"Build in Public" Is Everywhere. Does It Actually Get You Customers? 🤔

What founders report, what that evidence can't prove, and a four-week experiment you can run on your own product.

In 2023, the founders of Senja, a customer-testimonial tool, noticed how much attention revenue screenshots were getting in the build-in-public community. They gave the makers who focused on milestones a nickname: "milestone men." Then they started sharing losses and context alongside their wins.

They weren't skeptics, though. In the same interview, co-founder Olly said one in four of Senja's paying customers came from Twitter and building in public.

So one practice earned applause for some founders and, by one founder's account, paying customers for another. This article is about the gap between those outcomes. The question isn't whether building in public is good or bad. It's what has to be true between a post getting attention and a stranger paying for your software.

We'll look at what attention metrics can and can't tell you, then three documented accounts: a modest success, a spectacular one, and a failure. Then I'll explain why even those are weaker evidence than they look. Finally, we'll turn the patterns into an experiment small enough for a solo founder to run without losing a quarter.

One phrase, four different activities

"Building in public" gets used for at least four things that behave differently.

• Progress sharing: changelogs, screenshots, technical decisions. Mostly interesting to people who care about the process.
• Metrics sharing: revenue, signups, churn. It builds credibility, and as the Senja founders noticed, it can easily turn into a performance.
• Teaching: posts that solve a reader's problem whether or not they ever buy. This is content marketing under a founder's name.
• Conversation: asking users for feedback and answering people who have the problem you solve.

This split is my own, not an industry standard. It matters because the activities tend to attract different kinds of attention. Progress and metrics posts often draw people who like following founders. Teaching and conversation tend to draw people with the problem. Those groups sometimes overlap, but often they don't, and the product, audience, and platform all change the picture.

What a like measures

A founder's funnel has more stages than a social feed shows. Treat this table as a simplified model, not a strictly linear customer journey:

Not everyone who sees a post moves to the next stage, and many never do. How big the drop-off is depends on your audience, your offer, and your channel. A post can do brilliantly at the top while adding nothing at the bottom. If your audience is mostly other founders and you sell to dentists, a viral thread is a pleasant event with no commercial consequence. Your mom will be very proud, though. 🦷

There's a complication in the other direction. Influence doesn't always show up as a click. Olly said far more happens in DMs than people assume, especially around launches. Readers who never click a link may still remember your name later. That's an argument for tracking conversations, not just clicks, and for asking new users how they found you. Self-reported attribution is imperfect, but it beats assuming the answer is "direct."

Three accounts, three different lessons

Senja: customers, with caveats. The interview ran in March 2023, when Senja had reached $4,000 in monthly recurring revenue in under a year. Olly reported that one in three signups and one in four paying customers came from Twitter and building in public, and that he spent about seven hours a week on it. Note that those figures combine Twitter and building in public, so they don't isolate the effect of building in public itself. He called it, along with SEO, the best-return marketing work they did. He also listed conditions that cut against the hype. It's easier if you're making a product for other makers, it can take months to generate sales even then, and he wasn't starting from zero, since he already had a small audience from an earlier project.

RB2B: the spectacular case. Adam Robinson's account is the dramatic one. Interviews, including a ProductLed podcast episode, report that he took RB2B, a website-visitor identification product, to $5 million in annual recurring revenue in about 13 months with a tiny team, using LinkedIn heavily for awareness. A Trueframe write-up of his published figures (Trueframe is a content agency, so read it with that in mind) says he attributed about 75% of site traffic to LinkedIn in an October 2025 snapshot. It also notes that his own launch retrospectives disagree on basics, such as 1,600 waitlist members in one telling versus 3,000 free signups in another, and that meme content drew attention from people outside his buyer group. Now look at what surrounds those numbers. He already ran a larger, established company, his LinkedIn audience was made of SaaS operators, and RB2B sells to SaaS operators. That's less "I posted memes and got rich" and more "I posted to the exact people who buy." Treat all of this as his claims, not audited results.

A six-month failure. A founder wrote on Indie Hackers in September 2025 about posting daily updates, sharing the journey on Reddit, and ending up with 43 signups, 2 paying customers, and $18 in monthly revenue. Their own diagnosis was that the people cheering them on were supporters, not people with the problem. It's a single self-reported anecdote, and the post ends by linking the author's product, so weigh it accordingly. It's also as much a story about weak demand and validation as about building in public. Lots of cheering, very little paying.

What these accounts can't tell us

These stories are interesting, but they don't prove that building in public causes customers. Here's why.

First, every account is self-reported. Nobody audited these numbers, and an interview with a founder is a founder describing their own business.

Second, none of them isolates building in public from everything else. Senja credits SEO alongside Twitter. Robinson had an existing company and a reputation among his buyers. The failed project may simply have lacked a real problem to solve. The strategy might be the cause, a contributor, or just a companion to something else, and a story told after the fact can't separate those.

Third, we mostly hear from the visible. Founders who posted for a year, got nothing, and moved on rarely write retrospectives. That's my inference, not a measured fact. I couldn't find a controlled comparison of founders who build in public and similar founders who don't. If you see a precise "founders who build in public grow X times faster" statistic, ask where the denominator came from.

The three cases don't produce the same outcome, but they share a thread. Where the strategy visibly worked, the audience was close to the buyer. That's suggestive, not conclusive.

When it seems to work, and when it probably doesn't

Treat these as hypotheses consistent with the accounts above, not proven rules.

Audience overlap. Senja said building in public is easier for a product aimed at makers, and Robinson's audience matched his buyers. The failed project's audience was supporters. If your customers aren't on the platforms where founders talk to each other, you may grow a friendly audience that's useless to your revenue.

Content a buyer would value. Senja's "milestone men" and engagement from people who were never going to buy teach the same lesson from two directions: attention from the wrong people, or about the wrong thing, doesn't convert. A revenue screenshot can show that a business exists. On its own, it rarely shows a buyer that you'll solve their problem.

A route from reading to trying. A free tier, a waitlist, and Senja's DM follow-ups all give an interested reader a next step. This one is my inference from the accounts, not something any of them tested. Attention without a path leaves people with nowhere to go.

Time, including yours. Seven hours a week is nearly a full working day for a solo founder. The honest comparison isn't "posting versus nothing." It's posting versus the same hours spent building, or reaching out directly to people who fit your buyer profile.

One more thing the success stories don't dwell on: transparency is a strategic choice, not an obligation to disclose everything. Customer details, security specifics, and anything covered by a contract don't belong in a public update, however good the engagement would be.

A four-week experiment

Four weeks is a proposed starting point, not a proven duration. Senja's experience suggests sales can take months, so this experiment measures leading indicators, not revenue. The question it answers: is public content producing conversations with people who look like buyers?

1. Baseline (before week 1). Record how many signups you get per week now and where they come from. Note how many hours you can honestly spend. Without a baseline, any result is uninterpretable, and I'm not aware of a defensible benchmark conversion rate to use instead.
2. Audience. Write one sentence naming who pays you and where they already read or talk. If you can't, you've learned something important before posting a single word.
3. Hypothesis. Something like "Posting twice a week in [place] will start conversations with at least [N] people who fit my buyer profile." Set N before you start, based on your baseline and your available hours (for example, what the same hours of direct outreach would produce), not after you see the results. Moving the goalposts is a sport, but not this one.
4. Content. Mix teaching posts that address a buyer's problem, build updates framed around what changed for a user, and replies in existing communities. Treat revenue and milestone screenshots as optional. Log which type of post led to each qualified conversation, so you learn what worked and not just that something did.
5. Distribution. Pick one or two places where buyers already spend time. Reply and participate more than you broadcast.
6. Measurement. Leading indicators: replies and DMs from people who fit your buyer profile, and qualified visits to your site. Middle: signups and activation. Lagging: paying customers and retention, which probably won't show up in four weeks, so don't conclude from their absence alone.
7. Attribution. Use a distinct tracked link per channel and log DMs by hand. Add one free-text "how did you hear about us?" question at signup, and let people name more than one touchpoint, since someone may see a post, come back later, and sign up through a search result. Accept that this undercounts, because readers who see a post and return later will often look like direct traffic.
8. Review and decision rules. Check in at the end of week two to see whether the routine is sustainable and the content is landing with the right people. At week four, look at the quality of conversations (one qualified chat can beat ten polite likes), whether any turned into trials, how much time you spent, and whether you're reaching the right audience. Then decide whether to continue, change the channel or content, or run another cycle. Don't use four weeks to declare the whole strategy a success or a failure. If attention is high but buyers are absent, that usually points to the wrong venue or topic, not the wrong product. Consider demoting it to an accountability and networking habit if, after two cycles (my suggestion, not a proven threshold), qualified conversations stay near zero.

So, does it get you customers? 🎯

Sometimes. In the documented cases where it did, the audience was already close to the buyer, the content was useful to that buyer, and there was a path from reading to trying. When those conditions are missing, building in public may still help with accountability, feedback, and networking, but its value as a customer-acquisition channel becomes much less certain.

How often it works across all founders, nobody can say from the evidence available. What you can do is test it on your own product, with your own baseline, before spending a year on it.

So here's the question I'd most like to see answered in the comments. If you've built in public for a product whose buyers weren't other builders (dentists, accountants, game studios, anyone), where did your first ten paying customers actually come from, and could you trace any of them back to a public post?