The Solminica 30-Day Build-in-Public Report: Real Numbers, Real Failures, Real Contracts

Why We Are Doing This — The Honest Version

The standard IT company marketing playbook goes: publish polished case studies where everything went perfectly, post generic thought leadership that could have been written by anyone, avoid disclosing anything that might give a competitor an advantage or make a prospect feel uncertain, and hope that the professional veneer generates enough trust to get into a sales conversation.

We think that playbook is exhausted. Not because honesty is a virtue — though it is — but because the buyers we want to work with are smart enough to see through it. A CTO evaluating software development companies in 2026 has read a hundred case studies where the project was delivered on time and on budget and the client was thrilled. They do not believe them, because their own experience of software projects does not match that story.

So we are going to do something different. Every month, we will publish the actual numbers — what content we produced, what performed and what did not, how many leads came in and what stage they are at, what our active projects look like, and what we got wrong. The goal is not to look impressive. The goal is to be the most transparent build-in-public IT company in the market — and let that transparency be the trust signal.

The Month in Numbers

Image Caption: Solminica 30-day build-in-public report headline numbers — 10 pieces of content, 270,000+ impressions, 129 inbound leads, 3 contracts attributed to content marketing in Month 1 of transparent software company blog strategy.

Content Performance — Every Post, Every Number

We published 10 pieces of content in February 2026 across LinkedIn and this blog. Here is the full breakdown of how each one performed — impressions, engagement rate, leads attributed, and our honest verdict on whether it worked.

Image Alt: Solminica content performance table 30 days – build in public IT company showing impressions engagement rate and leads generated per post with best and worst performers

Image Caption: Solminica 30-day content performance table — February 2026 build-in-public data showing impressions, engagement rate, and leads generated per post. The ‘$42K invested, $180K saved, 428% ROI’ post was the top performer with 48,200 impressions, 6.8% engagement rate, and 31 direct leads.

The Clear Pattern From 30 Days of Data:

• Specific financial numbers in the first line dramatically outperformed everything else. Every post that opened with a concrete monetary figure — ‘$42K’, ‘$180K’, ‘428%’ — generated 2-3x more impressions than posts that opened with a question or a general statement.
• Education and save-worthy content outperformed promotional content every time. The posts that got saved and shared were the ones that taught something — the GDPR guide, the audit checklist, the tech stack comparison. People share what makes them look smart, not what makes us look good.
• The ROI case study was the single best-performing post of the month. 31 leads from one piece of content. The combination of a specific financial result, a real story, and a clear before/after was the formula. We are replicating this structure in every Month 2 case study.
• The company culture post was our worst-performing content. 8,400 impressions, 1.4% engagement, zero leads. Our audience is not here to see our office — they are here to evaluate whether we can solve their problem. Lesson learned and not repeated.

The Lead Pipeline — Full Funnel Transparency

Here is the complete picture of every lead that came in during February 2026, what stage they reached, and what we know about who they are. We are disclosing this level of detail because we think it is useful for other service businesses evaluating whether build-in-public content marketing is worth the investment. The honest answer, based on Month 1 alone, is yes.

Image Alt: Solminica lead pipeline table – transparent software company blog lead data showing 129 content replies 18 consultation bookings 7 proposals and 3 contracts from 30-day build in public strategy

Image Caption: Solminica 30-day lead pipeline — February 2026 build-in-public results showing full funnel from 129 LinkedIn content replies through 74 DMs, 43 audit lead magnet responses, 31 website form fills, 18 consultation calls, 7 proposals, to 3 contracts signed. All data from direct content attribution in Month 1.

What the Pipeline Data Tells Us:

• The funnel conversion rate is healthy but long. 129 initial leads to 3 contracts is a 2.3% raw conversion rate — which sounds low but is standard for B2B service businesses. More importantly, the 3 contracts represent a combined contract value significantly higher than our content production investment in Month 1.
• The best leads came from specific posts, not from our profile in general. 31 of 43 audit lead magnet enquiries came from the ’72-hour audit: 5 dangerous findings’ post specifically. The post drove the lead; the Calendly link in the comment drove the booking. Post-specific attribution matters for understanding what to produce more of.
• US founders are our most engaged geography. 51% of DMs were from US-based founders and CTOs. Despite being an India-based development company, the US market is responding to the content at the highest rate — which validates the specific audience we were writing for. UK and EU combined represent 46%, which is growing.
• The proposals that converted had one thing in common: they came from people who had read at least 3 of our content pieces before booking. We know this because we asked in the consultation call. The content is doing the trust-building work before the first conversation.

Project Updates — 6 Active Builds, Honest Status

We run between 4 and 8 concurrent client projects at any given time. Here is the status of every active project as of March 1, 2026. We have anonymised client names and industry details where the client has not given explicit permission to be named. The project types and statuses are accurate.

Image Alt: Solminica project status table 30 days – 6 active software development projects with live status update health indicators and transparent progress notes from transparent software company blog

Image Caption: Solminica 30-day project status update — 6 active development projects including 1 live MVP, 2 in-progress builds, 1 delivered audit, 1 ongoing retainer, and 1 internally paused project. Honest health indicators and transparent progress notes.

The Project We Need to Talk About:

The Solminica website redesign has been paused. It has now been delayed three months. This is embarrassing, and it is our fault. Client project work takes priority when capacity is constrained — which is the right commercial decision — but we have been making that decision every month and the website update keeps sliding. The consequence is that our own online presence does not reflect the quality of work we produce for clients.

Month 2 commitment: the website redesign gets 6 dedicated engineering hours per week regardless of client load. It ships before the Month 2 report. We are writing this publicly because accountability to an audience is more effective than accountability to ourselves.

What Worked, What Failed — 8 Content Lessons From 30 Days

Here is our full breakdown of what we learned in Month 1 of the build-in-public strategy. We are publishing this as a structured table because we think it is useful to other service businesses running similar content programmes — and because keeping it in this format forces us to be specific rather than vague.

Image Alt: Solminica content lessons table – 8 build in public learnings showing what worked and what failed in first 30 days of transparent IT company content strategy

Image Caption: Solminica 30-day content lessons — 8 specific build-in-public learnings from the first month of transparent software company blogging. Numbers in the first line, educational depth, honest failure content, and the 30-minute comment strategy were the top performers. Culture posts, hookless openers, and generic hiring posts were the three clear misses.

The 3 Failures We Are Not Glossing Over

The build-in-public commitment means documenting failure at the same resolution as success. Here are the three most significant failures of February 2026.

Failure 1: We Published a Post Without a Clear CTA and Left 15+ Leads on the Table

On February 9th, we published a post about our experience building with WebSockets that generated 22,000 impressions and a 4.1% engagement rate — higher than average. We did not include a call to action in the post or a first-comment link. We noticed this at hour 3 when comments were rolling in with no conversion path. We added the comment at hour 3, but the peak engagement window was over. Our estimate, based on the post’s engagement rate and our average comment CTR, is that we left 12-18 consultations unboosted.

Fix: every post now goes through a 5-point pre-publish checklist that includes confirming the CTA is in the post body and the first comment is drafted and ready to post within 2 minutes of publishing.

Failure 2: We Underestimated the Time Cost of 10 Pieces of Content Per Month

The content production plan for February assumed 3 hours per piece of long-form content and 1.5 hours per short post. The actual averages were 4.8 hours per long-form piece and 2.2 hours per short post. Total content time: 38 hours against a planned 24 hours. The overage came from research, fact-checking, and the internal review process that we added after post 3 to ensure technical accuracy.

Fix: Month 2 content plan reduced to 8 pieces with a realistic time budget. We are also building a content brief template that reduces per-piece research time by standardising the format for each content type.

Failure 3: We Tried to Do Build-in-Public and Traditional Agency Marketing Simultaneously

February’s content mix included 7 build-in-public transparent posts and 3 traditional promotional posts (‘here is our service’, ‘we are a great team’, ‘hire us’). The 7 build-in-public posts generated 97% of all leads. The 3 promotional posts generated 3% — all from direct network connections who would have found us anyway. We spent time on content that produced nothing while the genuine transparent content was working.

Fix: Month 2 is 100% build-in-public format. No promotional posts. No company overview posts. Every piece of content will either share a real result, teach something genuinely useful, or document a real experience — with full data transparency. If the audience wants to hire us, the content itself is the case for why they should.

Month 2 Commitments — What We Are Doing Differently in March 2026

The build-in-public report only works if it drives genuine change. Here are the specific commitments we are making for March 2026, against which we will be accountable in the Month 2 report.

Content:

• 8 pieces of content (down from 10) — quality and process discipline over volume
• 100% build-in-public format — no promotional posts, no culture posts
• Pre-publish CTA checklist on every piece — no post goes live without a confirmed first-comment strategy
• At least 2 genuine failure disclosures — this report proved they generate more engagement than success stories

Operations:

• Solminica website redesign live by March 28 — 6 dedicated hours per week, non-negotiable
• Daily Loom updates mandatory during any technically blocked sprint — no exceptions, regardless of whether there is visible progress to show
• New client communication protocol documented and signed off by all engineers — the January escalation does not happen again

Lead Pipeline:

• Follow-up sequence for 43 audit leads who did not book — we have not contacted most of them since the initial engagement. This is a missed opportunity.
• Month 2 pipeline target: 200 initial leads, 25 consultations, 10 proposals — scaling the funnel based on Month 1 conversion rates

Why Build-in-Public Works for an IT Company — The Argument We Did Not Believe Until It Worked

When we committed to the build-in-public strategy in January, the internal argument against it was reasonable: ‘We are disclosing our pricing, our lead numbers, our failures, and our internal project health to every competitor and prospect simultaneously. The downside is significant and the upside is speculative.’

After one month, the counter-argument is concrete. The 3 contracts we signed in February all came from prospects who explicitly cited the transparency of our content as a trust differentiator during the consultation call. Two of those three had considered other agencies with comparable portfolios. They chose us specifically because our content felt different — less performative, more honest. One prospect said: ‘I figured that if you are this transparent about your own business publicly, you will be transparent with me when things get complicated in a project.’

That is the ROI of build-in-public for a software development company. Not impressions. Not followers. The trust signal that converts a prospect who is evaluating three agencies into a client who chose us because of how we communicate — before we ever had a sales conversation.

That Is Month 1 — See You on April 1st for the Month 2 Report

Every number in this report is real. Every failure is real. Every commitment for Month 2 is public and accountable. If you found this report useful — whether you are a founder evaluating development companies, a marketer thinking about build-in-public for your own agency, or a competitor who wants to see if it actually works — follow along. The Month 2 report goes live on April 1, 2026.

If you are building something and want to work with the team behind this report: the first call is 30 minutes, it is free, and we will tell you what we genuinely think about your project — including if we are not the right fit. That is what a transparent software company looks like in practice, not just in a blog post.