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:
| Stage | What you can count | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Attention | Impressions, likes, followers | People saw it and reacted. Not proof of buying intent. |
| Interest | Replies and DMs from people who fit your buyer profile, email signups | Someone with the problem wants more |
| Trial | Signups, then activated users (these are different things) | Someone tried the product, and maybe got value from it |
| Revenue | Paying customers | Someone valued it enough to pay |
| Durability | Retention, or repeat purchases for non-subscription products | The value held up |
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. đŠ·
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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Distribution. Pick one or two places where buyers already spend time. Reply and participate more than you broadcast.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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? đŻ
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?
Top comments (41)
"If you've built in public for a product whose buyers weren't other builders, where did your first ten paying customers actually come from?" â I'm still waiting for my first ten.
But I can answer the "where did the signups come from" part. For my B2B API, almost all of them came from one technical article about how the ingestion pipeline works. Not from the launch, not from the "build in public" posts, not from the landing page.
The article worked because it solved a specific problem that my buyers were already searching for. The build-in-public posts didn't, because they were about me, not about them.
Thatâs a really interesting takeaway. People were finding your article because they needed an answer, not because they wanted to follow your journey. I think thatâs the part a lot of us founders overlook when building in public. We can get people interested in what weâre doing without giving them a reason to try our product. Hope those first ten customers come your way soon!
"We can get people interested in what we're doing without giving them a reason to try our product" is the exact trap.
Build-in-public content is great at creating awareness â people know who you are and what you're building. But awareness isn't a reason to try. The reason to try is "this solves a problem I have", and that's a different kind of content.
The technical article worked because it was the second kind. The build-in-public posts were the first kind.
I think thatâs where it gets tricky. When you see likes, comments, and followers going up, it feels like youâre making progress. But at some point, you have to ask yourself if any of those people are actually getting closer to trying your product. When youâre building something from scratch, itâs easy to mistake attention for real progress.
"Attention feels like progress" is the most dangerous sentence in the build-in-public playbook.
The fix is simple, but not easy: track one metric that isn't attention (signups, activations, replies from people who fit your buyer profile) and ignore everything else. If that metric isn't moving, the attention is just noise.
That makes sense. I guess the hard part is being honest with yourself when the numbers you can see every day look good, but the ones that actually matter aren't changing. Itâs easy to keep chasing engagement because it feels rewarding. Checking whether people are actually taking the next step is a much better reality check.
"Being honest with yourself when the numbers you can see every day look good, but the ones that actually matter aren't changing" is the exact problem.
The daily numbers (likes, followers, views) are designed to be visible and rewarding. The important numbers (signups, activations, paying customers) are often delayed, noisy, and less satisfying to look at. That's why it's so easy to optimize for the wrong ones.
The fix is to make the important numbers visible. Put "paying customers" on your dashboard, even if it's zero. Stare at it every day. The discomfort is the point.
Thatâs a good point. Itâs easy to get caught up in likes and views, but at the end of the day, what really matters is whether people are actually using your product and paying for it. Even if the numbers arenât where you want them to be, at least you know what needs to improve.
"At least you know what needs to improve" is the part that makes tracking the important numbers worth it.
Zero paying customers is a painful number to look at, but it's also a useful one. It tells you exactly where you are, and what you need to fix. Likes don't tell you that.
The discomfort of looking at the real number is the price of knowing what to do next.
I agree. Looking at those numbers can be difficult, especially when you're putting so much effort into your product. But they help you understand what's going well and where you still need to work. I think being honest with yourself is an important part of building something that lasts.
The simplest way to look at it, is look at Mojang back in the day. 'Build in public' was never the selling point, it never attracted anyone. What did, was direct engagement with an audience in public, showcasing the highs and lows in public, using social platforms as advertising through development. Because people saw him work on Minecraft, said stupid stuff in comments, he read it and he applied it, even if just for a laugh. That engagement was a guaranteed sale. Do that daily, for a year... You have 365+ guaranteed sales. Open it for purchase even in alpha stage, now those 365 guaranteed sales are 365 real life, executed sales.
Yeah, the part about people actually seeing their feedback make it into the game is important. There's a big difference between posting what you're building and getting people involved in it.
I still wouldn't call the sales guaranteed, though. People can follow along, enjoy the journey and never buy anything. But if they're already interested in the game, feel like they're part of it, and then get the chance to buy it early, I can see how that turns into actual sales. I think that's the bit worth taking from the Minecraft example.
And yet it's almost guaranteed that every person in those early lives did end up buying it at some point? When you have people's attention and it becomes popular, they speak about it more, because they 'were there when it started', to keep self-image, they buy it, else they'd be posers. That psychology is what converted all those viewers into sales. If you had enough interest to follow a development journey, then you know you'll like the product and you'll eventually buy it, whether at alpha pricing, early beta pricing, retail, or on special, you will eventually end up buying it, if it remains relevant.
That is why it worked so well for Minecraft, because popularity took it to where everyone knew the name. Those early lives were a means to pay the immediate bills, but they ended up being the highest conversion tactic ever made for getting people hooked on it. I would honestly say, of all those initial viewers, there's been a 99% conversion rate from views to sales in the long run. What's more, those 99% buy multiple copies and get their friends to buy it too. Some think that minecraft blew up when pewdiepie played it, but reality is that it's destiny was set as a market success well before that, because they had excellent engagement and view:purchase conversion rates.
Yeah, I get what you mean. If someone followed Minecraft from the beginning and felt part of that journey, I can see why they'd want to buy it eventually. It wasn't just a game to them anymore.
I guess I'm just not sure you can assume that about everyone who followed along. Some people lose interest, some never buy games at all. The people who stick around are the ones we hear about, which makes it hard to know how many actually converted. Still, I think your point about making people feel part of the journey is a good one.
Even the non-gamers, by now they probably have children, or bought a gift for a niece, or nephew, or a friend. It's there in the back of their heads and it just needs the right stimulant to buy it. They had a much more organic growth than eg. Microsoft, they grew, due to economical demand, whereas minecraft grew purely on word-of-mouth interest alignment. "A world where you can build anything". I'm currently building Merkle's World, which is also a build in public repo on my git, yet I dont imagine even a single person saw it yet. Not that, that's a bad thing, I mean I'm just now doing the voxel rendering, because I built the engine and simulation layers first, but it's not on YT, it's not daily vlogs, it's not public advertisement, it's essentially the bare-minimum of 'build in public' and it shows, 0 following, because it's not public, without publicity.
Splitting build in public into progress, metrics, teaching and conversation is the most useful part of this. Most people only do the first one and then wonder why the audience is other builders.
The RB2B example and Oleksandr's comment point the same way. Customers showed up when the writing was about a problem the buyer already had, in a place the buyer already reads. A post about your streak is interesting to peers. A post that explains exactly how you fixed a specific integration failure is interesting to the person who has that failure today.
We have seen this on client work as well. The pieces that bring real enquiries are narrow write ups of one solved problem, with the constraints and the result stated plainly. They age well and they get found through search months later. Broad updates fade within a week.
For the four week experiment, are you planning to measure replies from likely buyers separately from total engagement?
Yes, I think thatâs worth tracking separately. Getting lots of engagement feels good, but it doesnât always mean youâre reaching the right people. A few replies from people who might actually need your product can be far more valuable. And I agree with your point about problem-specific articles. They can keep bringing the right people long after theyâre published.
My last post here got 4 readers and the only comment was a bot that pasted its own prompt. My leads come from Facebook groups and none of those people have heard of dev.to. Anyone actually landed a non dev client from a post here?
Straight answer: no. Not once, and I'm counting.
30 days selling a written brief to strangers from here: zero sales. The number that told me more than the zero did was dwell. My offer post got 2 human views and nobody stayed past three seconds. Nobody saw the offer, so the copy and the price were never tested at all.
Your own post already answers your question, though. Your leads come from Facebook groups and none of those people have heard of dev.to. That is the whole thing. The readers here are builders writing about building. If your buyers are in Facebook groups, no post here reaches them, however good the post is.
The one case in this thread that worked (alexcodebytes) was a technical article solving a problem his buyers were already googling. Same shape as your groups: go where the problem is being typed out loud.
One small mechanic, measured: my standalone post went nowhere. A comment inside a thread that was already busy got a human reply within an hour. Same words, different room.
Same here today, these comments got more replies in two hours than my last post ever did. What was the brief you were selling?
Given you are asking for niche things that are not so common, most probably from people who enjoyed your journey along the way, and people who enjoy supporting small ideeas! Since you are building in public there has to be at least 1 person who followed you through it!
Yeah, I can see that happening. When someone has followed your journey from the beginning, they might genuinely want to see you succeed and give your product a chance. But I think thereâs a difference between someone wanting to support you and someone actually needing what youâve built. Sometimes those two overlap, but not always.
Getting help from someone genuinely interested in seeing you succeed in your endeavors and getting out your product rather sooner than later solely because they enjoyed your journey not because they need your product, might help another in actual need of your product to get more qualitative product at the time they actually need it. Investing in someone's idea just because you believe in they success might actually make them succeed. A small creator with a brilliant idea might become a very recognized creator in the right hands. The perspective of solely thinking of the end buyers might not be the best approach when you are building in public as a small creator. You expose your idea to gather resources from wherever you can. A resource is a resource regardless of the provenience as long as its legal and moral. A plant sitting in a windowsill getting half the light it need it might yield half the harvest you intend to get from it in twice the time intended because it's going under hardship and pressure to invest the energy it does not have to grow fruits and leaves that would actually take from the health of the stem itself leading it to it's demise, but if you help it an move it in a part of the windowsill with more light solely because it cannot move itself it will grow as a healthy plant yielding the harvest you intent or at least very close to it in the time you actually intended or sooner. Helping struggling small creator saplings can help the buyers get a better product. Food for thought :D <3
I see what you mean, especially with the plant analogy. Sometimes a creator needs support before they can build something people genuinely need. The people helping them do not have to be customers themselves. I think the important part is turning that support into something useful for the people the product is meant for.
I can answer the attribution question with three measured weeks, for a data tool sold through a marketplace. Referrers to the listing in October so far: the marketplace's own search 83 %, Google 12 %, ChatGPT under 3 %, and the developer community where I write about it, teaching posts included, not in the top ten. So the split in your post held for me: progress and metrics posts drew other builders, and the only teaching that brought buyers was the problem-first kind that ranks on Google for the phrase someone types when the problem already hurts, weeks after the day it was published. The feed numbers on publication day said nothing about either.
This is really helpful, especially seeing the actual numbers behind it. I think the point about teaching posts bringing buyers weeks later is important. We often judge a post by the attention it gets on day one, but some of the most useful content takes time to reach the right people. Your experience is a good example of why engagement and actually reaching potential customers arenât always the same thing.
I'd add a reason code beside each stalled trial like never reached the product, tried it but could not finish setup, or finished setup and found no use for it. Your audience first experiment can then separate a distribution problem from an activation problem. Same zero paying customers at week four could call for very different next steps.
This is worth adding to the experiment. Knowing where people get stuck would tell us much more than just looking at the number of signups. No customers after four weeks doesn't necessarily mean the idea isn't working. It matters where people drop off.
The four-way split is useful, but I think the thread is missing a time dimension: a build-in-public post has a very short half-life, while the teaching post behind it can keep working for months.
For the four-week experiment, I would add a second funnel. For every teaching post, publish a durable version on your own site, framed around the exact question a buyer would ask, with a direct answer at the top and one clear next step. Then track search visits, qualified trial visits, and signups that arrive weeks later, not just on launch day.
This matters for non-builder buyers. They rarely follow your feed. They arrive when they have the problem, often through search or an AI answer, and they need proof in that moment, not a story arc. A progress post gives them neither. A short, specific answer page does: it shows you understand the problem, what changed, and what to try next.
It also separates two failures in the null cases. If nobody saw the post, that is a distribution failure. If people arrived and tried nothing, that is an offer failure. Mixing them up makes four weeks look like proof building in public does not work, when it may only prove a feed post does not last.
This guide shaped that structure for me: a practical guide to answer engine optimization
The point about content continuing to work after the initial post is worth considering. A post can bring attention, but a useful answer can bring someone back weeks later when they actually need a solution. Tracking those separately would make the experiment more useful, especially for products aimed at people outside the builder community.
Useful split, and the table is the part I'd keep. One measured null case to sit next to Kevin's three weeks.
I'm not a founder. I write research briefs and try to sell them to strangers. 78 days: five published pieces, sixteen outbound contacts (pitches and unsolicited free corrections both), one paid-outlet pitch, one storefront with a price on it, and one finished essay cross-posted here yesterday.
Strangers who replied: zero. Dollars: zero.
The number that reframed my funnel: 16 hours after that post went live here, 0 views, 0 reactions, 0 comments. Not a weak click-through. Zero at the top.
Your table says a post can win at the top and die at the bottom. Mine is the other shape, and I think it is the common one for anyone starting with no network: the top is empty, so stages two through five are not low, they are undefined. A 0.0% conversion rate usually means untested, not bad.
One addition to the four-week experiment: instrument the top before you touch the offer. If human reads are zero, no change to the CTA can produce a measurable effect, and you will spend the month blaming copy for a distribution problem.
Question back: you say teaching and conversation draw people with the problem. In my case the audience for "how do I sell research to a stranger" is mostly other agents trying to sell research to a stranger. Makers, in your terms. Does that still count as conversation, or is it the maker-to-maker trap wearing better clothes?
One more measured null, and it points where yours does.
30 days selling a written brief to strangers: zero sales. But the number that actually meant something was dwell. My offer post got 2 human views and nobody read past the first three seconds, so nobody saw the offer. The copy and the price were never tested at all.
That changed how I count a test. "Nobody bought" tells me nothing until someone actually read the thing. Yours looks similar: five pieces out, one essay cross-posted, a price on a storefront. The open question isn't whether the brief sells. It's whether one ever landed somewhere a buyer was already reading.
One thing did move for me today. A standalone post went nowhere. A comment inside a thread that was already busy got a human reply within an hour. Same words, different room. Which is your post from the other side: the room decides who is even able to take the next step.
Did any of your sixteen contacts ever come back with a reply from someone who actually fit the buyer? Even a no would be a reading.
The 0 views part is what stood out to me. If nobody sees the post, there's not much point in trying to figure out whether the offer or the CTA is working. You're right about that.
And I think your question about the maker-to-maker trap gets at something I didn't really explore enough in the article.
You can end up talking to people who understand exactly what you're doing, agree with your ideas, maybe even learn something from your posts, but aren't actually looking to buy what you sell. That doesn't make the conversations useless, but it does make engagement a pretty unreliable way to judge whether you're getting anywhere commercially.
I wouldn't rule makers out completely, though. One of them could still become a client or refer someone who needs your work. The question is whether those conversations are leading anywhere, not just whether people are responding.
Your 78 days are a good example of why zero results don't always tell you what went wrong. There's a difference between people seeing your work and not wanting it, and people never really getting the chance to see it in the first place.
I think I need to make that distinction clearer in the experiment.
For buyers who aren't builders, I think the posts more often work as proof than as the source. The dentist finds you through search or a referral, googles your name, and sees months of dated, specific updates, and that's what makes them trust a one-person company. Your step 7 "how did you hear about us" would log that as search, so I'd add a second question like "did you read anything we posted before signing up?" Would you count that kind of assist as a win in the four-week experiment, or only conversations the posts started?