Build in Public Examples: Companies That Shared Real Numbers

"Build in public" is easy to say and hard to picture. These are examples you can check yourself, with links, of companies that published real numbers: revenue, customers and in some cases salaries. They range from a public company-wide dashboard to a few blog posts. Each shows a different way to do it.

We only list examples whose numbers are on their own sites. Many individual makers share revenue on X every month, which is great, but posts are hard to cite reliably, so they are not on this list.

Buffer: open metrics, salaries and updates

Buffer, the social media scheduling company, has one of the longest-running transparency pages. Its open page shows monthly metrics including MRR, ARR, average revenue per user and monthly active users, shareholder updates, a timeline of the company's history, and salaries, including the CEO's.

What to take from it: transparency can be a company value, not a marketing stunt. Buffer shares the boring numbers (salaries, policies) as well as the exciting ones, which is what makes the exciting ones believable.

Plausible Analytics: milestones in blog posts

Plausible, the privacy-friendly analytics tool, shared its growth through blog posts with real figures. In What we learned on our journey to $10,000 MRR (January 2021), it described going from about $400 MRR in April 2020 to over $10,000, with the marketing that got it there and no paid ads. Later posts cover bootstrapping to $500k ARR and $1M ARR as an open source SaaS.

What to take from it: you do not need a live dashboard. A post at each milestone, with the number and what worked, is useful to readers and doubles as marketing for the product.

Simple Analytics: an open startup page

Simple Analytics, another privacy-first analytics company, runs an Open Startup page with figures such as MRR, ARR and paying customers, plus customer satisfaction and usage totals.

What to take from it: a dedicated page means people do not have to scroll your posts to find the number. Pages like this need to stay current, though; when a chart stops updating, readers notice. A figure that refreshes itself from the payment provider avoids that.

Baremetrics Open Startups

Baremetrics, a subscription analytics company, runs Open Startups, an opt-in collection of public dashboards from its customers. Companies that join show live metrics such as MRR and customer counts straight from their billing data. When it launched in 2015, VentureBeat reported that Buffer had put its real-time revenue dashboard there.

What to take from it: numbers read from the billing system are more convincing than numbers typed in. That idea, verified revenue, is the core of open startup pages. We compare the tools in open startup dashboards.

Patterns across the examples

• Pick a cadence and keep it. Monthly works for most. The bad months matter as much as the good ones; we wrote about sharing revenue and failures.
• Say what the number is. MRR, ARR or revenue for the month are different numbers. See which revenue to show.
• Pair numbers with lessons. A figure on its own is a brag. A figure with what you tried is useful.
• Make the source checkable. A screenshot can be edited. A live connection to Stripe or Paddle cannot.

Doing it as an indie maker

You do not need to be Buffer. A small version takes ten minutes: a page with each project, its status and its revenue connected read-only, so the figure updates itself and carries a check mark. Link it from your bio and from every monthly update. That is what makerhandle does; see the build in public page and how to show verified MRR. For the habit itself, read how to build in public.