Three ways founders are building in public
How can you turn your operations into marketing?
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Building in public used to be simple. You’d launch on Product Hunt with some story, ask (aka beg) your friends to share it, tweet about it all day, and then hopefully some customers would appear.
The second wave was all about bombast, with indie hackers posting revenue dashboards and selling to the audience watching. But as a general backlash against hustle culture sets in, there are new and better ways of building in public emerging. The new growth meta is to be publicly excellent, making the company itself your content.
Here are three founders who are running this playbook right now.
1) Ship the frontier
As founders, you can live on the edge of the possible with AI models. Whenever a new model drops, it should, hopefully, enable new use cases for your product.
Tom Krcha exemplifies this at Pencil (SR005), the design tool built to live where you code. When Pencil crossed 100,000 users in May, the announcement was about Swarm mode: six AI design agents working a single canvas in parallel. It’s a visually enticing orchestra: a new way of visualizing AI tech at the very cutting edge.
It helps that Krcha is a four-time builder who sold companies to Miro and Google, so these updates read as a frontier operator reporting from the edge rather than a marketer hyping a release.
His video about swarm mode is a perfect example, six agents on one canvas could not have shipped a year ago, which is the line between building in public and posting a changelog.
2) Bet the company in public
If you’ve read any tech-adjacent content you’ll have seen debates on how SaaS companies should adjust their business strategies in the AI era.
One way to build in public is to take a hard stance on this question: pick a business model on the edge of possible, something newly enabled by AI, and tell the story about your ongoing transformation.
Chuck Ganapathi is doing exactly this at Gainsight. In May he told Upstarts that the company, on hundreds of millions in ARR, was going all-in on AI-native services over SaaS, spinning up an agent product called Atlas as its own P&L. A profitable company publicly declared its own core model obsolete! Talk about pivoting in public.
“There would be a revolt if we said we were going to kill that business,” Ganapathi told Upstarts. “But our fundamental belief is that Atlas, and the AI native services business, has a larger market.”
Now there’s a real storyline here worth following: Will Gainsight pull it off? Every update they post from here has added narrative weight because they’ve been so public about the stakes.
3) Hire weird, on purpose
The third version turns who you hire, and on what terms, into the headline. The most legible signal a company sends is the caliber of person willing to join it and the seat they take. When that seat breaks convention, the announcement becomes a build in public moment for staffing.
For example, Jean-Michel Lemieux just ran this at Spellbook, the “Cursor for contracts” startup that raised a $50M Series B from Khosla last October. Lemieux was CTO of Shopify, where he scaled engineering from 50 people to roughly 4,000, and before that ran engineering at Atlassian, helping both companies go from single product to platform. He is a heavy hitter who you would expect to join Spellbook as a CTO. Instead, he joined as something he calls an Executive IC. “It means I’m here to build and be hands on in every part of the company,” he wrote. A person who has held the top engineering seat at two iconic companies took one with no title leverage and no reports, in public, on purpose. This is weird! It’s also cool.It’s a handy way to grab some attention and get a kick ass employee at the same time.
Steak before sizzle
The rule underlying all three of these ideas is that you only earn the right to “build in public” if you’re doing something worth talking about. If you are, your content and your company become the same thing. You have to actually be shipping at the frontier, actually betting the business, actually landing the hire who only makes sense if you’re right. It isn’t about posting grindslop hustleporn about how much you work (spoiler, we are all working hard). It’s about how you’re working differently. The results will speak for themselves.
That’s it for this week! For more weekly dives into the world of early stage startups, subscribe below.
That 'visually enticing orchestra' phrasing is telling. when the product's appeal is the spectacle of watching agents work, you're selling the AI, not what it does.
This is exactly the kind of authentic building in public that forg.to was made for - helping founders showcase their real work and progress without the performance aspect. Love seeing the focus on actually shipping at the frontier!