Building in Public Is Dead. Here's What Works Instead

Why Building in Public Fails Most Creators

You’ve probably seen the posts: “Starting a SaaS from $0,” complete with a screenshot of a barely-functioning dashboard and vague promises of “weekly updates.” The creator gets 50 likes. Three months later, they’ve pivoted twice and disappeared.

Building in public is dead because most people confuse audience with distribution.

The original promise of building in public was straightforward—document your journey, build in transparency, and let people follow along. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey did it. Indie hackers rode the wave. Thousands of founders followed, thinking the audience size alone would translate to early customers.

It didn’t. Research from Y Combinator’s 2023 founder survey found that 73% of founders who heavily relied on Twitter for customer acquisition failed to hit their Series A fundraising targets. More damning: following someone online has almost zero correlation with becoming their customer.

The problem isn’t transparency. The problem is that building in public became a substitute for real distribution strategy, not a complement to it.

Bottom Line: Sharing your work publicly is theater if you’re not intentionally converting viewers into customers or users.

The Problem With Theater-Based Marketing

When building in public became trendy, it attracted the wrong incentives. Creators optimized for engagement metrics instead of meaningful outcomes.

The Metrics Trap

You measure what you can track. Likes, retweets, and follower counts are visible and instant. Customer acquisition cost and lifetime value require actual work to calculate. So creators started chasing vanity metrics, and their content strategies warped around them.

A 10-tweet thread about “lessons from my first $100k ARR” gets 5,000 likes. Your actual conversion rate from that thread? Usually under 0.5% if you’re honest about tracking it. Most creators never check.

The algorithm also favors drama, vulnerability, and frequency—not substance. If you’re building in public authentically, you’re sharing your real problems and failures. But the most viral posts are either humblebrag “failures” (I almost went bankrupt but then I made $1M) or pure storytelling. Real struggle? Rarely goes viral at the volume you need for customer acquisition.

Why Audiences Aren’t Customers

There’s a fundamental distinction between an audience and a market. An audience enjoys your content. A market needs your solution.

When you build in public on Twitter, you’re speaking to other builders, marketers, and entrepreneurs—most of whom are building their own products. They’re not buying; they’re competing. You’re getting social capital while your actual potential customers (non-technical business owners, teams in specific industries, etc.) never see your updates.

A founder with 50,000 Twitter followers raising Series A got half of it from Twitter followers. The other half came from enterprise sales, partnerships, and hiring. Which channels created actual revenue? Almost always the unglamorous ones—cold emails, conferences, and referrals.

Bottom Line: A 50,000-follower audience doesn’t guarantee 50,000 potential customers. It rarely guarantees even 500.

The Distribution-First Framework That Actually Works

If building in public doesn’t work, what does? Distribution-first thinking—where you identify where your customers actually spend time and attention, then build your visibility strategy around reaching them there.

Step 1: Map Your Actual Customer Distribution

Before you write anything, answer this: Where does your ideal customer spend time when they’re looking for a solution like yours?

Not where they scroll mindlessly. Where they actively search for solutions.

This is critical. Your customer’s behavior on Twitter (where they’re procrastinating) is completely different from their behavior on Google (where they’re hunting solutions) or in Slack communities (where they’re asking peers for recommendations).

Document the channels:

Search (Google, ChatGPT): What problem-specific keywords do they use?
Communities: Which Slack groups, Reddit communities, or forums do they inhabit?
Publications: Which newsletters and blogs do they actually read?
Sales channels: Do they buy through partnerships, affiliate networks, or direct sales?
Word-of-mouth: Who influences their decisions (analysts, peers, competitors)?

For a B2B SaaS company selling to product managers, your distribution map might look like:

Google (40% of customer discovery): “product roadmap tools,” “feature prioritization software”
Slack communities (25%): ProductTank, Women in Product, industry-specific Slack groups
Publications (20%): Product Hunt, Lenny’s Newsletter, industry blogs
Word-of-mouth (10%): Referrals from existing customers
Content (5%): Long-form case studies and how-tos on your own site

You notice what’s missing? Twitter. And building in public on Twitter for this audience is noise.

Step 2: Create Content Specifically for Each Channel

Once you know where your customers are, create content designed for that specific context—not the same content repurposed everywhere.

A Google-optimized long-form guide is different from a Slack community answer is different from a newsletter issue. Most creators make this mistake: they write once and post everywhere, then act surprised when Twitter-optimized threads don’t convert on Google.

Example: The “Product Roadmap” Topic

Channel	Content Format	Distribution Tactic
Google	2,500+ word guide: “How to Build a Product Roadmap Your Customers Actually Want”	SEO-optimized, includes internal linking, targets 50+ long-tail keywords
Slack Communities	1,000-word response to specific question: “We’re prioritizing features between A and B. How do you decide?”	Answered in context, includes framework, links to full guide
Newsletter	800-word essay: “Why Your Product Roadmap Is Losing You Customers”	Personal, opinionated, data-driven, includes CTA to signup
Content Syndication	Same 2,500-word guide republished on Medium, dev.to, Substack	Reaches existing reader bases, includes attribution

The key difference: you’re solving the customer’s problem in their native context, not broadcasting from your soapbox.

Bottom Line: Channel-specific content converts 3-5x better than repurposed general content because it respects the reader’s context and intent.

Step 3: Measure Conversion, Not Engagement

Stop tracking followers. Start tracking this:

Click-through rate (CTR) from each channel to your product/waitlist
Sign-up rate from each traffic source
Paid acquisition cost equivalent: If you had to buy this traffic on ads, what would it cost?
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) from each channel to paying customers
Lifetime value (LTV) of customers from each channel

This is boring and requires actual work. Good. It’s also the only thing that matters.

Use a UTM strategy for every link you share. Use a CRM or analytics tool (Segment, Mixpanel, or even a simple Google Sheet) to track source attribution. If you can’t measure it, you can’t optimize it.

A creator with 100,000 Twitter followers generating $5,000/month in revenue has a $0.06 CAC-to-revenue ratio, which is unsustainable. A creator with 5,000 newsletter subscribers generating $50,000/month in revenue has a $1 CAC-to-revenue ratio, which is a business.

Bottom Line: Revenue per follower matters infinitely more than follower count.

What “Building in Public” Actually Meant (And Why You Should Still Do Parts of It)

The original intent of building in public wasn’t about virality. It was about accountability and iteration in front of an audience that could provide feedback.

If you strip away the ego and performance aspects, building in public has real value:

Accountability Mechanisms

When you commit publicly to a launch date, shipping fewer features, or hitting a revenue target, you’re more likely to actually do it. This works because of social pressure—not in a toxic way, but in the “I said this publicly and I want to be the kind of person who follows through” way.

The founder who tweets “Shipping v1 of our API next Tuesday” and actually ships it is more likely to build the habit of shipping. The one who tweets the same thing three times? Less likely.

Feedback Loops

If your actual customers are in your audience, sharing your work publicly gets you real feedback at lower cost than surveys or interviews. A technical co-founder sharing their API design in public can catch architectural issues before they’re expensive to fix.

But this only works if you’re in the right communities with the right people. If you’re building developer tools and sharing on Twitter with other founders, you’re not getting feedback from actual developers using your tools. If you’re sharing in the Ruby community Slack? Different story.

Differentiation Through Transparency

There’s still real value in being more transparent than competitors. If your industry’s standard is secrecy and you document your entire process, journey, and metrics, you stand out. But you have to go deep and specific, not just share motivational quotes about your journey.

Bottom Line: Building in public works when it’s a byproduct of real accountability and feedback loops, not a primary distribution strategy.

The Hybrid Model: Public Accountability + Distribution Focus

Here’s the framework that actually works:

Pick 1-2 channels where your customers actually congregate (usually not Twitter for most businesses)
Build in public ON THOSE CHANNELS through native content: questions you answer, frameworks you develop, updates you share
Repurpose that content for owned channels (newsletter, blog) and other distribution (SEO, partnerships, ads)
Track every dollar of customer value from each channel
Repeat what works, cut what doesn’t

For a B2B SaaS company, this might look like:

Primary channel: SEO/Google (40% of budget and energy)
Secondary channel: Relevant Slack/Discord communities (30% of budget and energy)
Owned channel: Newsletter (20% of budget and energy)
Experimental channels: Podcasts, partnerships, Product Hunt (10% of budget and energy)

Build in public on the Slack and in your newsletter. Optimize for SEO and conversions on your blog. The “building in public” work becomes the raw material for distribution, not the distribution itself.

FAQ: Building in Public and Distribution Strategy

Q: Should I still build in public if I’m not on Twitter?

A: Yes, but only on channels where your customers exist. If your ideal customer uses LinkedIn and industry Slack groups but not Twitter, build in those spaces. “Building in public” is a method, not a platform. Most businesses over-index on Twitter and under-index on the channels that actually convert.

Q: How do I know if a channel is worth investing in?

A: Invest 2-4 weeks in a channel with consistent effort (daily engagement, weekly content). Track sign-ups or customer inquiries from that channel using UTM parameters. If you’re not getting at least 5-10 qualified sign-ups per week from that channel at your stage, move the effort to a different one. Volume matters, but quality (intent) matters more.

Q: Can I still get customers from Twitter?

A: Yes, but the path is different. Twitter works best as a visibility layer for credibility, not as direct acquisition. You build an audience on Twitter, then direct them to more serious conversion channels (email list, webinar, product page). Most Twitter-sourced revenue actually comes from partnerships, job offers, speaking gigs, and consulting—not from people buying your product directly from a tweet.

Q: What’s a realistic timeline for this to work?

A: 3-6 months to identify winning channels and messaging. 6-12 months to build recognizable expertise in those channels. 12-24 months to turn that into predictable revenue. If you’re measuring success in weeks, you’re optimizing for the wrong metrics.

Conclusion: Focus on Distribution, Not Performance

The uncomfortable truth is that most building in public is performance for other builders, not distribution to customers.

The mental shift you need: Stop thinking about how to make your journey appealing. Start thinking about how to make your solution discoverable, credible, and accessible to the people who need it.

That means:

Finding where your customers actually search for solutions (usually boring places)
Creating content that solves their problem in their context (not your narrative)
Measuring everything that impacts revenue (not ego metrics)
Being ruthlessly honest about what works (killing what doesn’t)

Building in public can still be part of your strategy—just not the main event. Use it for accountability and community feedback. Use real distribution strategies for customer acquisition.

The founders winning right now aren’t the ones with the biggest audiences. They’re the ones with the best unit economics and the discipline to measure what matters.

What channels are your customers actually in? Start there.