What Building in Public Actually Looks Like (Revenue, Failures, Lessons)

My favorite thing about the #buildinpublic hashtag is how little building is involved.

Scroll through it right now. You'll find revenue screenshots with rocket emojis. Milestone posts that read like LinkedIn announcements dressed down for Twitter. People who call themselves "builders" but whose product is a course about building. Day 47 updates that are really just content marketing in a trenchcoat.

And then there's the actual reality, which nobody posts because it's boring and kind of depressing and doesn't get likes.

I've been building Sydium for a while now. A social media management tool. Solo, from Romania, bootstrapped. I've written about why I started this before but this post is different. This one is about what the day-to-day actually feels like when you strip away the curated version.

If you want the inspirational founder story, there are a thousand of those on Indie Hackers. This isn't that.

The highlight reel economy

Building in public started as a genuinely good idea.

Buffer published their entire salary list in 2013. Just put it out there. All salaries, all revenue, complete transparency. Baremetrics made their revenue dashboard public in 2014. Pieter Levels launched his "12 startups in 12 months" challenge the same year while basically broke, living at his parents' house. Courtland Allen started Indie Hackers in 2016 with a simple idea that was actually radical at the time: make revenue sharing a requirement for founder stories.

The original premise was that honesty helps everyone. Show the numbers. Share the mistakes. Let other founders learn from your experience so they don't make the same ones.

Then it turned into a growth hack.

Damon Chen, founder of Testimonial.to, wrote about this: "People got caught up in the movement and forgot how the business world works." He used to share all his revenue publicly. He stopped. Pieter Levels removed his open revenue page too. Tony Dinh considered doing the same because sharing revenue numbers created risks to both his business and personal safety.

Someone on Hacker News put it perfectly: "If you're building in public there's a 99% chance you're going to end up building products for other indie hackers." And that's basically what happened. The audience for build-in-public content is other builders. Not customers. Builders.

The moment I realized this was when my tweets about building Sydium got way more engagement from other founders than from anyone who might actually use a social media tool. The meta-irony of building a social media management tool while getting better at social media through building in public while none of my audience needed a social media management tool. Yeah.

Patrick wrote about this on Medium: "Over time, building in public started to feel like performance. Instead of asking 'what did I learn this week,' I found myself asking 'what looks good enough to post.'" That hit close. Because I've done exactly that. Sat there with my phone wondering what angle makes the struggle sound interesting instead of just being honest about the fact that I spent four hours fixing an Instagram API issue and nothing else happened.

What "normal" actually looks like in numbers

This is the part that nobody wants to talk about. Not because the data doesn't exist but because the data is brutal.

According to Stripe-verified data from Indie Hackers, 54% of indie hacker products make zero revenue. The median monthly revenue for verified products is $30. Only 4.8% break $10K per month. Around 90% of SaaS startups fail overall - 42% because nobody wanted the product, 29% because they ran out of cash, 13% because of bad marketing. That last one feels personal.

Now think about what you see on Twitter. $10K MRR posts. $50K month screenshots. "Just hit six figures" announcements. That's the 4.8% you're seeing. The other 95.2% are quiet. Because nobody posts a screenshot of $30.

The success stories are even more misleading when you look at what came before the success. Pieter Levels has launched over 70 projects. Only four are considered successful. He makes around $210K per month now, but that sits on top of 66 things that went nowhere. Nobody puts "failed 66 times" in their Twitter bio.

Sahil Lavingia's Gumroad story is maybe the most honest founder story ever written. Left Pinterest (employee number two), raised $8.1 million, burned $350K per month, laid off 75% of his company including close friends. His investors told him to shut it down. He refused. The line that stayed with me: "Enough is a decision, not an amount."

These are the people who "made it." Their early years looked like everyone else's. The difference is they're still here.

The parts nobody posts about

My typical day building Sydium doesn't make for good content. Here's what it actually looks like.

I wake up and check if anything broke overnight. Platform APIs are unpredictable. Instagram changed something on a random Tuesday in February and three different publishing flows stopped working. No announcement, no deprecation notice. Just broken. I spent three days debugging that. Three days where I built exactly zero new features and created zero content and made zero progress on any metric that would look good in a tweet.

Then there's the features nobody uses. I spent two months building an analytics dashboard early on because I assumed creators wanted charts. They didn't. They wanted to know "is this working" not "here's your engagement rate broken down by day of week with a 30-day rolling average." I wrote about this in my first post about building Sydium. Those charts still haunt me because the time I spent on them could have gone to the things people actually needed.

The marketing part is its own form of suffering. I'm a developer. 15 years of writing code. Zero years of writing copy or running ad campaigns or figuring out SEO. Learning to market as a developer feels like being a professional chef who suddenly has to do their own plumbing. You can probably figure it out but it's going to be ugly and take way longer than it should.

There's a quote I keep coming back to: "Building got dramatically easier. Selling got harder." With AI tools I can build features faster than ever. But I still can't get people to try them. Distribution is the real bottleneck and nobody at a hackathon wants to hear that.

Then there's the stuff that's just boring. Updating dependencies. Writing documentation nobody reads. Answering support emails at 11pm because timezones mean your users are awake when you're supposed to be asleep. Fixing the same OAuth bug for the third time because Facebook decided to change something again. Getting the scheduling to work reliably across Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn when each platform has completely different rules about what you can publish and when.

None of this makes for a good tweet.

Founder mental health and the silence around it

I'm not a therapist and I don't have answers. But the numbers are too stark to ignore.

72% of founders report their mental health was affected by the entrepreneurial journey. 54% experienced burnout in the past 12 months. Two thirds considered quitting. And the worst part isn't the burnout itself - it's the isolation. 81% of founders hide their stress from others.

Building in public compounds this. When your metrics are public, a bad month isn't just a bad month. It's a bad month that everyone can see. Groove HQ's founder Alex Turnbull wrote about this: founders are expected to be "relentless optimists." There's very few people you can be real with.

I'm not going to pretend I've figured this out. I haven't. Some weeks I feel like I'm making progress and everything is possible. Other weeks I stare at the gap between where Sydium is and where it needs to be and it feels like trying to fill a pool with a cup. I'm lucky enough to have people around me who get it. A lot of founders don't have that and the stats reflect it.

If this section applies to you, I don't have advice. I just wanted to name it because most building-in-public content pretends this part doesn't exist.

What I've actually learned (not the inspirational version)

After months of building Sydium I've learned some things. They're not profound. They won't look good on a slide deck. But they're real.

Marketing is the job. I spent 15 years thinking the product was the job and marketing was the annoying thing you had to do after the job was done. That's backwards. The product is maybe 30% of the work. Distribution, positioning, figuring out how to explain what you built to people who have never heard of you, that's the other 70%. I wrote a full comparison of how social media tools handle this differently and even researching that post taught me more about positioning than any book.

Building from Romania is an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time. My burn rate is a fraction of what it would be in San Francisco. But there's no founder community. When I tell people locally what I do, most of them ask what SaaS stands for. European founders earn 40-60% of US equivalents, but bootstrapped ventures have a 60% success rate compared to 35% for VC-funded ones. Being forced to be profitable early might actually be the advantage.

The social media tool irony is real. I'm building a tool to help people manage their social media presence while learning in real time that the hardest part of social media is distribution, not creation. My best Twitter week was 332,000 impressions. Not from posting. From replying to other people's posts. My best reply got over 1,300 likes. Most of my own posts barely crack 100 impressions. The guy building the social media tool gets more traction leaving comments than creating content. That realization changed what Sydium does.

Pricing fear is expensive. Patrick McKenzie has been saying this for years: "Technical founders perceive code as being worth its cost and its cost to them is zero." He's right. Every indie hacker charging $9 per month is making the same mistake. At $9 per month you need hundreds of customers just to pay rent. Jon Yongfook figured this out the hard way with Bannerbear. I'm still figuring it out.

Features you don't build matter more than features you do. The social media management space has a dozen tools that do everything. They're all fine. They're all essentially the same scheduling interface from 2015 with different color schemes. The temptation when building something new is to match every feature your competitors have. Don't. Build the one thing they do badly and make it great. For Sydium that's the brand voice AI that actually learns how you write instead of generating generic content with a "make it casual" toggle.

What "building in public" probably should look like

I'm not going to pretend I have the formula. But I've watched enough of this play out to have opinions.

The performative version is dying anyway. The top indie hackers are going dark. Deleting MRR updates, removing product URLs from bios, retreating to private. Copycats show up at $10K MRR and take your revenue share. The taxman uses algorithms to track the revenue numbers you posted on Twitter. The incentives for sharing specifics just aren't there anymore.

What seems to work better is sharing process without sharing specifics. What you learned, not what you earned. The mistakes you made, not the milestones you hit. The decisions you're wrestling with, not the metrics you're tracking. Someone called this "learning in public" instead of "building in public" and I think that's a better frame.

The founders who did building in public well share a pattern. Sahil Lavingia wrote an essay about failure. Jon Yongfook talked about burning through a year of savings on projects nobody wanted. Michael Lynch published detailed annual retrospectives on his finances, including the months where his blog earned $1.2K and his living expenses were $6-7K. Ghost has published their revenue publicly for 12 years as a nonprofit that will never be acquired. These people shared because transparency was a value, not a growth hack.

The difference between useful transparency and performative transparency is whether you share the stuff that makes you look bad. A Stripe screenshot with an arrow pointing up is marketing. A post about the feature you killed after two months of work because nobody wanted it, that's building in public.

Where I actually am

I don't have a revenue screenshot with a rocket emoji. I don't have a hockey stick growth chart. I have a product I use every day, early users who actually give feedback, and a list of things to build that's longer than I'd like it to be.

Most days I'm figuring out how to repurpose content across platforms in a way that doesn't feel robotic. Working on the autopilot system so it actually learns from what performs and adjusts. Adding platforms. Fixing API breaks. Writing blog posts like this one when I should probably be writing code.

I'm still bad at marketing. I'm less bad than I was six months ago. Some weeks that feels like progress and some weeks it feels like I'm measuring the wrong thing.

The honest truth about building in public is that most of it isn't public and most of it isn't building. It's sitting alone with a laptop in Romania wondering if anyone will care about the thing you're making. Sometimes they do. Usually they don't yet. And the gap between those two states is where most of this journey actually happens. You just won't see that on Twitter because it doesn't fit in a screenshot.

If you're building something and it's going slow and the metrics look nothing like the ones you see other people posting, congratulations. You're normal. 54% of indie hacker products make zero revenue. You're literally in the majority. The screenshots you're comparing yourself to are the 4.8%.

I'll keep building. I'll keep sharing the real version, not the curated one. If that's useful to you, I'm on Twitter. If you're a creator or a small agency and social media is eating your time, you can try Sydium for free. If you think all of this is pointless, you might be right. I'll find out.

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FAQ

Is building in public actually worth it?

Depends what you mean by "worth it." For marketing, honestly it's mid. Your audience ends up being other founders, not your actual customers. For accountability and learning, it's been genuinely helpful. Writing about my failures forces me to think about why they happened. The community connections are real even if they don't directly convert to revenue. But if you're doing it purely as a growth strategy, the evidence is mixed. Projects shared publicly do show about 30% higher community engagement, but community engagement and revenue are very different things.

What's the average revenue for indie SaaS products?

54% make zero. The median is $30/month. Only 4.8% break $10K MRR. The timeline to replace a previous salary is 18 to 36 months for those who get there.

How common is burnout among startup founders?

Very. 54% experienced burnout in the past year. Two thirds considered quitting. 81% hide their stress. If you're struggling, you're in the majority.

Why do most indie SaaS products fail?

The biggest reason at 42% is no market demand. Building something nobody wants. Cash flow issues account for 29% and bad marketing for 13%. The overall failure rate for SaaS startups is around 90%. A common trap is spending months building before validating that anyone wants it. One founder built a SaaS in 9 days, launched it on Hacker News, and got zero signups. His takeaway: "Building is easy now, but distribution is the real work."

Should I share my revenue publicly?

Probably not, at least not forever. The trend among successful indie founders is to stop sharing specific metrics once they hit traction. Copycats appear at $10K+ MRR. Tax authorities track publicly posted numbers. And the pressure of public metrics compounds the already significant mental health challenges of building a company. Share your process and learnings. Keep your specifics private after you get traction. That seems to be where the movement is landing.

Is it harder to build a SaaS from Europe?

In some ways yes. European founders earn 40-60% of US equivalents for similar products. Valuations are 29-52% lower across all stages. There's less startup culture, less risk appetite, and basically no founder network in most Eastern European cities. But the lower cost of living means you can bootstrap longer. And here's the stat that makes it worth it: bootstrapped ventures have a 60% success rate compared to 35% for VC-funded ones. Being forced to be profitable early might actually be the advantage.

What's the best approach to building in public in 2026?

Share learnings, not metrics. The era of open revenue dashboards is basically over. What still works is talking about the decisions you're making and why, the mistakes you made and what they taught you, and the real challenges of building something. The founder stories that resonate aren't "$10K MRR!" posts. They're the ones that say "here's what went wrong this month and what I'm doing about it." Build for your customers, not for your Twitter audience. Those are usually two very different groups.