The founders who are most afraid of sharing their work publicly are usually protecting the wrong things — and missing the single best free customer acquisition channel available to them.
The Data Behind Building in Public
Buffer grew from zero to $20M ARR and 90,000+ paying customers by publishing everything: salaries, revenue, equity, even their internal debates. Ghost raised $316,000 on Kickstarter in under 30 days — before writing a single line of production code — because the founder had spent months building in public on a blog. Indie Hackers documented that founders who share revenue milestones publicly see 3-5x higher organic traffic growth compared to those who don't.
This is not a coincidence. Transparency creates compounding word-of-mouth. It generates content with authentic signal in an era where AI-generated noise has made authentic signal scarce. It attracts customers who believe in your mission before your product is perfect. And it accelerates hiring — the best candidates want to work for founders who are honest about where they are.
I've seen this across my own portfolio. The founders who build in public consistently raise their next rounds faster, close enterprise deals faster, and recruit stronger teams. The fear of giving away the moat is the thing that actually costs them most.
What Your Moat Actually Is (It's Not What You Think)
Here's the uncomfortable truth most founders don't want to hear: your idea is not your moat. Your feature roadmap is not your moat. Your pitch deck is not your moat. Competitors will know your feature set within weeks of your launch — that is inevitable in any functioning market. Acting as though secrecy around these things protects you is a coping mechanism, not a strategy.
Your actual moat is your execution velocity — how fast your team learns and ships. Your customer relationships — the trust and switching costs you have built. Your proprietary data — the training data, behavioral signals, or operational data only you have accumulated. And your distribution — the audience, channels, and partnerships that let you reach customers at lower cost than anyone else. Building in public is a direct investment in the last one.
When Buffer published its full salary formula, competitors did not copy it and beat Buffer. They could not, because Buffer's moat was its culture and brand — things that take years of consistent behavior to build, not an afternoon of reading a blog post.
The Founder's Framework: What to Share vs. What to Protect
- •Share: Revenue milestones and growth rates. Nothing builds credibility and attracts warm inbound — from investors, candidates, and customers — faster than specific, honest numbers. Round numbers are fine. Fake optimism is not.
- •Share: Failure stories and hard lessons. These are your highest-performing content by a wide margin. A tweet about a product decision that failed gets 5-10x the engagement of a product announcement. Vulnerability is distribution.
- •Share: Process and philosophy. How you make decisions, how you run sprints, how you think about pricing. These build thought leadership without revealing trade secrets.
- •Protect: Proprietary data pipelines and core algorithms. If your competitive advantage is a training dataset or a proprietary signal, do not describe how it works or how you built it. Describe that it exists and what outcomes it drives.
- •Protect: Unreleased roadmap tied to competitive positioning. If a feature is the reason you win deals against a specific competitor, do not announce it publicly before it ships. Ship it. Then talk about it.
- •Protect: Customer names and deal terms without consent. Case studies require permission. Sharing logos without consent destroys trust faster than any competitor could.
- •Protect: Specific discount structures and pricing floors. Publishing your pricing is fine. Publishing the maximum discount you'll offer is not — it hands every future negotiation to the buyer.
The Three Mistakes That Kill the Strategy
Mistake one: Going quiet when things get hard. The founders who stop posting when revenue dips or a product launch fails are the ones who lose the compounding benefit. Your audience is not just watching you when things are good. They are watching to see if you are honest when things are bad. Going silent reads as dishonesty. The founders I've seen build the most loyal communities are the ones who write the post-mortem in real time.
Mistake two: Performing instead of building. Building in public works because it is authentic. It stops working the moment it becomes a content calendar optimized for engagement metrics. Followers can smell when you have shifted from sharing what you are actually doing to crafting a narrative. The most effective build-in-public founders post because they think out loud naturally, not because they scheduled the post.
Mistake three: Treating your audience as your competition. The default fear — "what if a competitor reads this?" — is a category error. Your audience is not your competitor. Your competitor is a well-funded team with a different product thesis, and they are already watching your GitHub, your job postings, and your pricing page. A Twitter thread is the least of your security concerns. Your community, meanwhile, is a compounding asset your competitor cannot copy.
Your moat is not your idea. It never was. The founders who build in public understand this — and use transparency as the weapon their competitors are too afraid to pick up.
Stay current with VC and startup trends at Value Add VC. Originally published in the Trace Cohen newsletter.