We Counted 21,928 "Build in Public" Posts in One Week. Here's What Turned Into Jobs and Money.

In November 2025, Peter Steinberger pushed the first commit of a weekend project called Clawdbot. He built it in the open: the code, the rough edges, two forced renames before it settled on OpenClaw. By late January it was one of the fastest-growing repos on GitHub. By mid-February, OpenAI, Meta, and other labs were competing to hire him. He joined OpenAI, Sam Altman publicly called him a genius, and the Wall Street Journal covered the jump from side project to coveted hire in about three months.

Nobody gave him permission. He just let people watch.

That's the case for building in public in one story. And the part worth remembering is where it started: a weekend project, a first commit, and a developer willing to show it before it was finished. That part is available to everyone.

What the numbers actually say

Over seven days in late October, 21,928 posts on X mentioned "building in public" or "build in public." We pulled the count with Grok, X's own AI, which can search the platform directly. That's a post every 28 seconds, around the clock. Thousands of people are sharing half-finished work right now, and a few are getting outsized results from it.

Here is the honest baseline. Roundups of indie-founder data put the median at under $1,000 a month in recurring revenue, and fewer than 5% ever reach $100k a month. The revenue screenshots you see are the top of the distribution.

That isn't a reason to stay quiet. It's the reason to start. Nobody at the top of that distribution got there by thinking about it longer. Every one of them has an awkward first post somewhere in their history.

Your work is a better résumé than your résumé

Hiring is guesswork. A résumé is a claim. Public work is evidence.

Aurora Scharff spent years writing blog posts, giving talks, and building demo apps around React and Next.js, on her own time, because she liked it. On March 2, 2026 she announced she was joining Vercel as a DX Engineer, the team that builds the framework she'd been teaching. Her own words: the deep dives and experiments she'd been sharing for free were the most rewarding part of her career. They were also, it turned out, the interview.

Sulaiman Adewale built Xara, a WhatsApp banking assistant for Nigerians, and posted a demo on X. It went viral. A recruiter from xAI reached out with a job offer. Xara itself grew to 45,000 users and processed about ₦8 billion in transactions in ten months.

None of these people won a standard hiring process. The conversation started because the work was already out there for anyone to look at. When your work is public, you stop asking for a chance and start getting invited.

Public numbers earn trust you can't fake

Anyone can say their product is growing. Showing it is harder, and far more persuasive.

The playbook is older than most people think. In 2014, Pieter Levels committed to shipping twelve startups in twelve months and blogged every one, including the ones that died. Then he went further and made his companies "open startups," with live revenue, user counts, and costs on public dashboards for Nomad List and Remote OK. Over a decade later he still posts his numbers, and he's still the first name people reach for when they say "build in public."

Marc Lou watched that playbook and copied it. In 2021 he was fired, had a string of failed startups behind him, and had quit entrepreneurship once already. He found the build-in-public crowd on Twitter, took Levels and Danny Postma as his models, and started shipping small products and posting about every one. He now publishes a revenue update every month. He reported $1,032,000 for 2025, and in the same post said it was 20% less than 2024. In December 2025, after a viral complaint about fake revenue screenshots that Levels amplified, Lou built TrustMRR in a day: connect a read-only Stripe key and it shows your real revenue on a page nobody can edit. It made about $20,000 on day one.

Crypto runs on the same principle. Colosseum's 2026 Solana Frontier hackathon drew more than 10,000 participants and 2,857 projects, with every submission published in a public directory. Jacob Creech, VP of Technology at the Solana Foundation, wrote an essay in September 2026 titled Solana: Building, Proving and Earning Trust in Public, arguing that the network earned trust by publishing outage diagnoses and fixes in the open instead of keeping them internal.

That's the pattern across all of them. Trust doesn't come from showing your wins. It comes from showing your work, including the bad weeks, and letting people watch you handle them.

How to start without becoming a hype account

Share the process, not just the results. "I shipped X" is fine. "I shipped X, here's what broke, here's what I'd do differently" is something people bookmark.

Ask real questions. In the ranking weights X published with its open-source For You algorithm in August 2026, a reply scores 5.0 and a like scores 0.5. A reply is worth ten likes. End posts with a question you actually want answered.

Show numbers, especially small ones. Users, revenue, stars, signups. Going from 3 users to 30 is a story people want to follow. Going from 0 to 3 is too.

Give people something to touch. A link, a demo, a repo, a screenshot. Every hire and deal above started with work someone could see, try, or share.

Be consistent, not loud. One honest update a few times a week for six months beats one viral thread and silence.

What you're actually afraid of

If you've been thinking about this and haven't started, it's probably not because you lack something to share. It's because sharing feels exposed. What if people judge it? What if someone copies it? What if it fails and everyone watches?

Most people are too busy with their own work to judge yours. Ideas are cheap and execution isn't, so anyone who could out-execute you from your posts was going to beat you anyway. And failing in public isn't the end of the story. It's the middle, and people root for a middle.

Steinberger, Scharff, Adewale, Lou: none of them were fearless. They decided being seen was worth more than being safe, and they decided it before they had anything impressive to show.

The post that changes everything looks like every other post

Go back to Clawdbot. In November 2025 it was one more post in that week's pile of thousands: a side project, a rough demo, a developer showing his work to whoever happened to scroll past. Nobody could have picked it out as the one that would end at OpenAI. Probably not even him.

You won't know in advance which post is the one either. The revenue screenshot, the hacky demo, the honest thread about the week everything broke. Any of them could be what a founder, a hiring manager, or your first real customer happens to see. You don't have to guess right. You just have to make sure there's a body of work there when they look, and every post adds to it. A stranger who finds you in month six doesn't meet a pitch. They meet half a year of proof.

A year from now you'll have done a year of work either way. The only question is whether anyone will be able to see it.