Somewhere between "I'm going to be radically transparent about my business" and "I just accidentally posted my client list on Instagram," there's a line. Most founders who embrace building in public never find it until they've already crossed it.
That's not a knock on the build-in-public movement. Sharing your process genuinely builds audiences, earns trust faster than any ad campaign, and forces a kind of clarity that polished brand decks never will. But there's a version of it that helps you, and a version that quietly works against you. Telling the difference is the whole game.
Why Founders Get This Wrong
The appeal of radical transparency is real. You post a revenue screenshot, it goes viral, and suddenly you have 4,000 new followers who care about what you're building. So you keep going. You share everything. The messy pivot, the failed launch, the vendor who ghosted you, the client who paid late.
Some of that is genuinely good content. Some of it is oversharing dressed up as authenticity. The problem is that when you're in the middle of building something, it's hard to know which is which.
A useful build-in-public strategy isn't about sharing everything — it's about sharing the right things. The stuff that's useful to someone else, or that invites people into a story they actually want to follow.
What's Actually Safe to Share
Most of the good stuff is in the process, not the outcome. Here's where founders tend to get the most traction when they share business behind the scenes:
- The decision-making moment. Not "we pivoted" but "here's the exact thing we saw that made us decide to pivot." The reasoning is the content.
- Experiments and early results. A/B test outcomes, what flopped, what surprised you. This is useful to other people and positions you as someone who actually tests things rather than just talking about them.
- Your frameworks and mental models. How do you think about pricing? What does your intake process look like? These give people a window into how you work without giving away the keys to anything.
- Failures with a landing. Not failure porn — the "I almost quit" narrative gets old fast — but genuine reflection on what broke and what you changed because of it.
- Work in progress. A rough design, a draft outline, an early version of something. People love watching things get made. It's practically a biological response.
- The numbers that are yours to share. Your own revenue, your own follower growth, your own metrics. Not your clients'.
The common thread: all of it is yours. It belongs to your story, not someone else's.
What to Keep Off the Feed
This is where the line actually lives. And it's less about being secretive and more about being smart.
Client details, ever. Even anonymized, even with permission. "A client in the e-commerce space" still makes your actual clients wonder if that's them. The trust cost isn't worth the content.
Unreleased product specifics. You don't have to hide the fact that you're building something new. But the specific feature set, the pricing model, the go-to-market angle — that's proprietary until you're ready to launch it. There's a reason Apple doesn't post design screenshots in Figma.
Internal tensions and personnel stuff. The team disagreement that almost derailed the project sounds like self-awareness when you write it. It reads differently to the person who was in the disagreement.
Anything that's only interesting to you right now. "We just set up our new project management system" is not behind-the-scenes content. It's a diary entry. What to share publicly should pass a basic test: does this give someone else something useful, interesting, or resonant? If not, let it stay in your notes.
The Competitive Intelligence Problem
One thing that doesn't get talked about enough in the build-in-public conversation: you're also broadcasting to competitors.
For most early-stage founders, this is less of a risk than it feels. If someone can copy your idea from a few tweets, the idea probably wasn't the hard part. Execution is. But when you're sharing things like your exact positioning, your specific pricing experiments, or who your biggest enterprise clients are — that's genuinely useful to someone trying to outmaneuver you.
Share the thinking. Protect the specifics. That's a reasonable rule of thumb.
Build in Public Like It's a Strategy, Not a Personality
The founders who do this well treat it like any other part of their brand system — intentional, consistent, with a clear sense of what they're trying to accomplish. (If you want to think about brand systems more broadly, this post on building a brand system that actually scales is worth the read.)
At St. Clair Studios, we work with founders who are figuring out exactly this: what does the public-facing version of your business actually look like, and how do you build it without accidentally making yourself more vulnerable? The answer usually lives somewhere in the gap between "too polished to be believable" and "so honest it's chaotic."
Build-in-public for founders works best when you've decided in advance what kind of story you're telling. Not every story. Your story.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a founder share when building in public?
Share your process, decisions, experiments, and frameworks — things that are useful or interesting to someone else and belong entirely to your own story. Failures with context, work in progress, and your own business metrics are all fair game. What you're thinking is almost always more valuable to share than what you're building specifically.
What should stay private when building in public?
Client information (even anonymized), unreleased product specifics, internal team conflicts, and anything that would give a competitor a meaningful edge. If it belongs to someone else's story, or it's only useful to you right now, it probably doesn't belong on the feed.
Does building in public hurt you competitively?
Rarely, for early-stage founders — execution is usually the moat, not the idea. The real risk is oversharing proprietary details like exact pricing models, go-to-market tactics, or client names. Share the reasoning behind your decisions without necessarily revealing every specific you're working from.
How do I know if something is worth posting publicly?
Ask one question: does this give someone else something useful, interesting, or resonant? If the honest answer is no — if it's only interesting to you because you're in the middle of it — hold it back. Good build-in-public content earns its place in someone else's feed, not just your own.
Your turn: tell us in the comments — what's the one thing you'd never build in public, no matter how transparent you get?