Treated as a channel it can work. Treated as a substitute for one it produces an audience of founders who will never buy your product.
Building in public means sharing your revenue, decisions and failures as you go. Treated as a channel it can work. Treated as a substitute for a channel it produces an audience of other founders who will never buy your product.
If your customers are not founders, building in public is marketing to the wrong room.
MRR screenshots and launch retrospectives are interesting to other people building products. They are close to irrelevant to a therapist, a bookkeeper or an e-commerce operator.
That produces the characteristic build-in-public outcome: a few thousand followers, warm engagement, and almost no revenue attributable to any of it. The audience is real; it is simply not the audience that buys.
The exception is founders selling to founders. If your customer is an indie hacker, building in public is genuinely the best channel available to you, because the content and the customer are the same population.
| Your customer | Build in public? |
|---|---|
| Other founders and indie hackers | Strong fit — content and buyers overlap |
| Developers, designers, marketers | Partial — some overlap |
| Professionals in a vertical niche | Poor fit. Post where they gather instead. |
| Non-technical small business owners | Poor fit |
Three things drive results, and none of them is transparency for its own sake.
Specific numbers with the reasoning attached. "MRR went from $2,100 to $2,600" is a data point. "MRR went up $500 because I removed a signup field and activation went from 18% to 31%" is useful to a reader, which is what earns attention.
Failures described precisely. These outperform wins consistently, because everyone posts wins. A post explaining exactly why a launch produced no customers is rarer and more memorable.
Consistency over intensity. Two posts a week for six months beats daily posting for three weeks. The compounding is in the accumulation, and abandoning halfway produces nothing.
Same discipline as any other channel: one platform, ninety days, a success number defined before you start — the channel framework covers why sequential testing beats parallel at solo scale.
A reasonable success number: qualified signups per month attributable to the channel. Not impressions, not follower growth, not engagement rate. If ninety days produces fewer than a handful of signups from people who match your customer, the channel is not working for your product.
Instrument it minimally — a distinct link or a single "where did you hear about us" field at signup is enough. You do not need attribution software to know whether a channel produced customers.
Do not post revenue figures if you would be uncomfortable with a prospective customer seeing them. A vertical buyer discovering their supplier makes $900 a month may reasonably worry about whether the product will still exist next year.
Building in public consumes the same attention as any other channel, and it has an unusual property: the feedback is immediate and pleasant even when the results are zero.
Likes arrive within minutes; customers arrive in months or not at all. That mismatch makes it easy to keep running a channel that is not working, which is the specific failure mode worth naming — growing a SaaS around limited hours covers protecting attention for work that compounds.
The underlying instinct — be visible where your buyers are — is right. The correction is usually the venue rather than the practice.
Post the same content in the place your customers actually gather: a professional forum, an association newsletter, a trade community. Engagement will be lower and conversion far higher.
For a slower channel that compounds without requiring an audience, SaaS SEO for solo founders covers writing for the questions buyers type, and cold email at low volume covers the fastest route to signal.
It works when your customers are other founders, because the content and the buyers are the same population. When you sell to a vertical niche, it produces an audience of founders who will never buy, which is marketing to the wrong room.
On qualified signups per month attributable to the channel, not followers or engagement. A distinct link or a single 'where did you hear about us' field at signup is enough instrumentation.
Specific numbers with the reasoning attached, and failures described precisely. 'MRR rose $500 because removing a signup field took activation from 18% to 31%' is useful; a bare revenue chart is not. Failures outperform wins because everyone posts wins.
Not if you would be uncomfortable with a prospective customer seeing the number. A vertical buyer who discovers their supplier makes $900 a month may reasonably worry about whether the product will exist next year.
The feedback is immediate and pleasant even when results are zero. Likes arrive in minutes and customers arrive in months or not at all, which makes it easy to keep running a channel that is not working.
Tell Marcus who buys your product and where they gather. You get a straight answer on whether building in public reaches them.
Try GhostCoach free →14-day free trial · cancel anytime · 30-day money-back on Lifetime