Building in public works. It is one of the few reliable ways for an unknown person to get attention without a budget. It also has a specific failure mode that takes about a year to notice: you end up with a warm, supportive audience of other founders who love the journey, cheer every milestone, and will never be your customer.
The cause is straightforward. Revenue screenshots, launch retrospectives and stack decisions are interesting to people building something. Your customers are usually not building something. They have a job, a problem, and no particular interest in your MRR. If everything you publish is aimed at builders, builders are who you get.
Two audiences, two kinds of post
It helps to be explicit that build-in-public content serves two distinct purposes, and to stop treating them as one activity.
Journey posts, the progress updates and numbers and lessons, are distribution. They earn attention, reach, followers and the occasional collaboration. That is genuinely valuable and it is what gets you noticed at all. But their audience is peers, and peers convert to customers only when your product happens to serve peers.
Problem posts describe the situation your product ends, in the language of the person suffering it. They get less reach, fewer replies, and considerably more revenue. They are boring to your existing follower base and legible to strangers who have the problem.
A build-in-public strategy that converts runs both deliberately, rather than drifting into only the first because it feels better.
What to share that a buyer would care about
You can build in public without making yourself the subject. The raw material is the same, aimed differently.
- The bug you fixed, framed as the customer situation that caused it, rather than as a technical war story.
- A support conversation, anonymised, that shows a real person’s problem and how it got solved.
- The decision you made about a feature, and which kind of user it favours. This tells prospects whether you are building for them.
- What you removed and why. Removals signal judgement more strongly than additions.
- A number that means something to the customer, such as how long a job takes now versus before, rather than only revenue.
Notice that none of these require hiding anything. You can be completely transparent about revenue and still spend most of your output on content a buyer would read.
The revenue screenshot problem
Posting your revenue chart is the highest-engagement, lowest-conversion content available to a founder. It performs because it is a status signal in a community obsessed with the same metric. It rarely converts because a prospective customer does not buy software on the strength of how well it is selling.
It is not useless. Growing revenue is a credibility signal for a product people worry will be abandoned, and that worry is real for small tools. The mistake is frequency. If revenue updates are your recognisable content, you have positioned yourself as a founder-influencer rather than as the person who solves a specific problem, and the two lead to very different businesses.
Also be careful with the incentive it creates. Content that gets rewarded gets repeated. If your best-performing posts are all about you, you will make more of them, and the audience composition will drift further from your buyers every month.
Always leave a next step for the reader with the problem
Many build-in-public posts end with nothing. No link, no offer, no invitation. The author reasons that the profile is right there. In practice, a reader who felt a flicker of recognition and then scrolled past does not come back.
This does not mean bolting a sales pitch onto every update. It means that when a post touches the problem you solve, the last line should give a person with that problem somewhere to go. One link, one action, phrased for the reader rather than for you.
Use a distinct tracked link per post rather than one link reused everywhere. Otherwise you will end the quarter knowing that build-in-public generated traffic without knowing which of the two content types generated any of the money.
Transparency has limits worth setting in advance
Building in public rewards openness, which makes it easy to publish things you later wish you had not. Decide the boundaries before you are in the middle of a good week or a bad one, because both produce the urge to overshare.
- Never name or make identifiable a customer without asking. Anonymise the situation, keep the lesson.
- Do not publish numbers you are not prepared to publish again when they fall. Selective transparency is worse than none.
- Keep security, infrastructure and access details out of it, however interesting the incident was.
- Avoid public commitments to dates. A missed date in public costs more credibility than the feature was worth.
The other limit is emotional. Publishing every low point invites an audience that is invested in your struggle rather than your product. Some honesty about difficulty is credible and humanising. A running account of your anxiety attracts sympathy, which does not convert and is unpleasant to have to keep performing.
Instrument it, then read the ranking
The only way to know whether building in public is building a business is to attribute revenue to the posts, not engagement. Engagement will always favour journey content. Revenue frequently favours the quiet problem posts that nobody replied to.
When founders first look at this ranking, the usual finding is that a small number of unglamorous posts account for most attributed revenue, while the widely shared milestone posts account for follower growth and almost nothing else. Both are doing a job. The error was assuming the popular one was doing both.
seenpaid was built to produce that ranking: publish across the networks you use, carry a tracked link on each post, connect Stripe read-only, and see revenue attributed post by post. The value is not the dashboard, it is that it stops you optimising for applause by default.
A ratio that tends to work
If you want a starting point rather than a principle: aim for roughly half your output to be content a customer would find useful, a quarter to be journey and process content that earns reach, and the remainder to be direct, unambiguous offers. Then adjust based on what the revenue ranking tells you after a quarter.
The goal is not to stop building in public. It is to make sure the audience it builds contains the people who would pay you, and to know, rather than hope, that it does.
Publish across the networks where both audiences live, keep a tracked link on anything that points somewhere, and let attributed revenue decide the mix. seenpaid handles the publishing and the attribution together so that ranking is available without a spreadsheet.