: Indie Hackers (acquired by Stripe) was built entirely in public. Courtland Allen committed to shipping features and posting revenue updates monthly. When progress slowed, the community asked why. That external accountability kept him shipping when motivation dipped.

Result: Consistent execution led to acquisition. He credits public accountability for preventing the “wandering founder” trap—starting projects, losing interest, abandoning them halfway.

Example: @levelsio (Pieter Levels again) committed to “12 startups in 12 months” publicly. The commitment was insane. But making it public meant thousands of people were watching. He shipped 12 products in 12 months. Most failed. A few worked. The discipline came from public accountability.

Result: Nomad List and Photo AI emerged from that sprint. Without public commitment, he likely would have quit after product three or four.

How this applies to Vibery: When we say “we’re launching Vibery Edu in Q1,” we create external pressure to actually launch in Q1. When we share our studio philosophy, we’re committed to operating that way. Public statements prevent mission drift.

5. Serendipity and Unexpected Opportunities

The pattern: Share your work. People see it who you didn’t know existed. Opportunities appear that you couldn’t have predicted.

Example: Transistor.fm (podcast hosting) grew through co-founder Justin Jackson’s public writing. He wrote about bootstrapping, SaaS metrics, marketing strategies. One essay reached someone building a podcast who needed hosting. That person became a customer, then told other podcasters, who told others. The viral loop started from public content.

Result: Transistor hit $2M+ ARR, mostly through word-of-mouth driven by Justin’s public presence.

Example: Railway (infrastructure platform) built in public through their Discord community. They shared technical decisions, performance improvements, feature launches. A senior engineer at a FAANG company saw a post about their Postgres implementation, was impressed, and joined the team. That engineer brought expertise that 10x’d their product quality.

Result: Serendipitous hire from public technical content. That engineer became their VP of Engineering.

How this applies to Vibery: We don’t know who’s reading this post. Could be a founder with the perfect idea for our next co-build. Could be an engineer who wants to join us. Could be an investor who likes our approach. Building in public creates surface area for luck.

Content Strategy: What to Share vs. What to Keep Private

This is where most people get stuck. How do you decide what’s shareable and what’s confidential?

Here’s the framework we use at Vibery:

Share by default:

• Product decisions and reasoning: Why we chose Astro over Next.js. Why we’re using Cloudflare Workers. How we structured our database schema.
• Business metrics: Revenue, user counts, conversion rates, churn—anything that demonstrates progress or teaches a lesson.
• Processes and frameworks: How we evaluate co-build opportunities. Our decision matrix for technical architecture. Our prioritization system.
• Failures and pivots: What we tried that didn’t work. Why we shut down a product. How we recovered from mistakes.
• Technical implementations: Code snippets, architecture diagrams, deployment strategies—unless genuinely proprietary (rare).
• Philosophies and values: Why we operate as a product studio. Our stance on AI. How we think about co-building.

Keep private:

• Customer data and conversations: Anything specific to individual partners unless they consent to sharing.
• Competitive intelligence: Details about specific deals, pricing we learned about competitors, proprietary info shared in confidence.
• Personal team information: Salaries (unless you choose open salaries), personal struggles, private conflicts—unless the individual chooses to share.
• Truly proprietary technology: Genuine technical innovations that create defensible advantage. (In practice, this is almost nothing. Most “secret sauce” isn’t.)
• Active negotiations: Deal terms being discussed, partnerships in progress, anything that could harm outcomes if revealed prematurely.

The decision test:

Ask four questions:

1. Does sharing this violate someone’s trust? (Customer, team member, partner) → If yes, don’t share.
2. Does sharing this help someone? (Potential customer, peer founder, future hire) → If yes, share.
3. Could a competitor use this to harm us? → Usually the answer is no. Even if yes, ask if the benefit of sharing outweighs the risk.
4. Am I avoiding sharing because of fear or ego? → Fear of judgment, fear of looking dumb, ego protection—these are bad reasons. Share anyway.

Example in practice:

Should we share our revenue? Yes—helps founders evaluate if our model works, demonstrates transparency, creates accountability.

Should we share the name of a founder who’s talking to us about co-building? No—violates trust, could harm their fundraising or competitive position.

Should we share our technical architecture for Vibery Edu? Yes—helps other EdTech builders, demonstrates our capabilities, creates opportunities for feedback.

Should we share the exact terms of our equity split with a co-build partner? No—that’s between us and the partner, could affect future negotiations.

The gray area:

Some decisions aren’t clear-cut. When in doubt, ask the other party. If you’re sharing something about a partner, customer, or team member—ask if they’re comfortable with it. Most people appreciate being asked.

Community Building Through Transparency

Building in public isn’t just content strategy. It’s community strategy. Transparency is how you convert audience into community.

Audience: People who passively consume your content. Community: People who actively engage, contribute, and advocate.

The shift happens when you share not just wins but process. Not just outcomes but reasoning. Not just what you did but why and how.

How transparency builds community:

1. Shared learning creates belonging. When we share a mistake, people who made similar mistakes feel seen. When we share a framework, people who think similarly feel aligned. Vulnerability creates connection.

2. Open process invites participation. When we share our roadmap and reasoning, community members can contribute ideas. When we share what we’re struggling with, they offer solutions. Transparency turns spectators into collaborators.

3. Consistency builds trust. Anyone can post wins. Posting losses takes courage. Posting monthly updates whether metrics are good or bad builds credibility. Trust compounds over time.

Example: The Gumroad Community

Sahil didn’t just share metrics. He shared the near-death moments. The layoffs. The pivot from growth to profitability. The uncomfortable decisions. That vulnerability created fierce community loyalty.

When Gumroad needed help, creators rallied. They spread the word. They defended Gumroad in public. They stuck with the platform when competitors offered better features. Why? Because they felt part of the journey.

That’s the power of transparency. You’re not selling to customers. You’re building with community.

Example: The Indie Hackers Community

Courtland Allen built Indie Hackers as a platform for founders to share their journeys. The entire model was building in public. Every interview, every revenue number, every struggle shared publicly.

That transparency created the strongest founder community on the internet. Why? Because everyone was vulnerable together. Everyone shared real numbers. Everyone admitted failures. The transparency normalized honesty.

Stripe acquired Indie Hackers not for the revenue (it was small) but for the community. That community was worth millions because it was built on shared transparency.

How we’re building community at Vibery:

• Monthly updates: We’ll share metrics, progress, learnings—win or lose—every month. Consistency matters more than perfection.
• Open roadmap: Our product plans are public. Community can see what’s next, suggest changes, hold us accountable.
• Process documentation: We’re writing how we make decisions, evaluate opportunities, structure partnerships. Others can learn from or improve our process.
• Founder stories: When partners consent, we’ll share co-build stories—the messy reality, not sanitized case studies.

We’re not building a customer list. We’re building a community of people who believe in transparent product development.

Risks and How to Mitigate Them

Building in public isn’t risk-free. Let’s be honest about the downsides.

Risk 1: Competitors copy your ideas

The fear: Share your roadmap, competitors ship faster and steal your market.

The reality: Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. Competitors who copy without understanding your reasoning will build worse products. Competitors who understand your reasoning were going to build good products anyway.

Example: Notion shared their product philosophy publicly for years. Dozens of competitors emerged (Coda, Roam, Obsidian, Craft). Notion still won. Why? Execution, not secrecy.

Mitigation:

• Share your thinking, not just your features. Thinking is harder to copy than features.
• Build relationships, not just products. Competitors can copy features. They can’t copy your community.
• Move fast. Transparency creates accountability that keeps you shipping. Paranoid secrecy slows you down.

Risk 2: Public failures damage credibility

The fear: Share a metric that looks bad, lose customer trust.

The reality: Honesty about struggles builds more trust than fake perfection. People respect founders who admit mistakes and iterate.

Example: Buffer’s revenue dropped 9% in one quarter. They shared it publicly. Critics said this would destroy confidence. Instead, customers appreciated the honesty and stuck with them. Churn didn’t spike.

Mitigation:

• Frame failures as learning. Don’t just share bad metrics. Share what you learned and what you’re changing.
• Be consistent. If you only share wins, one loss looks catastrophic. If you share everything, losses are just data points.
• Separate company metrics from personal worth. Bad quarter ≠ bad founder.

Risk 3: Oversharing violates trust

The fear: Accidentally share something confidential about a partner, customer, or team member.

The reality: This is the real risk. Trust violations can’t be undone.

Mitigation:

• Ask permission. When sharing anything about someone else, ask if they’re comfortable with it first.
• Default to anonymity. Share lessons without naming names. “A founder we’re working with…” instead of “John from Company X…”
• Review before posting. Sleep on public updates. Fresh eyes catch accidental disclosures.

Risk 4: Transparency becomes performance

The fear: You start optimizing for what looks good publicly instead of what’s actually good for the business.

The reality: This is subtle and dangerous. Metrics become vanity metrics. Decisions become PR stunts.

Example warning sign: You delay shipping a necessary but boring feature because it won’t make a good tweet. You launch a flashy feature you don’t believe in because it’ll get engagement. You cherry-pick metrics that look good instead of metrics that matter.

Mitigation:

• Define your real metrics first. Know what actually matters before you share anything. Don’t let public perception define your priorities.
• Share the boring stuff too. Post about technical debt. Post about unglamorous improvements. Post about saying no to shiny features.
• Private accountability matters more. Have internal metrics and internal reviews that matter more than public ones.

Our take: The risks are real but manageable. Transparency requires discipline. You’re committing to honesty even when it’s uncomfortable. That’s hard. But the alternative—operating in the dark, missing feedback, building without accountability—is harder.

Decision Framework: When Building in Public Works (and When It Doesn’t)

Building in public isn’t for everyone. Here’s how to decide if it makes sense for you.

Ask these four questions:

1. Does your target audience care about the journey?

If you’re selling to developers, founders, creators, makers—they probably care. They’re building too. Your journey teaches them. Your transparency builds trust.

If you’re selling to enterprises, regulators, conservative industries—they might not care. They want proven, stable, boring. Sharing your struggles might hurt more than help.

Vibery’s answer: Our target is founders considering co-building with a product studio. They absolutely care about journey. They need to trust our process. Transparency is our best sales tool.

2. Is your competitive advantage in execution or secrecy?

If your edge is proprietary technology (rare), secrecy might matter. If your edge is speed, quality, or relationships—transparency helps.

Most companies think they have secret sauce. Most don’t. Your “proprietary algorithm” is probably similar to what competitors would build. Your real advantage is knowing your customer better, shipping faster, or building trust deeper.

Vibery’s answer: Our advantage is process, speed, and relationships. Sharing our process attracts better partners. Transparency creates accountability that keeps us fast. Our relationships deepen when partners see how we think.

3. Can you commit to consistency?

Building in public requires regular updates. Monthly, weekly, or daily depending on your medium. Inconsistency is worse than silence. Starting and stopping signals flakiness.

If you can’t commit to consistent sharing, don’t start. Do it right or don’t do it.

Vibery’s answer: Yes. We’re committing to monthly written updates, weekly social shares, and documentation of major decisions as they happen.

4. Are you comfortable with vulnerability?

This is the real filter. Can you share when things go wrong? Can you admit mistakes publicly? Can you post bad metrics and still show up next month?

If vulnerability feels impossible, building in public will feel like torture. And it’ll show. Performative transparency is worse than no transparency.

Vibery’s answer: Yes. Our entire model is based on partnership and co-building. That requires trust. Trust requires vulnerability. We’re comfortable with it.

When building in public makes sense:

• Developer tools and technical products (engineers value transparency)
• Creator economy products (creators share their journeys, respect others who do)
• B2B products sold to small teams and founders (they’re skeptical of marketing, trust transparency)
• Products targeting maker communities (Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, Hacker News audiences)
• Businesses built on trust and relationships (consulting, studios, agencies)

When building in public might not make sense:

• Enterprise sales with long cycles (public metrics might complicate procurement)
• Highly regulated industries (compliance might restrict what you can share)
• Consumer products where brand mystique matters (luxury, fashion, some entertainment)
• Businesses with genuine IP advantages (rare, but if you actually have defensible tech, maybe don’t share the details)

The honest answer: Most companies overestimate the risks and underestimate the benefits. When in doubt, default to transparency.

Vibery’s Commitment: What We’ll Share

We’re putting our money where our mouth is. Here’s what we’re committing to share as we build Vibery:

Monthly Public Updates

Every month, we’ll post:

• Metrics: Products launched, partnerships formed, revenue (when we have it), key performance indicators
• Progress: What shipped, what’s in progress, what got delayed
• Learnings: What worked, what didn’t, what we changed and why
• Next month’s focus: What we’re prioritizing and our reasoning

Format: Blog post, published last day of each month. First one drops November 30.

Open Product Roadmap

Our roadmap is public. You can see:

• What we’re building next (Vibery Edu launch timeline, future products in the pipeline)
• Why we’re building it (problem we’re solving, validation we’ve done)
• How we’re building it (tech stack, architectural decisions, design philosophy)

Format: Living document, updated as priorities shift. Hosted at vibery.app/roadmap (coming soon).

Process Documentation

We’re documenting how we work:

• How we evaluate co-build opportunities (framework, criteria, case studies)
• How we structure partnerships (equity splits, decision rights, governance)
• How we make technical decisions (architecture reviews, build vs buy, tech selection)
• How we build products (sprint structure, validation process, launch playbooks)

Format: Blog posts and documentation. Updated as we refine our process.

Financial Transparency

When we have revenue, we’ll share:

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) across portfolio
• Revenue per product
• Operating costs and burn rate
• Path to profitability (or why we’re choosing growth over profit)

Format: Monthly update includes financial section. We’re pre-revenue now. First revenue update when we hit $1 MRR.

What we won’t share:

• Partner-specific information without consent
• Personal details about team members without permission
• Active negotiations or deals in progress
• Anything that violates trust or privacy

We’re not building in public to perform. We’re building in public because it makes us better. Accountability keeps us honest. Feedback keeps us sharp. Community keeps us motivated.

How to Start: Your First 30 Days of Building in Public

If you’re convinced building in public makes sense, here’s how to start without overthinking it.

Week 1: Set up infrastructure

Choose your platform:

• Twitter/X: Real-time updates, short-form, high engagement. Best for developer/maker audiences.
• LinkedIn: Professional updates, longer-form, good for B2B. Best for enterprise/founder audiences.
• Blog/Newsletter: Long-form, owned platform, deeper content. Best for detailed explanations and SEO.
• Combination: Most effective. Tweet daily, blog monthly, newsletter when you have something meaty.

Vibery’s choice: Blog for depth, Twitter for real-time, LinkedIn for founder reach.

Set up tracking:

• What metrics matter to you? (Revenue, users, engagement, launches)
• How will you collect them? (Dashboard, spreadsheet, analytics tools)
• How often will you review them? (Weekly for internal, monthly for public)

Commit to frequency:

• How often will you post? (Daily, weekly, monthly)
• What format? (Thread, blog post, video, livestream)
• What day/time? (Consistency matters more than perfection)

Week 2: Share your baseline

Post your “why I’m building in public” explanation:

• What you’re building and why
• Why you’re choosing transparency
• What you’ll share and what you won’t
• How people can follow along

Share your current state:

• Where you are today (metrics, product stage, team size)
• How you got here (brief backstory)
• Where you’re headed (vision, next milestone)

This baseline post becomes your reference point. Future updates show progress against this starting line.

Week 3: Document your first learning

Share something you learned this week:

• A mistake you made and how you’re fixing it
• A framework you’re using to make decisions
• A technical implementation that worked well (or didn’t)
• A conversation that changed your perspective

This establishes the pattern: you’re not just sharing wins, you’re sharing the actual work.

Week 4: Establish your rhythm

Post your first regular update:

• What you shipped this week/month
• What you learned
• What’s next
• A metric or two (even if small)

Engage with your audience:

• Respond to comments
• Ask questions back
• Thank people who share your content
• Join conversations in your space

By end of week 4, you’ve:

• Explained why you’re building in public
• Shared your baseline
• Posted at least one learning
• Established your update rhythm
• Started engaging with your audience

That’s enough to start. Don’t overthink it. Don’t wait for perfect. Ship the first post and iterate.

Why This Post Exists

We wrote this because we’re committing publicly to building Vibery in public. This post is our stake in the ground.

We believe transparency is our competitive advantage as a product studio. We believe sharing our journey attracts the founders and builders we want to work with. We believe accountability makes us better.

But we also wrote this because we want to see more people building in public. The maker community gets stronger when we share openly. Your learnings help us. Our learnings help you. Transparency creates a rising tide.

If you’re building something—a product, a company, a studio, a side project—consider sharing your journey. Not performatively. Not for clout. But genuinely.

Share what you’re learning. Share what you’re struggling with. Share your metrics and your reasoning. The people you want to work with—the customers, partners, and teammates who actually get it—will find you.

We’re building Vibery in public starting now. Follow along at vibery.app/blog or @viberyapp on Twitter.

Next month’s update: Vibery Edu launch progress, our first partnership conversations, and what we learned trying to validate product ideas in public.

See you November 30.

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Want to build with us? We’re a product studio for the AI era. We co-build intelligent products with founders who have domain expertise. If you’re considering building in public and want a partner who gets it—let’s talk.