For more than thirteen years I’ve worked in B2B marketing, and my job has always come down to one question: what actually makes a company grow? Most channels, I can explain. Paid ads, content, sales, partnerships. You can see the mechanism. There was one I couldn’t. It started quietly, more than fifteen years ago. A few founders began doing something that went against everything business had taught them. They published their revenue. Their salaries. Their mistakes. Their hardest decisions. Not after the fact, in a polished case study, but as it happened, in front of everyone. Nobody organized it. There was no manifesto. Just a handful of people who believed that if you show your real numbers, people will trust you more, not less. Then more founders joined, and more after them. Somewhere along the way it got a name: building in public. Today it’s everywhere. Revenue screenshots in your feed. Monthly reports. Founders sharing every win and every failure. And here is what I couldn’t explain as a marketer. For some founders it became the most powerful growth engine they ever had. For others, doing exactly the same thing, it did almost nothing. For a few, it actively hurt. Same tactics. Opposite results. Meanwhile the argument around it split into two camps. One says it’s magic: the only honest way to grow without an ad budget. The other says it’s theater: numbers performed for likes. I didn’t believe either. Both felt half right. And I suspected both were asking the wrong question. So I went looking for the right one. And it became a book: Build in Public. It answers one question: why does building in public become an engine of growth for some founders, do almost nothing for others, and actively harm a few? The answer is a model I call Base × Coefficient × Sign. The four things transparency can never build for you. The two gates that decide whether openness works or turns against you. What makes it powerful. When to go quiet. And what being public really costs the person doing it. It’s available as an ebook, in print and as an audiobook. And half of it is free to listen to, no sign-up: khomichenko.com/build-in-pub… But the model isn’t the heart of the book. The stories are. I didn’t start with a theory and pick examples to fit it. I did the opposite. I took apart forty real founders and companies who built in the open, and let the pattern come out of them. Here are a few of the people you’ll meet inside. In 2008, @peldi left Adobe, built a small design tool called Balsamiq on his own, and started publishing its revenue almost immediately. The practice didn’t have a name yet. There was no audience to farm. He simply believed founders deserved real numbers instead of press releases. Eighteen years later, he still owns the company. No investors, no acquisition, no interest in either. Around the same time, @PatFlynn started Smart Passive Income and began publishing detailed income reports: exactly what his business earned, month after month. Almost nobody did that then, and he effectively invented the format. The reasons he eventually stopped are even more instructive than the reasons he started. In 2013, @joelgascoigne and Buffer did something most companies would consider unthinkable. They published the salary of every employee, along with the formula used to calculate it. The predicted disaster never came. Job applications surged, and candidate quality rose. @Shpigford built Baremetrics to show founders the truth about their revenue, so he published his own, live, for anyone to see. Other companies asked to join him. That’s how Open Startups was born, and a personal habit became a small movement. @levelsio is the face most people picture when they hear “building in public.” He works alone, from wherever he happens to be. No co-founders, no employees, no investors. Nomad List started as a public spreadsheet. Roughly forty projects later, most of which went nowhere, his portfolio earns millions of dollars a year. @marclou is the story people love to skip. He shipped around twenty-seven products that earned almost nothing, every failure in plain view, for years. Then ShipFast made about forty thousand dollars in its first month. The public record of trying wasn’t the embarrassment. It was the foundation. @tdinh_me spent three years simply being useful in public before anything he built made real money. Then TypingMind made twenty-two thousand dollars in its first week. From the outside, it looked overnight. It took three years. And @Nithin0dha built one of India’s largest brokerages without advertising, in a market where most brokers profit from customers knowing less. His signature move shouldn’t make sense: he publicly urges customers to trade less, even though trading is how he earns. That kind of honesty, the kind that costs you something, is the one trust signal a competitor can’t copy. Forty stories like these. Some triumphant, some painful, and a few that nearly broke the whole thesis. What they add up to is this: transparency is not an engine. It creates nothing. It is a multiplier, and what it multiplies is whatever you have actually built. If you’re in the book and want to read your section, tell me and I’ll send it.

A few months ago, I published a book called The Marketing Behind Rapid Growth. It told the stories of eighteen companies and how they grew faster than anyone expected, and I thought, when I finished it, that I had said what I had to say. I was wrong. The book turned out to be the beginning of something rather than the end of it. What followed was a kind of obsession. I kept studying companies — how each one found its first users, why its competitors couldn't copy it, where its growth actually came from once you stripped away the press releases — and I kept sharing what I found. I started a podcast, telling these company stories one by one, and I started a newsletter, taking apart another company most weeks. Each company got its own post and its own episode: a single, self-contained teardown. But with every new story, I found myself trying to do something more than tell it. I kept trying to fit them together — to see whether all these separate teardowns were pointing at the same underlying thing, and to unite them under one framework. Week after week, company after company, the pile grew, and so did the suspicion that the real work was not another teardown. It was the synthesis. I had studied dozens upon dozens of businesses in enough depth to argue with their own executives about how they worked; what I had not yet done was step back and draw the single map that all of them, taken together, implied. That became the question I couldn't put down. Why do some companies turn marketing into an engine that compounds for a decade, while others — with similar budgets and arguably smarter campaigns — spend more each year just to stand still? Every company I studied was another clue, and I had collected a great many clues without yet assembling them into an answer. The honest thing was to admit that the job was mine to do. I had the analysis — seventy-four companies' worth of it — and what I owed anyone following along was to turn it into one thing: a single map, a single set of insights, a single framework they could actually use. The book is here: khomichenko.com/marketing-as… This book is that synthesis. To build it, I had to stop adding stories and start subtracting — to take seventy-four companies and ask not what made each one special, but what they had in common, until only the durable patterns were left standing. What survived that process is the framework these pages describe. It is not a model I invented and then dressed in examples. It is the residue of the companies themselves, the shape that remained when everything idiosyncratic was washed away. That is what this book is: that framework, and the seventy-four companies that taught it to me. I've tried to write it the way I wish someone had written it for me — back when I was staring at a marketing budget of my own, wondering why pushing harder on it only ever seemed to cost more and return less.

If you like Contagious or Crossing the Chasm but want it built from real, named companies — my book does exactly that. 18 of them: Slack, Stripe, Notion, NVIDIA, OpenAI. Free on Kindle Aug 16–20, then $4.99 → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

Boring beats brilliant more often than anyone admits. Zoom entered the most crowded market imaginable and won for the least glamorous reason: it just worked, every time. The Zoom chapter + 17 more, free on Kindle till Aug 20 → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

Your product probably isn't confusing. It's just in the wrong context. Slack's founder wrote a memo before launch: "we don't sell saddles." Nobody wants a saddle; they want the ride. Positioning stories, free on Kindle this week → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

One of the best marketing assets in tech isn't an ad. It's documentation. Stripe's docs were so clear an engineer got value in an afternoon and never looked at a competitor. That chapter's free on Kindle till Thursday → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

If you like Contagious or Crossing the Chasm but want it built from real, named companies — my book does exactly that. 18 of them: Slack, Stripe, Notion, NVIDIA, OpenAI. Free on Kindle Aug 16–20, then $4.99 → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

Your product probably isn't confusing. It's just in the wrong context. Slack's founder wrote a memo before launch: "we don't sell saddles." Nobody wants a saddle; they want the ride. Positioning stories, free on Kindle this week → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

If you like Contagious or Crossing the Chasm but want it built from real, named companies — my book does exactly that. 18 of them: Slack, Stripe, Notion, NVIDIA, OpenAI. Free on Kindle Aug 16–20, then $4.99 → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

One of the best marketing assets in tech isn't an ad. It's documentation. Stripe's docs were so clear an engineer got value in an afternoon and never looked at a competitor. That chapter's free on Kindle till Thursday → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

If you want to create a category, name an enemy. Not a competitor — an enemy. The old way. The status quo. The thing your buyer already resents. An enemy makes the new category legible, and gives people a side they want to be on.

@airtable 2017 billboards never chased leads. They targeted the neighborhoods where media and fashion executives worked so a team’s internal pitch already felt pre-approved. khomichenko.com/airtable-gro…

Scaling headcount faster than insight is a silent growth killer. Decisions slow down. Market signals get filtered through too many layers. Airtable hit an $11.7 billion valuation and then watched growth stall. A viral claim that the company was dead forced a hard reset. Nearly half the staff was cut across two rounds. The CEO personally reviewed thousands of sales transcripts. Agility returned only after the organization became smaller than the rate of learning again. Size without clarity is just inertia. Read the full case study: khomichenko.com/airtable-gro…

AI-generated apps hit a ceiling the moment complexity appears. You can vibe-code a simple interface. You cannot inspect, edit, and trust a sprawling system built from opaque generation. Airtable’s answer was to treat its existing no-code primitives as a language. AI assembles from known, editable blocks instead of inventing everything from scratch. The result is systems people can still own and change. In an era of disposable generation, inspectability becomes the new moat. Trust is the feature that survives the hype cycle. Read the full case study: khomichenko.com/airtable-gro…

Boring beats brilliant more often than anyone wants to admit. One of the companies I studied entered the most crowded market imaginable and won for the least glamorous reason possible: it just worked, every single time.

Someone asked why I bothered writing a whole book of case studies instead of a framework. Because frameworks tell you what to do, and case studies tell you what it actually costs. The second one is the part everyone skips.

Adobe told its customers that Creative Suite 6 would be the last version they could ever simply buy. Petitions went round. Forums erupted. People who'd used Photoshop for twenty years genuinely felt betrayed. Adobe did it anyway. Internally they had a name for what the switch to subscriptions would do to the numbers: swallowing the fish. Revenue would get worse before it got better. Margins would shrink. Growth would slow. And instead of hiding that, they told investors out loud, in advance, exactly what the dip would look like. That honesty is the only reason they survived the transition. Adobe went from roughly 12 million users to over 30 million — and became the template every software company later copied. The lesson isn't "go subscription." It's this: the most dangerous thing a company can protect is the business model that made it rich. And reinvention has a cost nobody warns you about — the numbers get worse first, and everyone watching assumes you were wrong. Adobe's chapter is one of my favorites in The Marketing Behind Rapid Growth. The book is free on Kindle through Thursday → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

📘 5-day free promo. The Marketing Behind Rapid Growth is free on Kindle Aug 16–20 (normally $4.99). 18 real case studies on how tech companies used marketing to grow. Nonfiction, ~180 pages. Grab it before Friday — after that it's paid again → amazon.com/dp/B0H6VHNRMG

I stopped saying “I'll send you the link.” Online, sharing takes one click. Offline — a conference, a meetup, a chance conversation — it falls apart: we dig through apps, spell out emails, promise to send things later... and never do. So, as a personal side project built in my evenings, I made Smart Networking — one mobile page where every link you own becomes a QR code. Someone asks about your product, your project, your profile? Don't send it. Show it. They scan, done. Swap contacts anywhere — not everyone's on LinkedIn, so show Instagram or TikTok instead. And keep every link you own in one offline vault, with one-tap copy into any chat. It installs like a real app on iOS and Android — no App Store needed — and works fully offline. The twist: I'm a marketer, not an engineer. Claude, the AI, wrote most of the code — I brought the product thinking, on weekends and evenings. Free, open source, and your data never leaves your device. I built it for myself first. Today it's live on Product Hunt — and before deciding what to build next, I'd love honest feedback from people who actually network offline: producthunt.com/products/sma… #buildinpublic #ProductHunt #networking #AI