The Death of Stealth Mode: Inside the Build in Public Startup Boom

Revenue milestones on LinkedIn, failed launches dissected in founder blogs, hiring calls with a window into company culture: a growing number of startups are building their companies in full view of the public. The trend is called “Build in Public” — it originated in the indie hacker scene and has now firmly arrived in the DACH region. What’s behind it, and where are the limits of radical transparency?

What Build in Public Means

Build in Public describes the practice of documenting the building of a company openly — not once the product is finished, but while it’s happening. Founders share things that traditionally stay behind closed doors: revenue figures, user statistics, product roadmaps, hiring decisions, but also setbacks, bad calls, and failed experiments. The main channels are X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, newsletters, and podcasts — in the DACH region, LinkedIn clearly dominates.

The approach differs from classic startup PR in one central respect: what gets communicated is not the polished end result, but the process — including the uncomfortable parts.

Where the Trend Comes From

US company Buffer is widely considered the pioneer of the movement: the social media tool declared “Default to Transparency” one of its core values back in 2013 and went on to publish revenue, user numbers, and even the salaries of all employees, including the formula used to calculate them. Ghost founder John O’Nolan followed in 2014 with public business figures, and from 2018 onward, Pieter Levels (Nomad List, Remote OK) popularized the concept in the indie hacker scene by setting up open dashboards with revenue and traffic data for each of his projects. Authors like Arvid Kahl, who documented his entire founding journey through to his exit in public, eventually gave the movement a theoretical foundation.

With the AI boom, Build in Public has reached a new dimension. The most prominent example is Swedish vibe-coding startup Lovable: CEO Anton Osika communicated his company’s ARR milestones — from $4 million after four weeks to $100 million in the summer of 2025 to $400 million in early 2026 — in real time via social media and interviews. The company even made its first two failed launches public and analyzed the reasons in its own blog posts. The ongoing reporting on its growth figures itself became a marketing instrument — and Lovable became a unicorn within months.

Examples from Austria

Local startups are increasingly embracing the approach as well — in different flavors:

fonio.ai: The Vienna-based voice AI startup around Daniel Keinrath communicates growth steps, revenue development, and funding milestones assertively via LinkedIn. Its €14.6 million seed round — one of the largest in Austria in recent years — was accompanied by a broad public narrative from the founding team.

Chatarmin: The bootstrapped Viennese WhatsApp marketing startup founded by Johannes Mansbart is one of the most consistent Build in Public examples in the country. Mansbart regularly shares insights into revenue development, hiring, sales strategy, and company culture on LinkedIn — and deliberately uses that reach for recruiting and customer acquisition.

Heizma: The heat pump startup founded by Alexander Valtingojer, Michael Kowatschew, and Valentin Perkonigg documents its rapid scaling — from zero to more than 70 employees in nine months — as publicly as its funding rounds. The founders act as personal brands carrying the company’s story to the outside world.

eustella: The Vienna-based AI agent platform has documented its development from closed beta to open beta publicly — including community involvement, open roadmap discussions, and an open-source approach. (Disclosure: the author is a co-founder of eustella.)

The Upsides: Trust, Feedback, Reach

From the founders’ perspective, the arguments for Build in Public are tangible. First: trust. Those who disclose numbers instead of working with vague superlatives come across as more credible — to customers, investors, and potential employees alike. According to Buffer’s “State of Social Media” report, creators who share their professional journey publicly report measurably higher user trust and stronger brand loyalty.

Second: feedback. Making the development process public means getting early input from real users — before expensive missteps happen. That accelerates the search for product-market fit.

Third: reach without an advertising budget. Especially for bootstrapped startups, the organic reach of founder accounts replaces traditional marketing. Inbound applications, press inquiries, partnerships, and customer contacts emerge as a byproduct of visibility. In the current environment, where small teams can achieve outsized impact with AI tools, the founders’ personal brand is often the cheapest growth channel.

The Downsides: Competitors Are Reading Along

The flip side is just as real. Competitors get valuable information for free: revenue figures, pricing experiments, and product strategies can be copied or deliberately attacked. What is intended as community building can turn into competitive intelligence for rivals.

Then there is the pressure of the public narrative: anyone who posts growth curves for months can hardly go quiet when the numbers stagnate. That invites embellished metrics — such as creatively calculated ARR figures, an accusation regularly debated in the AI industry. In the worst case, the narrative becomes more important than the business.

The time investment isn’t trivial either: consistent posting, community management, and constant self-marketing tie up founder capacity that may be missing elsewhere. And finally, there are legal and cultural limits: once investors, works councils, or regulated markets come into play, not everything can be shared anymore. In safety-critical or conservative industries, radical openness can even be off-putting.

Conclusion

Build in Public is no cure-all, but it’s also more than a social media fad. The trend responds to a real shift: at a time when faceless marketing is losing its impact and trust has become a scarce resource, transparency has turned into a strategic asset. Whether the approach pays off depends on the business model — for B2B SaaS startups with a community focus it demonstrably works; for deep-tech companies with long development cycles and sensitive IP questions, considerably less so. One thing is clear: the generation of founders socialized on Lovable, Levels, and LinkedIn won’t be closing the door to the glass-walled startup workshop anytime soon.