A founder's note by Rajiv Sankarlall, editor of The Founders Report.
On December 19, 2013, Buffer published every employee's salary, including the founders', on a public page anyone could read. In the following month the company received 2,886 job applications, more than double the 1,263 it had gotten in the 30 days before the announcement, according to Quartz. That is the case for building in public in one data point: transparency did not cost Buffer talent, it recruited talent.
I share the systems I build for the same reason Buffer shared its payroll. Openness here functions as a mechanism: it converts strangers into an audience, an audience into trust, and trust into customers who already believe you before you pitch them anything.
Transparency Is a Decision, Not a Personality Trait
Buffer did not stumble into this. The company's 2013 culture deck made "Default to Transparency" its second core value, and from there it began publishing revenue, user counts, salaries, and even equity grants as a matter of policy, according to Failory. Founder and CEO Joel Gascoigne explained the reasoning in comments published by Buffer:
"Transparency breeds trust, and that's one of the key reasons for us to place such a high importance on it."
Trust is the actual product being manufactured here. Most founders treat their metrics like trade secrets, worried a competitor will copy the number. Competitors do not need your MRR to compete with you. Customers do need proof you are real, growing, and not about to disappear with their subscription fee.
The Receipts Do the Selling
Josh Pigford made this literal. In February 2014 he made Baremetrics' own revenue dashboard public, and by December of that year the company was reporting close to $27,000 in monthly recurring revenue, 280 to 300 customers, and six full-time employees, according to a Leveling Up interview with Pigford. The dashboard updated itself, in real time, and became the pitch on its own.
Arvid Kahl and Danielle Simpson ran the same play with FeedbackPanda, publicly sharing Stripe-verified revenue as they grew. The company hit $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue within nine months of launch and was acquired by SureSwift Capital in June 2019 for a seven-figure sum, according to They Got Acquired. Nobody had to take their word for the growth. The numbers were already public before the acquirer showed up.
Pieter Levels has run the most extreme version of this experiment for a decade. He launched Photo AI in February 2023, posting Stripe revenue screenshots to Twitter/X as he went. The product earned $5,400 in its first week and reached $132,000 in monthly recurring revenue by month 18, with more than half of its traffic arriving from X, according to an Indie Hackers deep dive. Across roughly ten years and more than 40 launched products, Levels built a following of about 600,000 on X and reached an estimated $3.1 million in annual revenue with no funding and no employees, according to Indie Hackers. The audience he built by sharing numbers became the distribution channel for every product he launched after the first one.
What to Actually Share
The founders above were not oversharing randomly. They picked a small set of numbers and posted them on a cadence, which is the part worth copying:
- Pick one metric that moves and matters: revenue, users, or churn. Not all three diluted into a vague update.
- Post it on a fixed rhythm, weekly or monthly, so the audience learns when to expect it and the habit compounds instead of arriving as isolated bursts.
- Attach the number to a decision you made because of it, not just the number alone. A dashboard is data; a decision is a story.
- Keep it running through flat or down months too. Baremetrics and Buffer both kept their numbers visible during slow stretches, which is what made the good months credible.
What you should not share is anything you would not want a competitor, employee, or customer to see out of context: unresolved legal exposure, specific customer names without consent, or figures you have not verified yourself. Building in public is a disclosure strategy, not a confession booth.
The Takeaway
Pick the one number in your business that is actually moving right now, whether that is revenue, signups, or retention, and commit to posting it publicly on a fixed schedule starting this week. Pigford, Kahl and Simpson, Levels, and Gascoigne did not go viral once and coast. They showed up with the same number, in the same place, on repeat, until the number became proof.