Loudcode

A weekly build in public update template you can copy

By Naod Tadele · · 5 min read

A white wall calendar
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

The simplest build in public habit is a weekly update. Same day, same shape, every week. It takes the decision out of posting, and over a few months it becomes a public log of how your product grew.

Here's a template you can copy, a filled-in example, and how to stretch one update into several posts.

The template

Answer four questions. A line or two each is enough.

  1. What did I ship this week? The one or two changes users would notice.
  2. What was hard, or what did I decide? A problem, a mistake or a trade-off.
  3. What are the numbers? Users, signups, revenue, or anything else that moved. Use exact numbers, even small ones.
  4. What's next, or what am I unsure about? This is where you invite replies.

A filled-in example

Example post
Week 12 of Nightshift: Shipped: related alerts now group into one incident. A 3am outage is one timeline instead of 40 pings. Hard: I spent two days on smarter dedupe rules before a customer said they didn't want fewer alerts, they wanted to know which one mattered. Deleted the branch. Numbers: 41 customers, $1,040 MRR, 2 churned. Next: Slack threads or a weekly email summary. Which would you use?

That's one post, and it covers the whole week.

Why this shape works

  • It always has something. Even a slow week has a lesson or a question.
  • It shows progress over time. Twelve weeks of updates make a story no single post can.
  • It ends with a question, which gets replies, and replies are what bring new people to your posts.

Turn one update into a week of posts

Your four answers are also four separate posts. Post the full update on Friday, and use its parts during the week:

  • Monday: the feature, explained from the user's side
  • Wednesday: the lesson, told as a short story
  • Thursday: the question, on its own
  • Friday: the full weekly update

Now one 10-minute check-in covers the whole week. For more ways to fill a week, see 30 build in public post ideas.

Tips that make it stick

  • Pick a day and protect it. Friday afternoon works for most people: the week is fresh in your mind.
  • Write before you polish. Bullet points first, then turn them into posts.
  • Never skip a week because it was slow. "Slow week: fixed bugs, talked to three users, learned X" is a perfectly good update.
  • Number your weeks. "Week 12" makes the streak visible, and streaks are motivating.

Make the check-in 30 seconds

This template is exactly the weekly check-in inside Loudcode. It asks you these four questions, one at a time, adds what it sees in your GitHub, and turns your answers into a week of posts in this mix: feature, lesson, question and recap. You edit them and schedule them to X.

You ship the code. We write the posts.

Your commits, revenue, traffic and a 30-second weekly check-in become build-in-public posts for X, in your voice. You approve every post.

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Keep reading

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