What’s the point of “build in public” if nobody’s watching?
Everywhere I look, people say “build in public” to grow your product and audience. Sounds great… except when you’re starting from zero and literally nobody cares yet.
From what I’ve figured out, it’s less about getting likes right now and more about leaving a trail, progress updates, decisions you’ve made, even mistakes. Most of it will get ignored in the moment, but it builds a record that people can stumble on later.
Also, “public” doesn’t have to mean blasting it to Twitter. It could be small niche communities, Reddit threads like this, or a tiny newsletter.
Basically, don’t measure it by immediate engagement. Think of it as planting seeds for your future self.
Anyone here actually started with no audience and made “build in public” work? What did you do?
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Could be for accountability, even if it’s just to yourself.
VibeScan
@_chandrshekhar_rawan This turned out to be a huge benefit for me actually. I've been making daily videos recording my journey and every day I end up thinking to myself: "What am I going to talk about in my daily video... Well, I better get something done lol"
@_chandrshekhar_rawan While I agree, I believe a lot of build in public reduces the brand value of those products, making them feel like "artisanal" and "unestablished" projects. It becomes harder to target larger business/enterprise clients as a result.
It’s almost never true that no one’s watching. While I agree that it is slow (most times), I’ve met some of the coolest people through early posts that felt like screaming into the void in that moment. You build a community slowly, and even if it feels empty, it keeps you accountable and moving. 100% recommend doing that + you need to leave your mark online once you want to market anyway so your work's never negligible
I’ve seen people given up on “build in public” after 2 weeks because they didn’t blow up. It’s more like gardening than fireworks.
Hedy AI
It helps you clarify ideas, track progress, and stay accountable. It creates a public record that future followers can discover and binge. Often, the audience appears after you’ve been consistently sharing the journey.
You can make documenting in public a 2 way street. When you track, it's easy to see your growth. Because not also documenting or tracking what's going on as you build/post in public, may make you feel nothing is working and no one is watching.
I assure you someone's watching. And you're right, don't measure stuff by immediate engagement. I wrote an article on medium about 2 years ago about using Rive to animate things on website and for edTech. This year people suddenly began reaching out to me about doing Rive animations (caught me by surprise honestly). And I also had my first client for my new studio because he saw stuff I documented online and followed me for a while.
What I'd encourage people to do is to kinda build a consistency and track stuff and document. If you're going to just use LinkedIn or Twitter or IG as a way to document, go for it. I'm also trying to understand painpoints online and stuff people (my target audience) are complaining of so I track my daily social media posting/building/ engagement to see what's working (image attached) and what I also personally need to improve on to get me to where I need to be in 5 years. From my tracker I can see that I am not putting in applications for certain opportunities, and I can tell that having so many calls in a day drains me and stops me from doing certain things. So I'm both documenting online, sharing my journey, tracking down my challenges, what I'm learning.
Yes, building in public is good for marketing/growth. But, honestly, you should be building in public for the purpose of getting early feedback so that you have more conviction that what you're building is actually something that people want to use.
When you look at it through that lense, even having one person following your journey and giving feedback can be invaluable. Over time, a larger audience will come naturally. But even when it does, you should keep the focus of building in public on soliciting feedback from the folks you're building for.
Building in public is more about identifying early adopters. Don't worry about how great your idea is; there are plenty of people with good ideas.
But more often than not, many of the people who follow you are your peers, as I've also "built in public."
However, peers can sometimes be potential customers, too.
doin that now! I think the idea is to just keep doing it, the analytics will come eventually if you have that good head on your shoulders and it hits all the markers. I'll let you know in 4 weeks. The youtube shorts I was making did not help at all though hahah
You said it right. Dont think of immediate engagement and 100's of likes. It is all about discipline and leaving your trail in the forest. Soon you will find an early adopter and it can become a jackpot.
Personally, the discipline of updating in these community kind of gave confidence and moral boost for myself.
Many people think "build in public" is some secret weapon to blow up early. That's rarely the case and you have to be doing it for the right reasons in order to have any chance of it yielding results for you.
For me, it boils down to discipline, accountability, and feedback. Like others have said, even if it feels like you're talking into the void, knowing you've "said it out loud" somewhere makes you more likely to follow through.
Truth is, it won't relate to everybody. You'll have that initial supportive community, but then comes the stall. Updates get less interesting, engagement falls off because it's no longer new and cute. It can start to sound pathetic if you're just posting the same stuff without showing tangible progress. That's when people disassociate.
I've been building Siplify, a sales commission tool that only a small subset of people will genuinely care about. But a lot of the pain I've gone through in building it, and the experiences I've had that showed there was a real need, are very relatable. So, for me, it's less about the product itself and more about being relatable and telling stories about things I've learned during the build.
It's not just saying "everybody look at me while I stack blocks." It's coming back with a pile of blocks and explaining what I learned about the landscape, why different types of blocks are important, and how it all fits together.
That's how you plant seeds for your future self, build a community slowly, and hopefully, help others along the way.