Building in Public: Why African Founders Should Share More
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Most of us were raised to keep the work quiet until it is finished.
You do not announce the harvest while the seed is still underground. You do not tell the village about the business until the doors are open and the shelves are full. It is good manners, and for a long time it was good sense.
But the way we build companies now rewards the opposite instinct.
The founders who share early, share often, and share honestly are pulling ahead of the ones who wait for the perfect launch. Sharing in public does real work for you: it recruits, it sells, it raises money, and it keeps you honest. This is the practice the rest of the world calls "building in public," and African founders have every reason to make it their own.
Let me make the case.
What building in public actually means
Building in public is the habit of showing your work while you are still doing it.
It means posting the messy middle. The feature you shipped this week. The number that went up. The number that went down. The customer who churned and the reason they gave you. The pricing experiment that flopped. The hire you are looking for. The decision you are stuck on.
The clearest example sits outside Africa. The Dutch indie founder Pieter Levels has spent a decade posting his exact Stripe revenue, his failed projects, and his live experiments on X, and built a portfolio of products earning a reported 3 million dollars a year with no employees and no office (LinkedIn / Andros Wong, 2025). People followed him because he let them watch the whole thing, polished or not.
That watching is the asset. When people see the process, they trust the person. And trust is the scarcest currency a young African company has.
Why the African founder, especially, should share
There is a specific reason this matters more on our continent than almost anywhere else.
The single hardest thing about building from Lagos, Nairobi, Kigali, or Accra is that the people who could help you cannot see you. The talented engineer in another city. The angel investor in the diaspora. The corporate buyer who needs exactly what you are making. The journalist looking for a real story. They are all out there, and the default is that they never learn you exist.
Building in public closes that distance.
When you post your progress, you turn a private struggle into a public signal. You become findable. The 2025 funding cycle made this concrete: African tech funding rebounded to 4.1 billion dollars, with investors rewarding founders who showed clear, transparent traction over founders selling big visions with thin proof (Partech, 2025). The ones who had been documenting their revenue, their retention, and their unit economics in public had the receipts ready when the room asked for them.
We forget how much of our own history was built on visibility. Safaricom and Vodafone launched M-Pesa in 2007, and it grew so fast that within a few years it was processing more transactions inside Kenya than Western Union was processing across the entire world (IMF, 2011). M-Pesa spread because every shopkeeper, every customer, every agent could see it working in the next stall over. Visible proof travels.
The four things sharing does for you
When founders ask me what they actually get out of posting in public, I give them four concrete returns.
It recruits. Your best future hires are watching to see whether you are real and whether you are moving. A weekly thread about what you shipped is the most honest job advert you will ever write. Tosin Eniolorunda built Moniepoint into a company processing trillions in transactions and crossing into nine figures of revenue by 2025 (Billionaires Africa, 2026), and a large part of how Nigerian fintech recruits its best people is reputation built in the open, founder by founder, post by post.
It sells. Every progress update is a soft pitch to a customer who is not ready yet but will be. By the time they need what you sell, they already know your name and they already trust your hands.
It raises money. Investors back a line of steady progress over time. A founder who has been posting steady monthly progress for a year is showing a slope, and a slope is far more convincing than a polished deck that appeared from nowhere.
It keeps you honest. This one is quiet but powerful. When you tell the world you will ship something by Friday, you ship it by Friday. Public commitment is the cheapest accountability system ever invented, and it works on the founder more than on anyone else.
The fear, and why it is mostly wrong
Now the objection. The one I hear in every room.
"If I share, someone will steal my idea."
I understand the fear, and I want to take it seriously rather than wave it away. There is a real version of it. In 2025 several of the most famous build-in-public founders abroad, including Pieter Levels himself, quietly went into what people started calling "revenue ghost mode," scrubbing their MRR figures once their products grew large enough to attract copycats (Indie Hackers, 2025).
So here is the honest rule. Share the journey, hold back the recipe.
Your execution, your team, your relationships, your speed, and your understanding of the customer are the moat. None of those can be copied from a tweet. Share your progress, your lessons, your early numbers, the problem you are obsessed with. Hold back the precise technical secret that took you two years to discover, the unsigned partnership, the data nobody else has. Most founders die from being unknown long before they ever die from being copied. The visibility is worth far more than the secret you are protecting.
Sharing the hard parts is the real test
The easy version of building in public is posting the wins. Anyone can do that, and after a while it reads like advertising.
The version that earns real trust is sharing the hard parts.
The clearest African example I can point to is from 2025. When Okra, the well-regarded Nigerian API startup, shut down, co-founder and CEO Fara Ashiru Jituboh chose to confirm the closure publicly with a measured, honest account of the journey (Launch Base Africa, 2025). Compare that with the startups that simply vanished the same year and left the whole ecosystem unable to learn anything from their failure. One founder added to the commons. The others took their lessons to the grave.
That is the deepest reason to build in public. A founder who shares honestly, including the failures, makes the entire ecosystem smarter. Every closed company that explains why teaches a hundred founders who come next. On a continent where we are still writing the playbook for ourselves, that generosity compounds.
How to start without overthinking it
You do not need a strategy. You need a rhythm.
Pick one channel where your people already gather. For most African founders that is LinkedIn or X, and for some it is a focused WhatsApp or Telegram community. Then commit to one post a week, and keep it to a simple shape: here is what I shipped, here is one number, here is one thing I learned, here is one thing I am stuck on.
Do that for twelve weeks before you judge it. The early posts will feel like shouting into an empty room. They still count. They are the archive that the right person will read in full on the day they finally find you.
Start small, stay honest, and keep showing up. The work was always going to be hard. There is no reason to also do it invisibly.
So plant the seed, and this time, tell the village.
Further reading: What Investors Really Look for in African Startups, Africa's Developer Talent: The Untold Global Advantage, and Looking Ahead: The Innovation Agenda for African Builders.
Over to you: what is one number from your own startup you have never shared publicly, and what is stopping you from posting it this week?
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