Building in Public Is Not Free Marketing

The Promise vs. the Reality

The pitch for building in public goes something like this: share your journey, attract an audience, convert followers into customers. Free marketing. No ad spend required.

I bought into this completely when I started sharing my build process online. Tweeted updates, posted revenue numbers, shared architecture decisions, wrote threads about lessons learned. After six months of consistent posting, here’s what I had: 2,000 followers, mostly other indie hackers. About 12 actual signups from social media. The rest came from SEO and direct outreach.

Building in public wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t what I thought it was.

Your Audience Is Other Builders

This is the part nobody talks about honestly. When you build in public, the people who pay attention are overwhelmingly other people who are also building in public. Founders follow founders. Developers follow developers. Indie hackers follow indie hackers.

Your actual customers, the people with the problem you’re solving, are usually not scrolling Twitter looking for someone’s build updates. A product manager at a mid-size company isn’t following your “day 47 of building my SaaS” thread. They’re Googling their problem and reading blog posts that rank well.

There are exceptions. Some builders have genuinely converted their audience into customers. But look closely at those success stories, and you’ll notice the audience was already the target market. A developer building dev tools for developers. A designer building design tools for designers. The audience and the customer were the same person.

If your target customer isn’t a builder, your build-in-public audience probably isn’t your target customer.

The Hidden Value Is Discipline

Here’s what building in public actually gave me, and it’s more valuable than marketing.

It forced me to plan. When you commit to sharing weekly updates, you need something to update people on. That means you need a plan for the week. Before I started sharing publicly, my weeks were reactive. I’d work on whatever felt urgent or interesting. Once I had an audience expecting updates, I started the week by deciding what I’d build and ended the week by reporting what I actually shipped.

It forced me to articulate decisions. Writing a tweet about why I chose Postgres over MongoDB made me actually think through the tradeoffs. Explaining a pricing decision publicly meant I had to have real reasons, not vibes. The act of writing for an audience clarified my own thinking.

It created accountability. I told 2,000 people I’d launch the beta by March. When February came and I was behind, the public commitment pushed me to cut scope and hit the date. Without that accountability, I’d have quietly slipped the timeline like I always had before.

It created a decision log. Six months of public updates gave me a searchable history of every major decision I’d made and why. When I questioned a choice later, I could go back and read my own reasoning. That’s worth more than any audience metric.

The Planning Discipline Is the Product

Think about what building in public actually requires:

• A roadmap (even a rough one) to share
• Weekly goals to update on
• Clear reasoning behind decisions
• Honest assessment of progress
• A definition of what “done” looks like for each milestone

These are all planning activities. The public sharing is just the mechanism that forces you to do them.

I’ve met builders who stopped sharing publicly but kept the habits. They still write weekly internal updates to themselves. They still articulate their decisions in writing. They still set weekly goals and review them. The audience went away. The discipline stayed.

And here’s the thing: the discipline is what actually moves the product forward. Not the followers.

When Building in Public Does Work for Marketing

I’m not saying building in public has zero marketing value. It does, in specific situations:

Social proof for early users. When someone Googles your product and finds months of transparent updates about how you built it, that builds trust. It’s not direct acquisition, but it helps convert people who’ve already found you.

Networking with other builders. My build-in-public audience introduced me to three people who became design partners, two who gave me critical feedback on pricing, and one who became a collaborator. That wasn’t marketing. It was community.

Content that ranks. Some of my build-in-public posts became blog posts that actually rank for useful keywords. The public sharing created raw material for real content marketing. The tweet got 20 likes; the blog post gets 500 visits a month from Google.

Be Honest About Why You’re Doing It

If you’re building in public for marketing, measure it like marketing. Track signups from social, track conversion from followers to users, track whether the time you spend posting is more effective than the same time spent on SEO or outreach.

If you’re building in public for discipline and accountability, great. Own that. It’s a legitimate reason, and probably the more honest one.

Just don’t confuse the two. The followers feel like progress. The planning discipline is progress. And you don’t need an audience to benefit from writing down your plans, documenting your decisions, and holding yourself accountable to a timeline.

A blank notebook works too.