Building in Public: What It Actually Looks Like for Operating Companies

Most of the build-in-public advice floating around is written by indie hackers shipping side projects. Solo devs tweeting their MRR. Founders posting screenshots of Stripe dashboards on Sundays.

That's fine. But it's not what operating in public looks like when you've got 40 employees, three warehouses, and a customer who'll churn if you say the wrong thing on LinkedIn.

I've been thinking about this a lot. Because the operating companies I work with — real ones, with payroll and inventory and quarterly tax filings — keep asking me the same question: how transparent is too transparent?

Here's my honest answer: nobody knows. We're all figuring it out as the rules change.

The indie-hacker version doesn't translate

When a SaaS founder with no employees tweets "just hit $4,200 MRR," the downside is basically zero. Maybe a competitor sees it. Maybe their mom sends a congrats text.

Now imagine the CEO of a mid-size rice exporter posting margin data on a 40-foot container shipment to Dubai. Suddenly the buyer on the other end is recalculating their next PO. The bank relationship manager is asking awkward questions. Three competitors are screenshotting it for their sales decks.

The math is different. The blast radius is bigger.

So when operating companies try to copy the indie playbook, it tends to blow up. I got this wrong at first too — I used to push every founder I worked with toward radical openness. Then I watched a friend lose a major distribution deal because he posted a roadmap update that hinted at a category his retail partner thought was off-limits.

Transparency without judgment is just noise with a brand voice.

What it actually looks like when it works

The companies doing this well aren't sharing everything. They're sharing the texture of how they operate. Process, not numbers. Decisions, not contracts. Lessons, not P&Ls.

A few patterns I keep seeing:

They share the messy middle, not the polished end. A founder I follow who runs a logistics startup in Karachi posts a weekly thread about one operational problem they didn't solve cleanly. Not a victory lap. Just — here's what broke, here's what we tried, here's what we'll try next week. His inbound from senior operators went up something like 6x in eight months. Nobody cares about your wins. They care about your thinking.

They publish their playbooks. When Zivni writes about how FMCG companies should actually think about the best route to market fmcg leaders are sleeping on — direct-to-retail versus distributor-led versus hybrid — they're not giving away the platform. They're showing operators how they think. And that's the moat for any B2B SaaS company selling into emerging markets: not the features, but the framework you bring to a buyer who's drowning in tactical decisions about route to market for fmcg execution.

They talk about customers in aggregate, not by name. "47% of our distributors are still using paper-based order capture" is publishable. "Our customer X is using paper" gets you sued. The line is obvious once you draw it.

They're consistent about cadence. One real post a week beats six posts in a burst followed by three months of silence. The operators I respect treat their public writing like a standup — boring, scheduled, ongoing.

The parts founders don't want to talk about

Here's the thing nobody admits at the conferences: building in public is exhausting if you're also actually running a company.

Writing takes time. Good writing takes more time. And every public post is a decision your team has to align around — legal looks at it, your co-founder has opinions, your investors maybe wish you'd toned down paragraph three.

I've watched founders burn out on this. They start with momentum, post four times a week for a quarter, then disappear because the company hit a rough patch and they don't want to talk about it. Which — fair. But it means the audience they built gets a sense that the silence equals trouble, and trouble compounds.

The fix isn't more discipline. It's lower frequency from the start. Pick a cadence you can hold during a bad month, not a good one.

Also: not every part of the business should be public. Hiring decisions, pricing experiments mid-flight, anything involving regulators in a frontier market — those stay internal. The operators I respect have a clear mental model of what's shareable, and they don't argue with themselves about the rest.

So what's the actual playbook

If I had to compress what I've seen working for operating companies trying to build a transparent business presence without lighting their cap table on fire:

Write about the problem space, not your specific deals. A satellite intelligence company can talk all day about how spectral analysis is changing mineral exploration without revealing which copper anomaly they're chasing in which valley. Education compounds. Deal-specific posts don't.

Pick one channel and own it. LinkedIn if your buyers are corporate. Twitter/X if you're selling to other founders. A newsletter if your audience is older than 35 and reads on weekends. Stop trying to be everywhere.

Be early. The companies that started writing publicly in 2019 about agri-commodity logistics or field sales tech now have audiences that founders launching today literally cannot buy. Distribution is the asset. It just takes 18 months before it feels like one.

And — this is the part I had to learn the slow way — don't optimize for engagement. Optimize for the right three people seeing the post. A 200-view post that lands with one strategic buyer is worth more than a 50,000-view post that lands with nobody who can write you a check.

Most of what passes for build-in-public is performance. The real version is quieter, slower, and mostly looks like writing down what you'd tell a smart friend over coffee.

Which raises the question I keep coming back to: if you stripped away the analytics dashboard, would you still write the post?