Building in Public vs. Bragging in Public?

Up to $10 MRR it feels like an underdog story. A struggle to gain independence and be able to pursue your business.

Now that you're over that number it's not that relevant to your #buildinpublic story— share the new struggles you face.

I think you touched on one thing that is an exception: money. I think you can publicly state your revenue as part of "building in public" while it is lower than an average salary. When it goes above that, I think you can only share it with selected people (entrepreneurial communities if you want). This is because most people have no idea about the expenses of a company. You say "We are making $20k/month" and all they think "That's 3 times my salary, you are rich!" instead of "But you have 5 employees, and that's only 3 times my salary, are you even breaking even?"

But building in public is not only about sharing revenue, it's about sharing your work in progress, your discarded designs, your ideas, the pipeline of features, etc. That you can keep on doing.

I resonate with this:

“Maybe the answer is context? For example, I'm more willing to share in private communities with other business owners than on a public forum like IH because I don't know if family, friends, etc. might run across it.”

Just share anyway.

I wouldn't worry about the self-esteem of other people -- that's on them.

What matters is that there are crucial insights/unique learning points we can learn from.

There's a dearth of info on IH on how to scale a startup from $10k-$100k MRR.

We need all the sharing we can get honestly.

I believe that sharing your data, no matter how big they are, is not a problem, as long as you maintain a transparent composition of your costs for example, if a user pays $ 10 you can already measure and leave it to him in the first information x of this value is for server, x% for server, x% for marketing and everything, even if it seems that you earn a high salary, it has a cost in structure and other things that can supply this user issue.

And you do not need to actively disclose, you can passively disclose, on a page within your service, with cost data in summary form, per month for example.

The difference is the that the author knows. Some people are really transparent and wish to share so others can learn. Other's just want the kudos. As a consumer of said content it doesn't matter, so long as I can learn from the story of the journey. You have to decide how much you wish to share, and share as much as makes you comfortable. You're absolutely right, it might matter with your family & friends. Decide how much you wish to share.

It's not that big of a deal. Revenue is relevant to any business and to any story of building in public. The reason I like IH products is because the revenues are trailing 30 days. This makes the revenue of a particular product highly relevant to the BIP updates. When you click into the revenue on an IH product (Stripe Verified) you can see the trajectory over time. So, you can correlate ideas, experiments, updates, etc., directly with revenue movement (in either direction).

But, if you feel like its bragging to be successful and make money, maybe you should go punch a clock.

Think it depends. I don't mind reading numbers and it can be inspiring but I agree with the general sentiment here that it becomes less relevant along the way and other problems become more interesting.