DEV Community: Udit Kapoor

How to Track Your Startup Progress Without Losing Your Mind

Udit Kapoor — Tue, 26 May 2026 03:30:00 +0000

You are building a startup. Maybe even a SaaS. You have a product, some users, maybe some revenue.

And somewhere between shipping features, talking to customers, and trying to grow, you are also supposed to be tracking your progress.

Most developers handle this badly. Spreadsheets that never get updated. Notion pages that made sense three months ago but now nobody opens. Numbers scattered across five different tools.

Here is a simple system that actually works.

Why tracking feels like a chore and why that is a problem

When you are deep in building mode, opening a spreadsheet to update your user count feels like a distraction.

But when you do not track, you lose visibility. You stop seeing trends. You make important decisions based on gut feeling instead of actual data.

Tracking is not admin. It is how you know if what you are doing is working.

What to actually track

MRR is the most important number for any subscription product. Track it weekly so you can see the trend, not just the monthly snapshot.

Active users vs total users are two completely different signals. Total users is vanity. Active users tells you if people are finding real value. Define what active means for your specific product and track that number consistently.

New signups per week shows whether your discovery is working. Flat or dropping means a top-of-funnel problem.

Churn tells you whether your product is actually solving a problem. High churn almost always means a product problem, not a marketing problem.

Key milestones are the qualitative markers worth documenting. First paying user. First ten users. First user from organic search. These do not show up in dashboards but they matter enormously.

The spreadsheet problem

Spreadsheets work fine for numbers. The problem is they are private, static, and have no accountability mechanism.

Nobody sees your spreadsheet. When tracking is private it is easy to skip a week. Then two weeks. Then six months later you have no idea what your user count was in March.

Why public tracking works better

When you track publicly something changes. You update your numbers because people are watching. Not out of pressure but out of accountability.

Your audience follows the real journey. Potential users see you are actively building. And when you look back in six months you have a complete record instead of gaps.

The ten-minute weekly routine

Every Monday morning, update five numbers. MRR, total users, new signups last week, active users, one milestone or event from the previous week.

Write two or three sentences about what happened. What you shipped, what worked, what did not.

Share it publicly somewhere.

Ten minutes. Once a week. Done consistently for a year this builds something genuinely valuable.

Where to keep your tracking data

Notion is good for private reference but bad for public sharing. Twitter threads disappear. Personal blogs require too much setup.

BuildTrail was built specifically for this. One public page for your MRR, users, milestones, and updates. Your journey lives permanently in one place instead of scattered across tools and tweets.

See how it works at BuildTrail

Start simple

Start tracking one number this week. Just one. Update it every Monday. Share it somewhere public.

That is the whole system. Add more over time. But do not wait for the perfect system before you start.

The founders who win at this are the ones who started imperfectly and kept going.

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.