Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

Hope you had a great weekend. I spent last week on the emotional roller coaster that is being an agency CEO, so I used my weekend to disconnect a bit. Most of my Sunday was spent on my couch reading. I’m on book 5 of the Red Rising series now, and I’m not ready for it to end.

Now, for the B2B content stuff you're here for. Today I want to answer one of the most common questions I get from B2B founders and marketing leaders.

“Should we build in public?”

This is a question that triggers some strong reactions. There are pros and cons to both sides—nuance…crazy, right?!

By the end of this piece, you’ll have the answer for your specific situation.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

The truth about building in public

Is it worth it for SaaS founders?

“Building in public” is a tactic that elicits some strong opinions.

Some believe it’s the way to build an audience of customers in 2024. Some believe it’s pointless. Overrated.

On one end of the spectrum, you have founders like Adam Robinson, who’s published his full P&L on the LinkedIn timeline for all to see. I don’t know who’s on the other end of the spectrum because they’re too busy “building in stealth” to post anything.

By the end of this piece, you should feel confident in your decision of whether or not building in public makes sense for you as a founder. I’ll walk you through some specific examples, and show you how I think about it with my clients.

To start, we need to answer 1 question.

Does building in public help me achieve my ideal outcome?

99.9% of your confusion will dissipate if you can answer this. We’re practical people, after all.

If yes—build in public.

If no—ignore.

There are 3 ‘ideal outcomes’ most founders care about.

(1) Get customers. No shit, Tommy.

(2) Attract investors and funding.

(3) Attract A+ talent.

I. Does building in public get you customers?

I mentioned Adam Robinson earlier in this piece. He’s crushing on LinkedIn right now. He was also an early client of Compound, back in 2022-2023, when we helped him go from 0 → ~25K followers.

I worked with Adam just as he was starting to ramp up founder-led content. Even then, he was intent on building in public. At the time, his only business was Retention.com—where the ICP was founders & marketing leaders at DTC brands.

Here’s where it gets interesting. The “building in public” content crushed. But it wasn’t attracting DTC folks. It was attracting B2B SaaS founders. Hmm.

Adam ended up launching another business, essentially the B2B version of the original product. It’s called RB2B now. This is how he found clear Content-Market Fit.

His ‘building in public’ attracts founders and revenue leaders at SaaS companies—his ICP at RB2B.

Now, you might not have the ability to build an entirely new business molded around your build in public strategy. In which case, you’ll have to consider if it makes sense to attract customers.

Building in public can get you customers—but only if the content that results from building in public is content your customer cares about.

Another example. If I were to go all-in on building Compound in public, sharing metrics and all, I’d end up attracting other agency owners. I don’t sell to agency owners. I sell to VC-backed, B2B SaaS founders. No Content-Market Fit.

So for SaaS founders, it makes sense if you're trying to attract other SaaS founders (and execs).

If you're trying to attract consumer brand founders, agencies, or some other group of people that isn’t SaaS founders…don’t make building in public the core of your content motion.

II. Does building in public attract investors?

Short answer? Yes.

Building in public, specifically when things are going well, is effective for creating an aura of momentum around your company.

FOMO is a powerful drug. Others want to hop on the rocket ship.

In an edition of his newsletter, Tyler Denk, founder of Beehiiv wrote “We raised our $12.5M Series A in just 6 days” and “I receive a dozen emails every day from funds who want to invest in Beehiiv.”

Beehiiv just announced its Series B last week. They also announced a community round of investment, where they allocated $1M in equity for fans of the company to invest. The round was oversubscribed in hours.

Over $1M, in hours—thanks in large part to building an inescapable social presence.

One wrinkle here to keep in mind. Building in public works well when the company is doing well.

If growth slows down, the strategy kinda falls apart. This is the risk you take when you opt into the building in public content strategy. Some founders are good with that, some aren’t.

So, if you're trying to raise VC money, ‘building in public’ is a high-ish risk, high-reward strategy for attracting funding.

III. Does building in public attract A+ employees?

Investors aren’t the only people who want to hop on a rocket ship.

When you use building in public to show momentum, you also create a magnet for A+ talent.

You create this magnet by highlighting company progress and sharing your philosophy on running a company. It gives employees a (curated) sneak peek of what they’re getting themselves into.

Perhaps even more important, posting founder-led content creates a repellent for bad culture-fits.

Dara Ladjevardian, founder of Delphi, set the timeline up in flames back in March when he posted a tweet that read:

“Everyone at Delphi works on weekends without question. Why? We were upfront about our culture from the beginning. Saying "we don't prioritize work-life balance" early on filters out a ton of great people, but the ones that make it through are always up for the challenge.”

The comments section looked just about as you’d expect when a post escapes its intended audience.

Look, you might not agree with Dara’s opinion. He’s okay with that. He doesn’t want those people to apply for jobs at Delphi anyway.

Building in public and sharing your company-building approach helps you attract other psychotic individuals with the same quirks and interests as you.

Building in public isn’t binary.

Building in public exists on a spectrum.

End 1: Share literally every financial metric on your P&L and air out employee drama for the timeline to see.

End 2: Say you're building in stealth because you don’t want to post any content.

The question isn’t whether or not to build in public. It’s how much you should build in public.

With myself and my clients, the goal is to find the sweet spot on the spectrum that maximizes the benefits while minimizing the risk of the strategy. This will look different for each company.

Here’s a secret the elites don’t want you to know. You can curate how you portray your ‘building in public’ strategy. The savviest way to do this is to manufacture a perception of positive momentum. You get far more upside from sharing stuff when you're winning.

Sure, vulnerability builds trust. But I say we opt for selective vulnerability. You want to share enough to maximize the 3 levers we walked through above. Nothing more.

A few tactics to bookmark:

Share overall trends, not exact metrics. Sharing that you grew ~2x in Q1 is different than revealing you made $317,347.17 in revenue in Q1. Directionality matters more than hard numbers when building in public—all you need to do is show that you have momentum.

Shut up when things are hard. Some people like being ‘vulnerable’ on the timeline. That’s fine. But if it’s not your thing, you have permission to keep quiet when you're going through a hard time. Even if this business is fine—if you don’t feel like sharing, don’t.

Sharing new logos and new team members are two of the easiest, safest ways to create momentum on social. When possible, namedrop new users. Announce new hires. None of these have to do with sensitive numbers or intel.

Periodic updates get you 99% of the benefits of building in public. Monthly and/or quarterly updates are two of my favorite formats to use with clients. You can give a ‘behind the scenes’ look at progress, without turning your social strategy into an unhinged stream of consciousness.

Founders forget that we have more control over the perception of our companies than the social media timeline would have you believe. You can share as much, or as little, information as needed to achieve your desired outcome.

After all, we’re all just pushing propaganda to get people to use our product.

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

• How writing helped this CEO build a $300M company by David Perell and Sam Corcos 🎥

•  How Notion does marketing by First Round 📝

• 7 social content strategies to grow your B2B SaaS startup (with examples) by Tommy Clark 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, I appreciate you allowing me into your inbox every week.

Before you go. I have an important question.

Who do you think is winning the rap beef? Drake or Kendrick?

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS: If you want Compound to run a founder-led content motion for you… save a spot on our waitlist here. We’re at capacity right now, but looking to partner with some SaaS startups in May or June.