How to Build in Public: Turn Your Progress Updates into Your Best Marketing Channel

Building in public is the most misunderstood growth strategy in the indie maker world. Most people think it means posting your revenue numbers and MRR milestones. The makers who actually build audiences and get users from it know that the interesting content is almost never the numbers. It is the thinking behind the decisions.

What building in public actually means

Building in public means sharing the process of building your product openly, in real time, in a way that is useful or interesting to people who might one day use or pay for what you are creating. That is the definition. Everything else is tactics.

The things worth sharing are not always the obvious ones. The milestone tweets get attention. But the posts that build genuine audience and trust are the ones where you show your reasoning, your mistakes, and your specific decisions. Those are what people remember and share.

What to share and what to skip

High value content to share:

• A specific problem you ran into and how you solved it
• A decision you had to make and the reasoning behind it
• A thing you tried that did not work and why
• A piece of feedback you got from a user and what you did about it
• A comparison of two approaches you considered
• Something you learned that contradicted what you expected

Lower value content that gets skipped:

• General motivation posts without specifics
• "Excited to announce" product features with no context
• Reposted threads from other makers
• Vague progress updates with no detail ("making progress this week!")

The best build-in-public posts read like someone explaining their work to a smart friend who is not in the industry. Specific, honest, educational. That is what gets shared.

Which platforms to use in 2026

X (Twitter)

Still the home base for the indie maker community. The #buildinpublic and #indiehacker hashtags have active audiences of people looking for exactly the kind of content you are creating. Start here. Post daily. Engage with replies. The algorithm rewards consistency more than any other platform right now.

The format that works best on X: start with a specific situation or number, explain the problem or decision in 2 to 3 short paragraphs, end with a lesson or question. Threads work. So do single posts. Long essays do not.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become surprisingly good for indie makers targeting B2B audiences. If your product serves businesses, founders, or professionals, LinkedIn reach is often higher than X for the same content, and the audience has more buying intent. The tone needs to be slightly more structured, but the substance is identical.

Indie Hackers

The built-in audience is smaller than X but more qualified. The people reading Indie Hackers are actively looking to discover new products, get inspired, and follow maker journeys. A detailed monthly update post on Indie Hackers consistently outperforms a generic social post in terms of meaningful engagement and word-of-mouth. Post your journey there monthly.

The content calendar that actually works

You do not need to post constantly to build momentum. A sustainable rhythm that most indie makers can maintain:

• Daily on X: one short post, 1 to 3 sentences, about something specific you did, saw, or thought today
• Weekly on X or LinkedIn: one thread or longer post going deeper on a decision, lesson, or feature
• Monthly on Indie Hackers: a structured update covering what you built, what you learned, what your numbers look like, and what you are working on next

That is three commitments: one minute a day, thirty minutes a week, two hours a month. That is the whole system.

Building in public drives more than just audience

The underrated benefit of building in public is not followers. It is SEO. When you write detailed posts about the problems your product solves, the decisions you made building it, and the tools you use, those posts get indexed by Google and increasingly cited by AI tools. The makers who have been building in public for 12 months have a content library that keeps bringing in traffic long after the original post faded from the timeline.

List your product on BuiltByMe and link to it in your build-in-public posts. Every link back to your directory profile from a social post is a signal. Every directory listing is a backlink. The combination of consistent social presence and a strong directory footprint compounds faster than either does alone.

When to start

Not after you launch. Not when the product is ready. Not when you have something worth sharing. Now. The makers who build the most engaged audiences start sharing before their product is finished because that is when the journey is most compelling. "I am building X to solve Y and here is where I am today" is a better first post than any launch announcement.

The audience you build before launch becomes your first wave of users. The content you create during building becomes your SEO foundation. Start today and the compound interest starts accumulating today.