Build in Public
How to Measure Whether Building in Public Is Actually Helping Your Startup
Measure building in public with the BUILD Scorecard: buyer reach, useful conversations, better decisions, business outcomes, and founder time.
By Uriel Bitton · 4 min read
The short answer
Building in public helps when it reaches relevant people, sparks useful conversations, improves decisions, or creates business opportunities at a reasonable time cost. Use the BUILD Scorecard to track buyer reach, useful conversations, informed decisions, leads and outcomes, and founder time. Use tagged links and customer-source questions, and label influence as direct, assisted, or unknown.
Building in public is helping when it does more than generate impressions. It should reach relevant people, start useful conversations, improve decisions, create measurable business opportunities, or build familiarity that later assists a sale—without consuming disproportionate founder time. Track those outcomes for at least a month. Likes and followers can diagnose distribution, but they should not be the final score.
Impressions tell you whether content traveled, not whether it helped
Platform analytics are useful, but they answer narrow questions. LinkedIn’s creator analytics documentation gives creators impressions, engagements, follower growth, and follower demographics such as job title, industry, seniority, and company size. Those metrics can tell you whether your content is reaching anyone and whether the audience resembles the people you intended to reach.
They cannot tell you whether a product decision improved because of the discussion or whether a future customer discovered you through the post. Treat reach as a diagnostic layer, not the outcome.
Use the BUILD Scorecard
Review these five areas every month.
B — Buyer reach
Ask whether the right people are seeing the work. Track relevant followers, profile visits from target roles, repeat readers, and engagement from people who resemble customers, partners, or useful peers. Five replies from your intended buyers can matter more than 500 likes from unrelated founders.
U — Useful conversations
Count conversations that moved beyond applause: a potential customer explaining their workflow, someone asking for access or a demo, an introduction to a relevant buyer, a detailed objection that exposes weak positioning, or a serious collaborator or partner conversation. Record the person, source post, topic, and next action.
I — Informed decisions
This is the metric most social dashboards cannot measure. Keep a monthly count of public conversations that caused you to change or reject a feature, rewrite positioning, investigate a customer problem, change onboarding, revise an experiment, or decide not to pursue an idea. Do not count every suggestion. Count feedback that produced a concrete decision or a better question.
Buildside’s practical guide to building in public recommends separating evidence from interpretation. Apply the same discipline to measurement: record what changed, not merely how many comments arrived.
L — Leads and business outcomes
Track the actions closest to business value: product visits, waitlist signups, trials, demos, qualified leads, customers, partnerships, recruiting conversations, or investor introductions.
For links you control, Google Analytics recommends consistent campaign tagging and supports utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign for identifying traffic from specific campaigns. Use a simple naming convention such as channel, build-in-public, and month or campaign.
Also ask new customers or strong leads: “Where did you first hear about us?” UTMs capture clicks. People can discover you through a post, return later through search, and convert through another route.
Do not demand perfect attribution
Public founder content can influence people before they become visible in your funnel. The 2025 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that hidden stakeholders consume and evaluate thought leadership and can advocate internally for lesser-known vendors.
For B2B founders, that means last-click attribution can understate the effect of useful public content. This is an inference, not proof that every build-in-public post contributed to a sale.
Use three labels instead: Direct when a tracked link or explicit customer answer ties the outcome to public content; Assisted when the person followed or engaged with your public work before converting elsewhere; Unknown when there is not enough evidence. Do not promote “unknown” into “assisted” because you want the strategy to look successful.
D — Drain on founder time
Record approximate hours spent writing, formatting, publishing, replying, and analyzing. If building in public generates good conversations but consumes twelve hours each week, the problem may be the workflow rather than the strategy. Reduce frequency, narrow the number of platforms, or document work more efficiently.
Run a 30-day measurement cycle
For the next month, keep one simple sheet with: post → intended audience → useful conversations → decisions changed → direct/assisted opportunities → founder time.
Review it at the end of the month. Keep the strategy if relevant conversations, learning, or business outcomes are appearing at a reasonable time cost. Change the audience, format, channel, or call to action if reach exists but nothing useful happens afterward. Stop or reduce the effort when the startup is producing content mainly to keep the content system alive.
Building in public is working when the public work helps the private company make better decisions, find better people, or create valuable opportunities.
Sources
Frequently asked questions
What metrics should founders track when building in public?
Track relevant audience reach, useful conversations, decisions changed by public feedback, qualified leads or customers influenced by public work, and founder time spent. Impressions and followers are useful diagnostics but should not be the main success measure.
How do I attribute customers to building in public?
Use tagged links such as UTMs, record the source of qualified conversations, and ask customers where they first discovered you. Classify outcomes as direct, assisted, or unknown instead of forcing every customer into a single source.
How long should I test building in public before judging it?
A 30-day measurement cycle is enough to inspect early signals such as relevant conversations and learning, but some business effects can take longer. Avoid declaring success or failure from one viral post or one quiet week.
Does follower growth mean building in public is working?
Not by itself. Follower growth matters when the audience is relevant and produces useful downstream behavior such as customer conversations, product learning, signups, partnerships, or other startup outcomes.
A note from Uriel Bitton
I do not want to judge building in public by whether a post looks popular. The useful question is whether public work helps the startup reach relevant people, learn something important, create opportunities, or make a better decision without consuming more founder time than the value it creates.
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