# Build in public marketing: publish the ad numbers, not just the MRR > Makers who post MRR screenshots already believe in showing figures. The marketing numbers — spend, clicks, visits — are rarer, and far more useful to read. Published 2026-09-05 · 6 min read · build-in-public-marketing, build-in-public, transparency, indie-makers Canonical: https://bidsurvivor.space/blog/build-in-public-marketing-numbers --- The revenue screenshot is the house style of indie making. Monthly recurring revenue, a chart going up and to the right, a caption about the journey. Build in public marketing has been very good at publishing the *result* and strangely quiet about the *inputs*. You will find a hundred MRR charts before you find one post that says: we spent this, on this channel, it sent this many people, and this many of them paid. That second post is rarer, harder to write, and the only one of the two that another maker can actually use. ## Why the MRR chart is the easy one Revenue is a single number, it is flattering when it goes up, and it does not commit you to anything. It does not say how the customers arrived. A maker reading it learns that success is possible, which they already believed, and nothing about how to get there. The marketing numbers are different in every way. There are several of them. Most of them are small. Some of them are embarrassing — the $200 that sent nine visitors, the launch that produced a spike and nothing after. And the platforms that produced them mostly report privately, to the buyer, in a dashboard that does not screenshot well and cannot be linked. The [buildinpublic.so guide](https://www.buildinpublic.so/blog/indie-hacker-marketing) lists building in public as one of the four channels that work this year; the argument here is that it works better when what you publish is the part everybody else hides. ## The five numbers worth publishing For every channel you tried in the month, one row: 1. **What it cost.** Money and, honestly, hours. 2. **What it sent.** Visits to your site from that channel, from your own analytics, tagged. 3. **What the channel itself claims it sent.** Its own count, if it publishes one, next to yours. The gap is informative. 4. **What happened next.** Signups, trials, paying customers from that source, in whole numbers. 5. **The price you paid per placement,** where the channel sells placements. A sponsorship rate, a slot's clearing price. That table, published monthly, is worth more to the maker reading it than any chart. It says which channels a person with your budget can expect anything from, and it says it with the losers included — which is the thing published case studies never do, for the reason in [every ad platform shows you the winners](/blog/every-ad-platform-shows-you-the-winners). ## Why it is rarely done: the numbers are private Here is the practical obstacle. Most ad channels report to you and only you. You can screenshot the dashboard, but a screenshot is a claim, not a record; nobody can open it and check. And there is a quieter problem: when only the buyer sees the number, the buyer has every incentive to round it up, and the platform has every incentive to lead with the biggest one. The short list of channels that publish their click-through numbers in public, compared, is in [ad platforms that publish their numbers](/blog/ad-platforms-that-publish-their-numbers). It is a short list. This is where we should disclose our interest. [BidSurvivor](/) is our board, and it is built so that this table writes itself. Every slot's clearing price is on the board tile, on the Hall of Survivors and on the brand's own page. Every brand's page shows its card opens and its click-throughs, counted separately, with bought traffic flagged at source and excluded. The front page shows the whole site's totals, live. None of it is behind a login. So a maker who held a slot can write "we held the noon slot on the 3rd for $0, it produced these opens and these click-throughs" and *link to the page where anyone can check it*, which is the difference between a build-in-public post and a build-in-public claim. The board is young and its numbers are small — visibly so, on the front page. If a small number would embarrass you, this is not your channel. If a small true number beats a large private one, it might be. ## How to write the post **Link, do not screenshot, where you can.** A number on a page anyone can open is evidence. A cropped dashboard is a story. **Give the denominator.** "Twelve click-throughs" means nothing without "from a slot that showed, say, so many opens" — and if you do not have the denominator, say that, rather than inventing a rate. Never turn a count under a hundred into a percentage; it will move by whole points when one more person clicks. **Report the losers in the same table as the winners.** The month with three channels at zero and one at eleven is the honest month. It is also, counter-intuitively, the more persuasive one, because a reader can see you are not selecting. **Date everything.** Marketing numbers rot faster than revenue. The search landscape alone has moved this year: the report doing the rounds has clicks from search down **42%** where AI Overviews appear ([Search Engine Land](https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-cut-search-clicks-report-471497)). A channel figure from March is a historical document by September, and a post that says so is more useful than one that does not. **Say what you would do differently, in one line.** Not a lesson. One line. "Should have booked the weekday slot" is enough. ## What you get back Three things, from experience and from watching people who do this well. The first is the right audience. A table of marketing numbers draws makers who are running the same experiments, and those are the people who become customers of tools for makers and collaborators on everything else. A revenue chart draws people who want a revenue chart. The second is a discipline. Once you know the table is going out on the first of the month, you write the number down *before* the test, you tag the links, and you stop running channels whose result you cannot read — because you cannot put "impressions: many" in the table. The habit is the same as in [fast marketing tests need honest numbers](/blog/fast-tests-need-honest-numbers); publishing simply enforces it. The third is a record. In a year you will have twelve tables. Nobody else has that about your product. The founder with twelve months of honest channel numbers knows something the founder with twelve MRR screenshots does not: where the revenue came from, and what it cost to fetch it. The follower count and the revenue chart are the parts of building in public that flatter. The channel table is the part that helps. Publish that one too — and if you only have a small audience to publish it to, [what 500 followers actually buys you](/blog/what-500-followers-actually-buys-you) is the companion piece. --- **Sources.** Build in public as a working channel in 2026: [buildinpublic.so](https://www.buildinpublic.so/blog/indie-hacker-marketing). Search click decline: [Search Engine Land](https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-cut-search-clicks-report-471497). What our board publishes and where: [how BidSurvivor works](/blog/how-bidsurvivor-works).