Quick Answer
Build in public means sharing progress, decisions and numbers while you are still building, and it earns trust rather than distribution. The people who reward a shipping log are usually other founders, not the operators who would buy. Posting becomes distribution only when the audience contains buyers, the post answers a problem they already have, and the answer lives on a page you own.
You shipped something, wrote it up, and posted it. Two hundred reactions arrived, almost all from people building their own products, and the signup chart did not move. That gap is not a writing problem, and posting more often will not close it.
Most advice on content marketing for tech companies treats a founder's feed as a channel, when a feed is closer to a room you happen to be standing in. Who else is in the room decides what the post is worth. This piece covers what build in public actually produces, the five moves that turn founder posting into distribution, and the thing Plausible Analytics did that its progress updates alone never did.
Build in Public Produces Trust, Not Pipeline
Build in public produces familiarity, evidence of competence and a record of momentum, which are trust assets rather than pipeline. Those assets are worth having and worth working on. None of them is a distribution channel, because a channel is judged by who it reaches and a trust asset is judged by what it changes in someone who already arrived.
The format barely matters here. Weekly shipping logs, revenue screenshots, changelogs and founder diaries all do the same three jobs, and they do them for whoever is already watching.
Most advice on content marketing for tech companies stops at that point and calls the job done. It skips the timing problem sitting underneath it.
LinkedIn's B2B Institute put a number on that timing problem. Its 95-5 rule finds that 95 percent of your potential buyers are not ready to buy today, which means almost everyone who sees your post cannot act on it today, however good the post is.
That is an argument for trust work, not against it. It is also why a post cannot be judged on the week it went out, and why founders who judge it that way conclude the wrong thing.
The trap is the loop that forms around the posting. Indie Hackers, the build in public communities on X and the r/buildinpublic community on Reddit are full of people who will reward a candid update, and almost none of them has your buyer's problem.
Peer Attention Compared With Buyer Attention
Peer attention and buyer attention run on different rewards, and build in public is tuned for the first one. A founder rewards candour. A buyer rewards a solved problem, and usually does it silently.
| Factor | Peer Attention | Buyer Attention |
|---|---|---|
| Who is watching | Founders, indie hackers, people building | People who hold the job your product does |
| What earns it | Candour, numbers, the struggle | A named problem and a workable fix |
| How it shows up | Reactions, reposts, new followers | A reply, a demo request, a quiet visit to pricing |
| Where it happens | X, Indie Hackers, r/buildinpublic on Reddit | Google, ChatGPT, a colleague's recommendation |
| What it is worth | Reputation, hiring, investor warmth | Pipeline |
Read the table as two audiences rather than a ranking. The peer loop is genuinely valuable, and plenty of founders have hired, raised and found co-founders inside it.
The confusion is always the same one. Engagement is not demand, audience is not market, and visibility is not distribution.
The mistake is spending the buyer loop's budget inside the peer loop and calling the result distribution. A B2B demand generation agency gets fired for that inside one quarter, and a founder can do it to themselves for a year with nobody saying a word.
The overlap is real in a few markets. If you sell developer tools, infrastructure, or anything founders buy for themselves, the room and the market can be the same room, which is why the tactic has such loud success stories.
Test the overlap rather than assuming it. Open the last twenty people who engaged with your posts and count how many hold the job title you sell to.
Five Moves That Turn Build in Public Into Distribution
Build in public turns into distribution when the post, the audience and the landing place all point at the same buyer. Five moves do almost all of that work, and none of them asks you to stop posting.
Each one below says what the move is, how to run it, how to tell it worked and where it usually goes wrong. Run them in that order, because posting the right thing into the wrong room still reaches the wrong room.
1. Post Where Your Buyer Already Reads
Move the posting to the places your buyer already opens, even when the audience there is smaller and colder. A founder feed full of other founders is comfortable, and a forum where your buyer asks for help is not.
Start from your ideal customer profile and work backwards to three places those exact people read. For a month-end close tool that might be an accounting subreddit and two niche finance newsletters, rather than the X community you already post in.
You will know it worked when replies start arriving from job titles you sell to instead of from people selling to you. The first sign is usually fewer reactions and much better questions.
The common mistake is reading a smaller audience as a downgrade. Twenty of the right readers beat two thousand of the wrong ones, which is the same argument we make about which social media forums are worth posting in.
2. Publish the Problem, Not the Progress
Write about the problem your product solves rather than the week you had building it. A progress update is interesting to someone already tracking you, and a problem write-up is useful to someone who has never heard of you.
The swap is smaller than it sounds. Instead of posting that you shipped a reconciliation engine, post what goes wrong in month-end reconciliation, what you tried, and what the numbers looked like afterwards.
Google's guidance on creating helpful content asks whether a page demonstrates first-hand expertise of the kind that comes from having actually used a product or service. Building the thing gives you precisely that, which is why the raw material is already sitting in your drafts.
You know it worked when a reader who does not know you says the post described their week. The mistake is burying the problem under the story of building it, so the post only makes sense to people who followed along.
3. Move the Answer Onto a Page You Own
A post decays in a day and a page keeps answering the same question for years. Publish the argument on your own site first, then post the short version with a link back to it.
This is the move that changes the arithmetic, because a page can be found by somebody who never followed you. Getting it found in Google results and inside ChatGPT answers is what an AI SEO service does, and that is a different job from posting.
In our work with founders, the posts still producing conversations months later are the ones with a page behind them. Better Marketing builds the founder feed and the pages it points at as one system, because an AI SEO service and a founder's posting both underperform when they are run separately.
You can tell it worked when Search Console starts showing impressions for the question rather than only for your company name. The mistake is posting the whole argument inside the thread and linking nothing, which leaves the best thing you wrote on somebody else's platform.
4. Ask for the Conversation, Not the Applause
End the post with a question only a buyer can answer, and reply to every person who answers it. Applause is the default outcome of a good post, and it is the one outcome that leads nowhere.
In practice that means closing with something like whether month-end still takes your team three days, rather than asking what people think of the update. Then move the replies into direct messages within a day, while the post is still the reason you are talking.
You know it worked when a post produces conversations instead of a number. Five replies from the right people beat five hundred reactions, and one of the five usually turns into a call.
The mistake is the engagement-bait question that any founder can answer. Those questions perform beautifully and teach you nothing at all about your market, which is the same trap behind posting five things a week and going invisible.
5. Measure Replies, Demos and Branded Searches
Judge build in public by replies from buyers, demos booked and searches for your company name, never by impressions. Impressions measure the room, and the room is the thing in question.
Three numbers are enough to run this properly. Count qualified replies each month, demos or trials you can trace back to a post or its page, and branded searches in Search Console.
Branded search is the cleanest of the three, because somebody typing your company name has already decided you are worth checking. Set the baseline this month and read it again in ninety days, because a single week says almost nothing about a trust asset.
The mistake is reporting reach to yourself. A B2B demand generation agency that reported impressions instead of meetings would not survive its first review, and the same standard belongs in your own weekly note.
Plausible Built in Public and Then Published Answers
Build in public did work for Plausible Analytics, and the company's own write-up says how. Its account of reaching $1M ARR records that the early marketing went to its blog, to Indie Hackers and to a co-founder's Twitter account, and that all the early users came from those updates.
The line worth quoting is Marko Saric's own: “Our marketing in the early days was focused on building in public.” That is the strongest version of the case for the tactic, and it comes with a detail that most retellings drop.
Plausible sells analytics to developers and site owners, and Indie Hackers is full of developers and site owners. The audience and the market were the same people, which is the condition build in public needs and rarely gets.
The step change came from something else entirely. In April 2020 the company relaunched around a post arguing that you should stop using Google Analytics on your website.
Its record of that week reports more than 48,000 unique visitors, against 27,300 in roughly the fifteen months before. It also reports 166 new trials, more than the previous four months combined, and searches for the company name rising from ten in the week before to 121 in the week after.
That post was not a progress update. It named a problem its buyers already had, and it lived on a page Plausible owns rather than on a feed somebody else controls.
The honest reading is that build in public brought Plausible Analytics its first users, and published answers brought it a market. We took the rest of those numbers apart in what Plausible's numbers teach about trust marketing.
When Build in Public Costs More Than It Returns
Build in public is the wrong use of the hours in three situations, and none of them is about being bad at posting. The tactic has conditions, and a founder can fail every one of them while doing everything else right.
The first is a buyer who does not read founder content at all. A hospital procurement lead, a plant manager or a compliance officer is not in the X community, and no amount of candour reaches them there.
The second is a public record you will have to live with afterwards. Abandoned roadmaps, revenue charts that went the wrong way and confident claims that aged badly all stay searchable. Candidates and investors read that record alongside buyers.
The third is cost with no landing place. If posting takes five hours a week and there is no page, no list and no follow-up behind it, the attention arrives and leaves on the same afternoon.
When the audience test fails, those same hours buy more elsewhere:
- One page that answers the question your buyers actually type.
- A teardown of a problem you solved for a customer, published on your own site.
- Ten direct messages to accounts matching your ideal customer profile.
- An hour in the community where buyers ask for help, answering rather than announcing.
- A customer conversation turned into the page you did not have.
That is the uncomfortable part of content marketing for tech companies. The work that produces customers is usually less visible than the work that produces applause, and a B2B demand generation agency earns its fee on the first kind.
Run the Audience Test Before Your Next Post
Before the next update, list the last twenty people who engaged with your posts and count the buyers among them. If the count is low, keep posting for the reputation it earns and move the distribution work to a page, a list and a direct conversation.
Publish the problem instead of the progress, put the answer where Google and ChatGPT can reach it, and ask for a reply rather than a reaction. That is build in public doing a job it can actually do, and Better Marketing turns the trust it earns into first customers.