Building in public has become a cliché. Everyone tweets progress updates, shares subscriber counts, and posts "we hit 1,000 users" announcements. But most of it is noise.
The founders who actually benefit from building in public share one thing: revenue numbers.
Why follower counts are useless
Follower counts and user counts are easy to inflate. They tell you nothing about whether a business is working. Revenue is hard to fake.
When Marc Louvion tweets his MRR, or Pieter Levels posts his annual revenue, people pay attention — not because they're famous, but because the number is real and specific.
A public MRR number:
- Proves the market exists
- Proves you can charge for the product
- Creates accountability that drives growth
- Attracts customers who trust transparent founders
What founders get wrong about public revenue
Myth 1: You need to be successful before sharing
Wrong. The most useful time to share your MRR is early — when it's $0, $100, $500. The journey is the content. Sharing $0 and growing to $5k publicly is ten times more valuable than announcing $5k with no history.
Myth 2: You'll attract competitors
Competitors already know your market exists. Sharing your MRR doesn't help them — it helps you. It attracts customers, investors, and collaborators who are specifically looking for founders they can trust.
Myth 3: You need to share everything
You don't. Sharing MRR doesn't mean sharing your customer list, your profit margins, or your tech stack. Revenue is a public signal; everything else can stay private.
The practical approach to revenue transparency
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Pick a public number. Commit to an MRR figure you can stand behind. If you track multiple revenue streams, decide which ones count.
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Pick a cadence. Monthly updates work. Don't overthink the frequency — consistency matters more than timing.
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Give it context. "$2,300 MRR" means more as "$2,300 MRR — up $400 from last month, driven by annual plan uptake."
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Put it somewhere permanent. Twitter threads get buried. A dedicated public profile at a stable URL stays findable.
Where to share your MRR
A few options:
- Your personal site — most control, hardest to maintain, easiest to forget to update
- Indie Hackers profile — good distribution, but buried in the feed
- MRR.fyi — designed for exactly this: a permanent, shareable MRR profile with Verified badge, history chart, and leaderboard listing
MRR.fyi takes 60 seconds to set up and gives you a profile URL like mrr.fyi/yourproduct that you can put in your Twitter bio, on your landing page, and in your cold emails.
The Verified badge signals to visitors that you've committed to a real number — not a "roughly," not an "approximately," not a "we're on track to."
The compounding effect
Revenue transparency compounds over time. A founder who's been publishing monthly MRR for a year has 12 data points that tell a story. That story attracts more customers, more investors, and more opportunities than any amount of tweet threads.
Start now, when your MRR is small. The compounding starts immediately.