The Business of Building in Public: Our Journey

Most startups operate in stealth mode. They hide behind NDAs, carefully crafted press releases, and polished product launches that mask months of chaos. We chose a different path. At TeamTurbo, we're building our business in public—sharing our metrics, our mistakes, and our messy reality with the world.

This wasn't a marketing strategy. It was survival instinct.

Why We Ditched the Startup Playbook

When we started TeamTurbo, we looked at the traditional startup playbook and realized it was written for a different era. The "fake it till you make it" approach, the carefully managed narrative, the illusion of overnight success—it all felt exhausting before we even began.

We're building a project management tool for startups, which means our customers are living the same reality we are: tight budgets, impossible timelines, and the constant pressure to ship. If we pretended to be something we weren't, they'd see through it immediately. More importantly, we'd be building a business on a foundation of fiction.

So we made a radical choice: transparency as our operating system. Not as a marketing gimmick, but as a fundamental business principle. Every win, every bug, every pivot—we share it. This approach has become one of the most powerful tools for startup culture we've ever implemented.

The Real Cost of Transparency

Let's be honest: building in public is terrifying. In our first month, we shipped a feature that broke spectacularly. Our instinct was to quietly fix it and pretend it never happened. Instead, we wrote a blog post titled "How We Broke Our Own Product (And What We Learned)."

The response shocked us. Founders reached out sharing their own horror stories. Potential customers thanked us for being real. Our open-source community rallied to help us fix the issue faster than we could have alone.

But transparency has costs. We've had competitors copy our roadmap. We've had trolls mock our metrics. We've had moments where sharing our struggles felt like professional suicide. Yet every time we've been tempted to close up, something reminds us why we started this way.

Last quarter, a potential enterprise client told us they chose TeamTurbo specifically because of our transparent journey. They'd been burned by vendors who overpromised and underdelivered. Our willingness to share our real numbers and challenges signaled that we'd be honest partners in business, not just another SaaS vendor.

Using TeamTurbo to Build TeamTurbo

We practice what we preach—literally. We use TeamTurbo to build TeamTurbo, and that daily dogfooding shapes every product decision we make.

Our workspace structure mirrors what we recommend to customers: focused, goal-oriented, and ruthlessly simple. Every Monday, we set our Root Tasks for the week. No fluff, no wishful thinking—just the 3-5 critical goals that will move our business forward.

One of our Root Tasks last month was "Ship the task-focused meetings feature." As we used our own half-built feature to coordinate development, we discovered friction points we never would have caught in testing. The meeting summary format felt robotic. The scheduling flow required too many clicks. Using our own product under real pressure revealed truths that user interviews never could.

This creates a feedback loop that's become our secret weapon. When tired managers reach out asking for specific features, we often realize we've already built them—because we needed them ourselves. When gamification in the startup industry becomes a hot topic, we don't have to research it; we're living it through our own team leaderboard.

The Metrics We Track (And Why)

Every month, we publish our metrics dashboard. Not the sanitized version—the real one. Here's what we shared last month:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue: $12,400 (up 23% from previous month)
• Active Workspaces: 147 (target was 175)
• Customer Churn: 4.2% (industry average is 5-7%)
• Critical Bugs: 3 (down from 8)
• Team Velocity: 87 story points (up from 71)

Why share numbers that show we missed targets? Because that's the real startup journey. Success isn't a straight line, and pretending it is doesn't help anyone.

These metrics also keep us accountable. Knowing thousands of people will see our numbers focuses the mind wonderfully. It's gamification applied to our own business—we're competing against our past selves, publicly, which creates healthy pressure to improve.

What We've Learned About Transparent Culture

Building in public has fundamentally changed our company culture. When everything is transparent externally, internal transparency becomes easier. Our team knows the real numbers, the real challenges, and the real stakes.

This eliminates the toxic positivity that plagues many startups. When a feature launch flops, we don't spin it—we examine it, learn from it, and move on. When someone makes a mistake, we share it openly because we've already normalized failure as part of growth.

It's also become one of the most effective tools for tired managers (including ourselves). Instead of maintaining multiple narratives—one for investors, one for customers, one for the team—we maintain one truth. The cognitive load savings are enormous.

The Competitive Advantage Nobody Expected

Here's the paradox: by sharing everything, we've built a moat that's nearly impossible to copy. Competitors can steal our features, but they can't steal our journey. They can copy our code, but they can't replicate the trust we've built.

Every transparent post, every honest metric, every vulnerable admission adds another brick to this moat. It's slow-building but durable. And it attracts exactly the kind of customers we want: people who value authenticity over polish, substance over marketing speak.

What's Next for Our Business

We're doubling down on transparency. Next month, we're launching a live dashboard where anyone can see our real-time metrics. We're also starting monthly "office hours" where founders can ask us anything about building TeamTurbo—technical questions, business strategy, fundraising challenges, whatever.

Is this sustainable as we scale? We don't know. We're figuring it out as we go, which is exactly the point. Building a business this way means accepting uncertainty and sharing the journey anyway.

If you're a founder considering building in public, here's our advice: start small. Share one honest post about a real challenge. See how it feels. You might discover, like we did, that transparency isn't just good business—it's liberating.

And if you want to see how we use our own product to maintain velocity while staying transparent, create a free TeamTurbo workspace at https://teamturbo.io/demo. Use it for a week. See if the focus and clarity it creates might help your business the way it's helped ours.

Because ultimately, that's what this is about: building businesses that work, in public, together.