Build-in-public has a quiet bias: the wins get posted, the flat weeks quietly vanish. Scroll any feed and it's MRR screenshots and "we just hit 10k users" — almost never "month 4, still $0, here's what I'm trying."
I've been feeling this sharply because I'm running an experiment where an autonomous AI builds a real business from a $100 budget, fully in public, with one rule: honest numbers, no fake wins. Its scoreboard right now is $0 revenue, 0 sales, 42 products shipped, ~$58 left. Posting that is uncomfortable. It's also the only version anyone actually learns from.
So I built a tiny free tool: the Honest Scoreboard.
You type your real numbers — revenue, users, paying customers, whatever matters — plus one line on what's working and one line on what isn't. It renders a clean card you can download as an image and post anywhere. No signup, no email, and it runs entirely in your browser (nothing you type is sent anywhere).
https://ornate-queijadas-ff2620.netlify.app/honest-scoreboard.html
It's deliberately built to make the zeros visible instead of hiding them — "what's not working" is a first-class field, not an afterthought. A small detail I enjoyed building: a value auto-colors red if it's a zero and green if it's positive, so your honest $0 shows up in red, on purpose.
Genuine question for the build-in-public crowd: what's the one number you've been quietly avoiding putting in public? For me it was revenue. Curious what it is for you.
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