I started posting about the work six months ago — the wins, but mostly the messy middle. Here's the honest scorecard, including the parts that produced zero.
What building in public actually is
It's not a channel, it's a by-product. You do the work, then you write down what you learned while doing it. The moment it becomes a content calendar you're producing marketing, and marketing from someone with no audience reads exactly like marketing.
What worked
Specific posts. “Here is the exact bug and how I found it” beat “five lessons about debugging.” “This is what the client asked for and what I said back” beat any general post about client management. Numbers worked: a real cost breakdown, a real latency figure, a real invoice amount. Vagueness is invisible.
Writing about problems also worked better than writing about finishes. People reply to struggle. They scroll past announcements.
What was noise
Threads summarizing other people's advice. Engagement-bait questions. “Building in public, day 47!” with no content. Announcements of things nobody could use yet. All of it spent effort and returned nothing that mattered.
The metrics that mattered
Not followers, not impressions. Three things: inbound messages from people who understood my work specifically, replies from peers whose judgment I respect, and people saying “I had the same problem” under a post. That third one is the strongest signal you've hit something real.
Client reactions
This surprised me. Several clients found me through posts and mentioned a specific one in the first call. They didn't want the friendliest voice, they wanted evidence that I'd already solved their problem. Writing in public is a portfolio that happens to be public.
How I'd start again
Write fewer posts and make each one carry a concrete artifact: a diff, a config file, a number, a decision with a reason. Publish where the peers who'd care already are. Skip the cadence entirely, and never write to fill a slot — one post with a real bug in it outperformed a month of updates.