Build-in-public metrics that actually matter

Build in public, as a practice, has produced two genuinely useful things and one bad habit.

The useful things are: accountability for founders who would otherwise drift, and a learning corpus for everyone watching. The bad habit is the MRR screenshot. We have, as a culture, conflated "transparency" with "post your revenue number once a month." It is a lagging indicator. It is also, increasingly, a marketing channel.

There are metrics that would actually be more useful to share. Almost nobody shares them.

The useful ones

A short list of build-in-public metrics that would tell the audience something:

• Customer time-to-first-value, in minutes. From signup to the first moment the product visibly did something for the user. This number is the most under-reported in all of SaaS. It is also the one that predicts retention most reliably.
• The week-over-week shape of organic signups, not the level. A founder going from 5 to 15 organic signups a week is doing more for their craft than a founder posting a flat $20k MRR. The shape matters. The size is noise.
• Refund rate, and the modal reason. Most founders bury refund rate. The honest founders share it. The reason is usually more interesting than the number.
• The "did I ship today" boolean. A binary. Not what you shipped. Just whether something went out the door. Across a quarter, the chart of this number predicts almost everything else.

The reason these are useful is that they are leading indicators. They tell the audience — and the founder — whether the next quarter is going to work. MRR tells you only about the last one.

Why the MRR screenshot won anyway

We are not stupid. There are reasons the MRR screenshot dominates.

It is legible. The number is the same unit for every business. You can compare yourself across founders. You can compare yourself to your past self. That is satisfying.

It is also cheap. You do not have to instrument anything. Stripe gives it to you. The chart is already pretty.

The leading indicators are none of these. They require instrumentation. They are not directly comparable across businesses. They are also, frankly, less brag-worthy. Nobody is going to retweet "shipped today: yes."

That last fact is doing more work than anyone admits. Build in public has become, for many practitioners, content marketing. The metrics that drive engagement become the metrics that drive the practice. Hence: MRR screenshots forever.

What the good builders share instead

If you watch the founders whose build-in-public threads have actually helped them — not just made them visible, but helped — they share things that look less like a dashboard and more like a working notebook.

What they tried this week. What they cut. What an early customer said in a call. The screenshot of the empty state they redesigned for the third time. A graph of one specific funnel step.

This is harder to do than posting MRR. It is also the only version of build in public that compounds. The MRR-screenshot version is a treadmill. You have to post a higher number next month. The notebook version is a flywheel. The audience comes for the work, not the number.

A test for yourself

A useful test, if you build in public: scroll back twelve months in your own feed. Which of your posts do you still think about? My guess is that it is the ones where you said something specific about your craft, not the ones where you posted a number.

If that is true for you as a reader, it is also true for the people reading you. Optimize accordingly.