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.
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.
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