Is the "build in public" strategy dead?

Why does build in public feel dead right now?

Build in public feels dead today because its easiest content formats have become generic: revenue screenshots, daily shipping logs, launch countdowns and founder diaries are everywhere.

The frustration is very current. Recent discussions across r/SaaS, r/nocode and founder communities keep circling around the same question: does build in public still bring customers, or mostly other founders watching one another? One highly discussed r/SaaS thread recently argued that the tactic had become bad advice for most B2B SaaS founders, while another founder said six months of sharing MRR updates produced followers and encouragement but no paying customers from social media. These are anecdotes, so we should not turn them into market statistics. The repetition of the complaint is still useful: founders are increasingly questioning the conversion value of the audience they build.

The supply side has also changed. A few years ago, openly sharing revenue and product decisions was unusual enough to make the founder interesting. These days, the same post competes with thousands of similar founder updates, particularly around SaaS and AI products.

The part that has clearly weakened is the novelty. Transparency alone no longer gives a founder much of an edge.

Did build in public actually work better a few years ago?

Yes, the old build-in-public playbook had a real distribution advantage when fewer founders were doing it and communities such as Twitter, Indie Hackers and Product Hunt were central meeting places for early SaaS users.

Tally is a good historical example because the founders documented where their customers actually came from. During its first year, Tally grew to 11,000 users and about $5,000 MRR without paid marketing. The company identified Product Hunt, Twitter, its “Made with Tally” badge, no-code communities and Indie Hackers as its main acquisition channels.

Those channels reinforced each other. Someone discovered Tally through a founder post or community discussion, created a free form, and exposed more people to Tally through the badge on that form. Public conversations also generated product feedback that the two founders could act on quickly.

This was a very favorable setup for build in public. Tally was selling a product used by startups, creators and no-code users, while its founders were publishing inside communities full of exactly those people.

That kind of direct audience overlap made public building unusually effective in the early indie-SaaS era.

Has X become worse for build in public?

For an unknown founder, X is currently a tougher place to use build in public as a cold-start distribution channel, even though strong accounts can still generate enormous reach.

Buffer's latest social-media study analyzed more than 52 million posts. In its dataset, X had a median engagement rate of roughly 2.5%, compared with about 6.2% on LinkedIn. Buffer warns that engagement is calculated differently across platforms, so these figures should not be treated like perfectly comparable financial metrics. The gap is still useful as an indication of how different the environments have become.

The bigger finding for new founders is inside X itself. Buffer found that Premium and regular accounts started separating sharply after early 2025. During the latest portion of the period studied, the median engagement rate for ordinary accounts even reached 0% in some months. Text remained the strongest format at 3.56% median engagement, while posts containing links were down at 2.25%.

That combination is awkward for someone trying to launch a product. Native founder stories can still travel, but sending people away from X to a landing page is harder than generating likes on the post itself.

LinkedIn currently looks more attractive for some B2B founders, while Reddit remains powerful when a product fits a specific community. X still works, especially for founders who already have an audience, but it no longer deserves to be treated as the default home of build in public.

Current social-data point	What it means for build in public
X median engagement in Buffer's dataset: ~2.5%	Organic attention is relatively difficult
LinkedIn median engagement: ~6.2%	B2B founder content has another serious distribution option
X text posts: 3.56%	Native stories can still work
X link posts: 2.25%	Turning attention into site traffic is harder
Growing Premium/non-Premium gap	Starting from a small ordinary account is especially difficult

Are founders still making real money while building in public?

Yes. Founders are still producing very large outcomes while sharing their businesses publicly, including one of the most spectacular bootstrapped startup stories of the last few years.

Base44 is the strongest recent example. Maor Shlomo built the AI app builder as a solo founder and documented its progress on LinkedIn. In his interview with Lenny Rachitsky after the acquisition, the growth story was described as going from a few initial users to more than 400,000, with building in public on LinkedIn driving more growth than paid channels. Wix then acquired Base44 for initial consideration of roughly $80 million. The company later passed $100 million ARR under Wix.

Buffer offers a much older and very different case. It has published company metrics openly for more than a decade and currently shows about $26.1 million ARR on its public dashboard.

Pieter Levels is still doing the same thing as a solo founder. Earlier this year he publicly reported Photo AI at roughly $105,000 monthly revenue and $80,000 monthly profit. He also published a bootstrapping post explicitly telling founders to grow on X by building in public; that post has accumulated roughly 645,000 views on his site.

These are exceptional founders, so they tell us little about the average success rate. They do settle one part of the debate: public building remains completely compatible with serious revenue and large business outcomes.

Is Tally still growing because of build in public?

Only partly. Tally still publishes openly, but its current acquisition engine has become much broader than founder content.

At its latest $5 million ARR milestone, Tally said its original product loop was still compounding. Free forms carry a “Made with Tally” badge, people discover the product while filling them out, and roughly 2% of users eventually upgrade to Tally Pro.

Yet that viral loop is no longer Tally's biggest acquisition channel. AI-powered search has overtaken it. New users increasingly report discovering Tally through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and AI search experiences.

The company still has 28 posts in the “Building in public” section of its blog and continues sharing revenue milestones, product decisions and operating lessons. Public communication remains part of Tally's identity.

The actual customer-acquisition system, however, now includes product virality, word of mouth, search, AI recommendations, online communities and years of accumulated brand mentions.

Tally gives us a better picture of how build in public ages when it works. Founder content can help start distribution, while stronger loops gradually carry more of the growth.

Tally stage	What was driving discovery
First users	Twitter, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, no-code communities
Early revenue	Founder content, community, product launches
Scaling phase	Word of mouth and the “Made with Tally” product loop
Around $5M ARR	AI search, word of mouth and product virality

Was build in public ever enough on its own?

Rarely. The famous build-in-public stories usually had another distribution advantage hiding behind the founder posts.

Marc Lou's ShipFast is a good example. ShipFast made roughly $250,000 in its first five months, which looks like extraordinary evidence for build in public until we look at what existed before launch.

Lou had joined X about two years earlier, launched around 20 side projects and accumulated roughly 35,000 followers. When ShipFast arrived, he was selling a product for launching software to an audience packed with people trying to launch software.

The public journey clearly helped. The audience itself, however, had taken years and many failed or smaller projects to build.

Pieter Levels followed a similar compounding path across dozens of launches. Every project increased the audience available for the next one.

Build in public has always worked best as a multiplier. The multiplier becomes powerful once there is something underneath it: a relevant audience, a good product, community access, word of mouth, search demand or a product that naturally exposes itself to new users.

A founder with none of those advantages should be careful about copying the visible part of somebody else's success.

Does build in public only work when followers are potential customers?

The overlap between the audience and the buyer is one of the biggest determinants of whether build in public produces revenue or vanity metrics.

ShipFast had almost perfect overlap. Developers and indie founders followed Marc Lou because they enjoyed watching him launch products; ShipFast was a product that helped those same people launch products faster.

Base44 also benefited from unusually strong alignment. Maor Shlomo was posting about building an AI app builder on LinkedIn at the exact moment developers, founders and companies were becoming fascinated by AI-generated software. The product itself was interesting to the people who enjoyed following its construction.

Now imagine the same strategy for software that manages payroll compliance for small construction companies. Ten thousand indie-hacker followers could create plenty of likes while containing very few people who can buy the product.

Recent founder discussions repeatedly describe this problem. One r/SaaS founder put it simply after months of posting: the audience consisted mainly of other founders, while paying customers came from outreach and word of mouth. Another recent discussion reached a similar conclusion about founders selling to hotels and restaurants: posting in founder communities may generate feedback without reaching hospitality operators.

We cannot turn individual Reddit experiences into a conversion benchmark, but the underlying mechanism is straightforward.

Before judging whether build in public works, ask who is actually watching.

Can build in public still work from zero followers today?

Yes, but a zero-follower founder should expect build in public to require active distribution rather than magically creating an audience.

The current social data makes the cold-start problem obvious. Buffer's research across text-heavy platforms found that typical posts generate very little interaction, and its larger 2026 study shows that the strongest accounts publish more consistently than median accounts. Posts where creators reply to comments also tend to perform better across every platform studied.

Successful founder content usually requires participation. The founder posts, replies, comments on other people's work, enters communities, talks to users and keeps showing up.

Recent founder experiments show the same pattern. When unknown builders report getting meaningful launch traffic from Reddit or social media, the work usually includes community participation, direct replies and several posts across multiple channels. The traffic rarely comes from a passive daily build log.

Starting from zero is still possible. The realistic version looks much closer to doing sales and community work in public.

Are MRR screenshots still worth posting?

MRR screenshots can still win attention, but these days they work better as a hook than as the foundation of a build-in-public strategy.

The appeal is obvious. Revenue gives a startup story stakes. “We redesigned onboarding” is easy to ignore. “We went from $4,000 to $10,000 MRR after redesigning onboarding” immediately raises a useful question: what changed?

The problem comes when the number becomes the entire content strategy. Revenue screenshots are now common across indie-hacker communities, and we found very little credible evidence that publishing the number itself reliably converts strangers into customers.

There is also an engagement-versus-traffic gap. Buffer's current X data shows native text performing better than link posts. A founder can generate substantial conversation around an impressive revenue milestone without necessarily moving many people to the product.

The more interesting public content starts one level deeper. Why did revenue move? Which acquisition channel suddenly worked? What failed first? Did retention improve? Did customers start using the product differently?

The number attracts attention. The explanation gives the post lasting value.

Does building in public make it too easy for competitors to copy you?

Copying becomes a serious build-in-public risk when founders publish temporary advantages that competitors can reproduce quickly.

Several established indie founders have become more selective about revenue disclosures, acquisition tactics and product roadmaps. Copycats are one reason regularly mentioned when founders explain the change.

Pieter Levels has experienced the problem at a larger scale. He publicly said Wayfair used his AI interior-design product as inspiration when building a similar capability. Whether we call that copying or normal competitive imitation, public products inevitably make successful ideas easier to study.

The risk varies enormously by what gets shared. Explaining a customer problem or publishing a post-mortem after an experiment has finished is relatively hard to exploit. Publishing a cheap acquisition channel that currently produces exceptional conversion gives competitors something far more actionable.

A public roadmap creates the same issue when the feature itself is easy to replicate.

Selective transparency makes more sense now than radical transparency. Founders can still share the journey without giving competitors every useful detail in real time.

Usually safer to publish	Worth protecting
Lessons from completed experiments	A channel currently producing unusually cheap customers
Customer problems	Sensitive customer identities
Product philosophy	Easily copied unreleased features
Post-mortems	Security or infrastructure weaknesses
Broad milestones	Detailed real-time unit economics
Past failures	A temporary arbitrage that still works

Is learning in public stronger than building in public now?

Yes. Learning in public is currently more durable because useful information can spread even when nobody cares about the founder's daily progress.

Compare two posts. “Day 42, shipped the dashboard today” depends almost entirely on people already being interested in the journey. A post explaining what happened after 200 customers used the dashboard gives strangers a reason to read it.

Pieter Levels' recent bootstrapping post is a good example. The post gathered roughly 645,000 views because it distilled years of experience into concrete opinions about pricing, hosting, automation, customer support and distribution. People could disagree with it and still get something from it.

The broader B2B research points in the same direction. The latest Edelman-LinkedIn thought-leadership study surveyed nearly 2,000 professionals. Among the hidden buyers influencing B2B purchases, 91% said they wanted content that surfaces needs they had not previously considered. LinkedIn also reported that 65% preferred a human, less formal tone.

That is much closer to “here is what we learned while solving this problem” than “here is what we shipped today.”

Public building still gives founders raw material. Turning that raw material into useful insight is what makes the content travel.

Is AI search giving build in public a second life?

Yes, and Tally gives us the clearest evidence so far that years of public discussion can keep producing discovery long after individual social posts disappear from the feed.

As seen above, Tally now says AI-powered search is its largest acquisition channel. Earlier in that transition, the company was already tracking more than 2,000 new users per month directly from AI tools, while its onboarding survey suggested the real number was higher.

The interesting part is where those recommendations come from. Tally attributes much of the effect to its community: users recommending the product, discussing it on Reddit, mentioning it online and creating the kind of independent web footprint that AI systems can encounter when answering questions.

We should be careful with causality. Tally cannot tell us that a specific blog post from years ago caused ChatGPT to recommend the product today. Product quality, user reviews, backlinks, Reddit discussions and general brand popularity are all mixed together.

Still, the economics of public content have changed. A useful founder post no longer has value only during the 24 hours when an algorithm shows it in a feed. Search engines can surface it later, people can cite it in forums, and AI systems can encounter the surrounding discussion when people ask for product recommendations.

That makes durable public knowledge more interesting now, while disposable progress updates become less interesting.

Does build in public actually work for B2B SaaS?

Build in public can work very well for B2B SaaS when the founder talks about problems buyers care about instead of expecting buyers to follow the startup diary.

The evidence for expert-led B2B content is strong. In the Edelman-LinkedIn research, 73% of decision-makers said thought leadership was a more trustworthy way to judge a company's capabilities than conventional product sheets and marketing materials. Separate findings showed that roughly nine in ten decision-makers were more receptive to outreach from companies consistently producing high-quality thought leadership.

The newer study also found that 71% of hidden buyers have little or no direct interaction with sales. Content can therefore reach people involved in a purchase before the sales team ever meets them.

This creates a much more useful version of build in public for B2B founders. A cybersecurity founder can publish what the company learned from analyzing a new attack pattern. A logistics founder can explain why customers are changing warehouse workflows. A vertical SaaS founder can show anonymized patterns from customer interviews.

Daily coding updates are unlikely to interest most procurement teams.

The closer the content gets to the customer's actual problem, the more useful public building becomes.

Is build in public worth the founder's time today?

Build in public is worth the time only when the work produces customers, useful feedback, reusable content, search visibility or a stronger relationship with the right audience.

Good public distribution takes more time than posting once and returning to the product. Buffer's analysis of nearly two million posts found that accounts replying to comments tended to outperform their own baseline across all six platforms studied. The association reached roughly 30% higher engagement on LinkedIn and 42% on Threads.

That means the effective version includes conversation. It costs founder hours.

A recent r/SaaS founder described spending five to six hours per week for six months publishing MRR updates and other public content, then finding that every paying customer had arrived through outreach or word of mouth. Again, one founder does not establish a rule. The case is useful because it shows what founders should measure.

If five hours of content brings ten qualified conversations a week, the strategy may be excellent. Five hours that generate hundreds of likes from people who cannot buy the product is much harder to defend.

Revenue, qualified signups, customer conversations and reusable search traffic tell us far more than follower growth.

What does the build-in-public strategy that still works look like now?

The version of build in public that works today combines useful public expertise with distribution channels that can keep growing after a post disappears.

The first change is the subject matter. Strong founder content increasingly focuses on what customers are doing, what the company discovered, why an experiment worked or what is changing inside a market. Routine shipping updates are much harder to make interesting.

The second change is audience selection. Posting everywhere is less useful than becoming recognizable in the places where potential customers already spend time. Depending on the product, that can mean LinkedIn, Reddit, X, a niche Slack community, YouTube, an industry newsletter or a combination of them.

The third change is what happens after somebody discovers the product. Product virality, email capture, search content, community, referrals and strong word of mouth make the value of each public post compound.

Founders are also becoming more selective about what they reveal. Sharing enough to create trust remains useful. Publishing every financial, tactical and product detail creates risks that were easier to ignore when the strategy was young.

Older build-in-public playbook	Stronger version today
Daily shipping logs	Useful lessons from real work
MRR screenshots	Explain why the number changed
Grow a founder audience	Reach the people who could actually buy
Post mainly on X	Use the channel where the buyer already spends time
Measure likes and followers	Measure customers, conversations and qualified traffic
Publish almost everything	Keep temporary competitive advantages private
Depend on the founder feed	Build search, word of mouth, referrals and product loops

So is the build in public strategy dead?

No. Build in public still works, but it now behaves much more like a multiplier for good distribution than a distribution strategy a founder can rely on by itself.

The evidence for complete death is weak. Base44 used public building on LinkedIn during a run that ended in an $80 million acquisition. Buffer still exposes company metrics at more than $26 million ARR. Successful solo founders continue publishing their numbers and operating lessons. Social platforms still distribute strong founder content, and B2B research continues to show that buyers pay attention to credible expert content.

The easy version has lost much of its edge. Generic progress posts face far more competition. X is harder for ordinary accounts. Revenue screenshots are common. AI has made software dramatically easier to produce, which puts even more pressure on distribution. And founder audiences frequently contain far more builders than buyers.

The biggest shift is probably what we now expect build in public to accomplish.

A few years ago, founders could reasonably hope that documenting the journey itself would become a growth channel.

Today, the stronger strategy is to use the work happening inside the company to produce information that the right people genuinely want.

That still builds in public. It just gives the public a much better reason to care.