Building in public: what to share, and how to prove it.

The short version

• Publish the number, not the adjective. “Growing fast” costs nothing to say. “$3.1K to $10.4K over twelve months” can be checked.
• Timing is the whole asset. Anything published before the outcome was known is worth more than the same thing published after.
• Include the flat months. A record with no bad months in it reads as a highlight reel, and readers discount the good months accordingly.
• Say what you did, next to what happened. A revenue chart shows that a company grew. It never says why anyone did anything.
• Make it checkable and make it current. A screenshot is neither.

What founders actually share

There is no fixed format, but in practice the things founders publish fall into four groups, and they are not equally persuasive.

Why screenshots stopped working

A cropped dashboard image asks the reader to trust three things at once: that the number is real, that it is yours, and that it is current. None of them can be checked, and all three have been abused often enough that a sophisticated reader now discounts the whole format. The failure is structural, not moral — an honest founder’s screenshot is indistinguishable from a dishonest one, which is exactly what makes it worthless as evidence.

A read-only connection to your billing provider fixes all three at once. The figure is computed rather than typed, it is tied to the account it came from, and it updates without you touching it.

The part most founders get wrong

Almost everyone publishes the chart and stops. But a chart only tells a reader that revenue moved; it never tells them what you did. The version that persuades pairs each decision with the numbers around it — where the business stood the day you shipped, and where it stood thirty, ninety and a hundred and eighty days later.

That includes the decisions that did nothing. A launch that moved MRR three percent in its first month is more convincing than one described as a breakout, because a reader who has run a launch knows which of those two happens more often.

How to start this week

1. Connect your billing. A read-only key is enough. Thonest rebuilds the last twelve months so you are not starting from an empty page.
2. Add five dates. Your launch, your last pricing change, the pivot, the first hire, the month you nearly quit. Five is plenty.
3. Look at it privately first. Decide what you are comfortable showing before anyone else sees it.
4. Publish it, then put it where people already are. Your about page, your footer, your careers page — not only a social post that scrolls away.

Questions founders ask

What does building in public mean?

Building in public means sharing your startup's progress — revenue, customer counts, launches, pricing changes, mistakes — while it is happening, rather than telling the story afterwards. In practice most founders share monthly revenue, what they shipped, and what they learned. The defining feature is timing: it is published before anyone knows how the story ends.

Why do founders build in public?

Distribution and trust, mostly. A founder with no audience and no logos needs a reason for a stranger to take them seriously, and a public record of real numbers is one of the few things that works without a brand behind it. It also creates accountability, gives you a reason to talk to your market every month, and produces an asset you can point at when you are hiring, raising or selling.

Should I share my revenue publicly?

Only if you would still publish a flat or falling month. Sharing revenue while it grows and going quiet when it does not is worse than never sharing, because everyone can see the gap. If that trade sounds fine, revenue is the single most credible number you can publish, because it is the one that is hardest to fake and easiest to check against your own product's pricing.

What should I not share when building in public?

Anything that belongs to someone else, and anything you cannot sustain. Individual customer names, deal sizes and churn reasons are usually theirs, not yours. Burn rate, runway and cap-table detail invite conversations you may not want. And a metric you publish once becomes a metric people expect monthly, so do not start with a number you will want to stop reporting.

Is a revenue screenshot good enough proof?

It used to be. A screenshot is a picture of a number that anyone can crop, re-date or edit, and readers have learned that. It also goes stale the moment you post it. A connected, read-only feed from your billing provider is checkable and stays current, which is why it now carries more weight than an image.

How do I prove my MRR without exposing my Stripe account?

Use a read-only key. Thonest connects with a restricted key that can read subscriptions and customers and nothing else — it cannot move money, issue refunds or change your account. Your timeline stays private until you publish it, and you choose which entries appear.

Related: startup social proof · what an open startup is · how we count MRR