A few years ago, build-in-public lived on Twitter. Then on LinkedIn. Now the people who post their build-in-public videos on TikTok are getting more views than they ever got on either.
The format is one founder, one phone, one minute. That's it. Most of the videos that work are just someone sitting at their desk explaining what they shipped that day.
Why TikTok
TikTok's algorithm doesn't care if you have followers. It will show your video to a few hundred people first. If they watch all the way through, it shows it to a few thousand. If they watch all the way through, it shows it to more.
This means a brand new account can get 100k views on a video if the video is good. That doesn't happen anywhere else. So if you've been ignoring TikTok because you don't have an audience, that's exactly why you should try it.
The shape of a video that works
There are three parts. They take about a minute total.
The hook is the first three seconds. You say what's in the video, in plain words. "I just shipped the feature my biggest customer asked for and it broke production." That's a hook. People stay because they want to know what happened.
The middle is the story. Thirty seconds. What did you build, why did it matter, what went wrong. Talk like you're telling a friend at a bar.
The end is the lesson, in one sentence. Not a grand one. A small honest one. "I think I keep underestimating how long migrations take." That's it. End the video.
What to film
Film yourself. Phone propped up. No setup. Don't do screen recordings of your IDE for the whole minute. Your face is the thing people stay for.
If you want to show what you built, cut to a screen recording for ten seconds in the middle. Cut back to your face for the end. People follow faces, not codebases.
Do it daily for two weeks
The first five videos will be bad. Nobody watches the first five videos. That's the price of admission.
By video ten you'll start to feel the shape. By video fifteen one of them will pop and you'll get a few thousand views from people who don't know you yet. That's the moment the channel starts to work.
The hard part is recording the first five.