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.

I wrote Build in Public for founders who share their numbers and wonder why nothing happens. Inside: 40 founder cases, from Pieter Levels and Marc Lou to Zerodha, and a simple model of when transparency actually grows a business. khomichenko.com/build-in-pub…

While writing my book on building in public, one case surprised me most. Nithin Kamath of Zerodha publicly tells customers to trade less, even though every trade earns him money. Zerodha still grew into one of India's largest brokers with almost no ads. Honesty that costs you is the most convincing kind.

OKRs expose performance. They do not create it. In a healthy company they often add reporting layers, meetings, and pressure without fixing the underlying pace or ownership. khomichenko.com/okrs-are-not…

One of my favourite stories in my book Build in Public is @arvidkahl's. He and Danielle Simpson built FeedbackPanda, a focused, unglamorous tool that helped online English teachers write student feedback faster. Roughly $55K in monthly revenue in about two years. Sold in 2019. What makes him instructive is what his openness did at the exit. He had documented his decisions and numbers in public for years. So when a buyer came, much of the due diligence was already done. The record existed, in public, and could be checked. After the sale he gave the whole playbook away, and built a second, larger reputation on it. In the book I call this the second ledger: the company and the founder keep separate accounts, and the one under your own name carries forward. khomichenko.com/build-in-pub…

My book Build in Public has a chapter on a team that did almost everything right and still shut down. Everpix had a product people loved and an honest team. Too few people ever found it. The lesson I took for the book: openness amplifies what works. It can't replace it. khomichenko.com/build-in-pub…

One founder decision that often backfires is treating marketing as optional during growth. When the stall hits, the system that takes one to two years to build is already needed. itukraine.org.ua/en/why-mark…

Investors grow cautious when a startup’s plan begins with paid advertising. It suggests growth relies on continuous spending rather than a product strong enough to generate organic momentum on its own. khomichenko.com/why-investor…

Technology gives us more software but not more attention. In SaaS, the bottleneck is shifting from building to being noticed. indiehackers.com/post/when-b…

One pattern in how companies build lasting trust: executives who share what they learned while building the organization create credibility that logos cannot match on their own. khomichenko.com/why-companie…

One thing that stands out across growth-stage teams is how rarely managers define clear checkpoints before deciding to hire or to let someone go. Without them, both moves become reactive. khomichenko.com/when-to-hire…

Companies remember marketing only when growth stalls. But a marketing function takes 1–2 years to build. By the time it's urgent, you're late. Why "marketing doesn't work" is often a hiring mistake – my piece for IT Ukraine Association: itukraine.org.ua/en/why-mark… #B2Bmarketing

Micromanagement can deliver results because the manager becomes the frame that holds the team together. The problem starts when that frame never gets removed and the system stays dependent on one person. khomichenko.com/how-to-stop-…

Looking at the B2B and B2C choice, the difference is which problems feel interesting to solve: mapping how companies make decisions or understanding mass consumer behavior. khomichenko.com/why-i-chose-…

One marketing lesson that compounds over time: develop ambitious juniors inside the system rather than importing ready-made stars. External habits rarely match company pace and standards. khomichenko.com/how-to-build…

Great leaders protect their teams by absorbing unfair pressure instead of passing it down. When people know they will be defended, trust grows and performance rises with it. khomichenko.com/why-great-le…

A marketing leader who only coordinates bottom-up ideas gradually stops directing. The department stays busy, but the system loses coherence. The real job is to align separate efforts into one strategic movement. khomichenko.com/a-marketing-…

Traditional B2B content often fails because readers spot the commercial intent immediately. The stronger path is insight drawn from product data itself. khomichenko.com/why-nobody-t…

Looking at Reddit’s recent momentum, one thing stands out. Google can send traffic to a platform, but it cannot turn spectators into members. khomichenko.com/reddits-grow…