DEV Community: Udit Kapoor

What Does "Building in Public" Actually Mean in 2026?

Udit Kapoor — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:45:00 +0000

If you've spent any time on developer Twitter, you've seen it.

Founders posting their MRR. Sharing what broke this week. Documenting every step of building their product in real time.

But what does building in public actually mean? And is it worth doing?

This is the honest breakdown. No hype.

The simple definition

Building in public means sharing your startup journey openly as it happens. Not after you've succeeded. Not in a polished case study. Right now, in real time, with the messy parts included.

That means posting about your revenue even when it's zero. Sharing what broke last week. Telling people about the feature nobody used.

It is the opposite of stealth mode.

Where it started

The movement took off when founders like Pieter Levels started sharing everything publicly. Revenue screenshots. User counts. Failed experiments. Real numbers behind real products.

People responded because it felt honest. In a world full of polished startup stories, "here's what my dashboard actually looks like" was refreshing.

Indie Hackers built a community around it. Twitter's #buildinpublic tag became one of the most active founder spaces online.

What building in public is not

It is not bragging. It is not a marketing strategy disguised as transparency. It is not just posting revenue milestones when things are going well.

The founders who do it well share the whole picture. Bad months alongside good ones. Features that flopped alongside ones that worked.

If you only share the good stuff, your audience will feel it. And they will stop trusting you.

Why founders actually do it

Accountability is the biggest reason. When you tell the world you're going to ship something this week, you're far more likely to do it.

Audience building compounds over time. Every post reaches potential users, collaborators and supporters.

Feedback helps you build something people actually want. When you share what you're building, people tell you what they think.

Community is real. The build-in-public world is genuinely supportive. Founders help each other in ways that don't happen anywhere else.

The problem nobody talks about

Here's the thing though. There's a real problem with how most founders build in public.

All that content disappears.

You post a milestone on Twitter and it gets buried in 48 hours. Six months of honest documentation of your journey just vanishes into the feed.

There's no permanent record. No single place where someone can see your full story from the beginning.

This is the gap that BuildTrail fills. A permanent public page for your entire startup journey. One link that tells the whole story.

How to actually start

Start with weekly updates. Every Friday or Monday, write a short post covering three things. What you shipped. What you learned. What you're working on next.

Share real numbers from day one. Even if those numbers are zero. Saying "zero users and zero revenue on week one" is more trustworthy than vague language about early traction.

Be consistent over being perfect. One post every week for a year matters far more than ten posts in January and then silence.

The bottom line

Building in public means sharing your real journey openly as it happens. It's not about looking good. It's about being genuine, staying accountable, and building trust.

The founders who do it consistently and honestly are the ones who build audiences, get early users, and create products people actually care about.

If you're ready to start documenting your journey properly, BuildTrail gives you one permanent public page for everything.

Free to start at buildtrail.app

Why I Built BuildTrail — A Public Home for Founders Who Build in Public

Udit Kapoor — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 05:40:25 +0000

If you've ever posted a milestone on Twitter and watched it disappear two days later, this one's for you.

It started with a problem I couldn't unsee

About a year ago, I was building ViewUs — my first real SaaS attempt.

Like most founders trying to grow, I was doing the whole "build in public" thing. Posting on Twitter every few days. Revenue updates. User milestones. Lessons from features that flopped. The wins, the dead ends, all of it.

And after a while, I started noticing something that nobody really talks about.

All of it was disappearing.

Not slowly. Fast. A tweet about hitting 50 users — buried in 48 hours. A thread about the biggest lesson from a failed launch — gone in a week. A revenue screenshot that took real courage to post — never found again.

I'd scroll back through my own feed looking for something I wrote three months ago and spend ten minutes trying to find it. That's when it hit me.

There's no place where a founder's journey actually lives.

The "build in public" movement has a blind spot

Look at any founder you follow on Twitter who builds in public. They post consistently. Revenue milestones. User counts. Honest reflections. All of it valuable, all of it real.

But here's the thing — if someone discovers them today and wants to understand their full journey, they have to scroll through hundreds of tweets across months or years. Most people won't bother.

And for the founder themselves? There's no single answer to "how far have you come?" No timeline. No clean record. Just fragments scattered across a social feed that wasn't built to tell stories.

I kept waiting for someone to build the solution. Nobody did.

So I built it myself.

What is BuildTrail?

BuildTrail is a public page for your startup journey.

Instead of your milestones living in tweets that disappear, they live on your BuildTrail — a clean, permanent, shareable page that tells the full story of what you're building.

Here's what you can track and share:

Milestones — every significant moment in your build, from first commit to first dollar
Revenue — your MRR or total revenue, updated as you grow
User count — watch your number go up (and sometimes down — that's fine too)
Updates — post like a public changelog, keep your audience in the loop
Full control — you decide exactly what's visible and what stays private

One link. Your whole story.

Why this matters more than you think

Building in public isn't just a growth strategy. For most indie founders, it's accountability. It's the thing that keeps you going when nobody's watching.

But accountability needs a record. Progress needs somewhere to live.

When you have a BuildTrail, you can look back six months from now and see exactly where you started. Your followers can follow the real arc — not just the latest tweet. Future users can see you're the real deal before they hand over their credit card.

It changes the question from "what have you been up to?" to "here's everything, in one place."

The honest part — where I am right now

I launched BuildTrail two days ago.

I have my first real users. I have my first real feedback. I have a site speed issue I fixed last night at midnight.

Revenue: $0. Users: small but growing. Energy: very much alive.

I'm using BuildTrail to track BuildTrail's own journey — which feels right.

If you're building in public and your journey deserves more than a Twitter thread that disappears — come try it.

Free to start. $9/mo for the full thing.

First 50 founders get 40% off for 3 months with code EARLYTRAIL.

👉 buildtrail.app

One question for you

What's the one thing missing from how you currently share your startup journey publicly?

I'm genuinely building this for founders like you — every piece of feedback shapes what gets built next. Drop it in the comments, I read and reply to everything.