A decade ago, app developers guarded their numbers like state secrets. Today, a whole corner of the indie world does the opposite: posting monthly revenue, churn percentages, launch postmortems, and straight-up failures where anyone can read them. It’s called building in public, and for a one-person software business it has quietly become the marketing department.
What it actually looks like
The practice ranges from casual to rigorous. Some developers post a screenshot of their App Store Connect dashboard at the end of each month. Others write detailed blog posts: what a launch week earned, where users dropped out of onboarding, what a price change did to conversions. The best ones share the boring middle — the month where nothing grew — not just the launches.
The scale varies too. You don’t need a viral hit to participate. Plenty of developers share numbers from apps making a few hundred dollars a month, and those threads are often the most useful, because that’s the stage most people are actually in.
Why it works
It converts attention into trust. A landing page says “buy my app.” A two-year archive of honest numbers says “I’ve been here the whole time, and here’s exactly how it’s gone.” When someone eventually buys, they’re buying from a person they feel they know. For an indie developer with no brand, that’s the entire moat.
It generates distribution for free. A revenue screenshot is inherently shareable. Every “month 14: $2,340 MRR, down 4%” post travels further than any ad a solo developer could buy. Journalists trawl these threads for stories; other developers amplify them; prospective users discover the app through the business, then stay for the product.
It creates accountability. Knowing you’ll report this month keeps the shipping cadence honest. Several developers have said publicly that the fear of posting a zero is what got version 1.1 out the door.
The costs nobody tweets about
Building in public has real downsides, and the people doing it will usually admit them after a while. Your worst months happen in front of an audience. Copycats watch the same numbers you publish and reverse-engineer your niche. Comparing your month 3 to someone else’s month 30 is a mental health hazard, and survivorship bias is baked in — the developers for whom it destroyed their motivation don’t post postmortems about that.
There’s also a subtle product risk: optimizing for what’s shareable instead of what’s good. A feature that makes a great screenshot and a feature that makes a great app overlap less than you’d hope.
How to start without burning out
If you’re an developer thinking about it, the playbook that seems to work:
- Pick one number. Monthly revenue, or active users, or downloads. One metric, reported consistently, beats a dashboard dump.
- Choose a cadence you can keep. Monthly is plenty. A weekly streak you abandon in February teaches people to ignore you.
- Share decisions, not just outcomes. “I raised the price to $19 and here’s my reasoning” is more valuable — and more durable — than the number alone.
- Decide in advance what stays private. Some keep exact figures approximate; some never share personal financial context. Any line is fine; draw it early.
The bottom line
Building in public isn’t charity or performance art — it’s a rational strategy for people whose marketing budget is zero and whose credibility is their product. Done well, the archive becomes an asset: proof of stamina in an industry that assumes everyone quits.
If you’re building something yourself, the numbers only exist once you’ve chosen how to charge. Start with my breakdown of subscriptions versus one-time purchases, then make sure your first release survives contact with App Review.