Build in Public on Twitter: What to Share, What to Keep Private and How Often to Post

To build in public means sharing the process of making something, not just the finished result. Founders post their progress, numbers and mistakes; developers share what they shipped this week; writers show drafts and how their audience grows; makers post photos from the workshop. On X (Twitter) it has become a recognisable style, especially among indie hackers and solo founders, often under the #buildinpublic hashtag.

The idea is simple: people follow stories, and a project in progress is a story with a built-in cliffhanger. Instead of launching to silence, you bring an audience along the way, learn from their feedback and earn trust before you ask anyone for anything. This guide covers building in public tips for X: what to share, what to keep private, how often to post, which formats work, and the honest pros and cons.

• Progress: what you shipped, built, wrote or fixed this week. Concrete beats vague: "added CSV export" says more than "worked on features".
• Numbers you are comfortable sharing: users, signups, revenue, traffic, waitlist size or hours spent. Pick the metrics that tell the story and that you are happy for strangers, customers and competitors to see. Ranges or growth rates work if exact figures feel like too much.
• Lessons: what worked, what failed and what you would do differently. Honest failures are useful to other builders, which is why they often make the most interesting posts.
• Decisions: why you chose a price, a tool, a feature or a direction. People like seeing the reasoning, and you get feedback before it is too late to change course.
• Launches and milestones: the first user, the first sale, a new version, a round number. Celebrate them and thank the people who helped.
• Behind the scenes: your setup, your routine, a screenshot of the messy first version.
• Questions: ask your audience to vote on a name, react to a landing page or describe their problem. It turns followers into participants.

Transparency is a choice, not an obligation. Some things should stay private however open you want to be:

• Customer and user data: names, emails, private messages or dashboard screenshots that show personal details, unless you have clear permission.
• Other people's information: co-founders, employees, partners and investors should agree before you share anything about them.
• Security details: infrastructure, admin screens, keys or tokens visible in a screenshot, or anything else that helps an attacker.
• Confidential agreements: contract terms, partner deals or anything covered by an agreement you signed.
• Numbers you might regret: if a figure could hurt you in a negotiation, a job search or a hard month, leave it out. You can always share more later, but you cannot unshare.
• Your whole personal life: building in public is about the project. Boundaries around health, family and money outside the business are healthy.

Building in public works as a continuing story, so regularity matters more than frequency. A rhythm many people can sustain:

• A few times a week: small progress posts, a screenshot, a lesson or a question.
• Weekly: an update with what you shipped, one or two numbers, a struggle and what is next.
• Monthly: a numbers post or a longer thread on what you learned.
• At milestones: a launch, a first customer or a version release, with a thank-you to the people who helped.

Pick one day for your weekly update and stick to it, so followers know when to expect it. Scheduling helps: write the update when you have the numbers, and let a queue publish it at a time your audience is around. GrowX's post scheduler can queue posts and threads, with up to 10 waiting at once on the free plan, and its analytics show which of your updates earn replies and which formats work best for you.

• The weekly update: the week number, a few metrics, what you shipped, what you struggled with and the plan for next week.
• The milestone post: what you reached, how long it took from idea to now, and who you want to thank.
• The numbers post: the key figures for a period, plus one thing you would do differently.
• The shipped post: the feature, why you built it and where to try it.
• The lesson thread: one mistake or insight, the story behind it and what others can take from it. The guide on how to write a Twitter thread helps with the structure.
• The before-and-after: two screenshots of a page, a product or a design, with a line on what changed and why.
• The decision post: two options you are choosing between, and a question for your audience.

GrowX, a Chrome extension for growing on X, includes a Build in public category among its 52 post templates, alongside hooks, threads, lists, stories, lessons, questions and announcements. Its four build-in-public templates cover the most common formats: Weekly update, Milestone, Numbers and Feature shipped. The weekly update follows this structure (the template itself adds a small emoji to the metric and status lines):

• Week {week} of building {project}:
• {metric1}
• {metric2}
• Shipped: {shipped}
• Struggle: {struggle}
• Next week: {next}

You fill in the {placeholders}, and you can save your own variations as templates so a weekly update takes minutes. The same 52 templates are free to browse in the tweet templates library on this site.

If you use GrowX AI (Premium), it can turn rough notes into a draft update in your voice, on your own computer. It leaves {placeholders} for numbers instead of inventing them, which matters when the whole point of building in public is honesty.

Building in public is not right for every project or every person. The upsides:

• Early feedback: people tell you what they want before you spend months building the wrong thing.
• An audience at launch: people who watched you build already know what you made and why.
• Accountability: a public weekly update is a reason to ship something every week.
• Relationships: other builders find you, and peers become friends, testers and collaborators.
• Something real to post about: your work supplies the material, so you rarely run out of ideas.

And the downsides:

• Competitors can watch: sharing ideas, numbers and channels makes them easier to copy.
• Pressure to perform: slow months are visible, and it is tempting to post only good news.
• Time: writing updates takes time away from building, especially early on.
• Audience mismatch: other builders may cheer you on without ever being your customers.
• It can become the project: some people end up optimising for posts instead of the product.

A middle path suits many people: share progress, lessons and decisions openly, keep sensitive numbers and strategy private, and make sure some of your posts speak to your actual customers, not only to other builders. For the bigger picture of building an audience around your work, see personal branding on Twitter and the guide to your first 1,000 followers on X.

GrowX is free to install from the Chrome Web Store, and you can create a free account to try every Premium feature free for 30 days, no credit card needed. Fill in the weekly update template, queue it for your best time and start telling your story.