Build in Public in 2026: Your Audience Isn't Your Buyers
In June, an agency founder named Chris Leo posted an honest checkpoint on Indie Hackers. Eight weeks of build in public had made those updates his best-performing content by a wide margin. Then the conversion math: on one channel, eleven hundred plus impressions produced one link click and a couple of reactions. Early-access signups: effectively zero.
His third guess at what went wrong is the one that matters: "Builders enjoy the content. The people who actually pay for marketing services are not the same crowd."
That's the trap in one line. Building in public still gets you an audience. The 2026 question is whether that audience will ever pay you. Here's how to check, and how to take the same updates to where your buyers actually are.
What build in public means now
The idea: share the work while you do it. Decisions, revenue, failures, the bug that ate your weekend. Followers watch the product take shape, and some become your first customers.
Ten years ago that was a real edge, because almost nobody did it. Pieter Levels shared everything while most founders built in stealth and launched once. In practice, "building in public" in 2026 mostly means one thing: posting progress updates on X, often with complaints about having no MRR, tagged #buildinpublic.
The format is over-saturated. That's exactly the problem.
Does build in public still work in 2026?
It works for some founders, and for a narrower set of reasons than the advice suggests. Three things changed.
1. Everyone is doing it
In September 2024, ex-Google engineer laike9m wrote "No One Builds in Public", which went viral on Hacker News. His line: "When everyone builds in public, no one builds in public." Timelines are full of milestone posts, and most of them are achievements rather than anything a reader can use. The top Hacker News comment, quoted by Indie Hackers, put it more bluntly: people who build in public tend to end up "trapped by their chosen distribution strategy", building for other indie hackers because those are the only people watching.
2. The big hits are rare and mostly not about the product
LigoSocial published a study on September 26, 2026 of 1,209 tweets from 15 build-in-public creators on X. Even in a sample already skewed toward each creator's best posts, only 3.6% reached 10x that creator's own median likes. The single biggest hit (842x the creator's median) was a personal story about a tax office seizing a business bank account.
3. Your audience and your buyers are different people
This is the big one. If you sell to other founders, devs or indie hackers, the build-in-public crowd might really be your market. If you sell to dentists, marketing managers, Etsy sellers or HR teams, it almost certainly isn't. They aren't scrolling #buildinpublic. They're asking for help in a subreddit, on Hacker News or in an X reply chain, usually right when the problem hurts.
The builder-or-buyer test (15 minutes)
Before changing anything, find out who your build-in-public audience actually is. Open your last 10 update posts and look at everyone who liked, replied or reposted. For each person, ask one question: could this person ever pay for what I'm building?
Builder: bio says founder, indie hacker, "building X", or they post their own MRR updates.
Buyer: has the job, the problem or the budget your product serves.
Neither: bots, engagement pods, the friends who like everything.
Count them. If buyers are a healthy share, keep going and tighten your call to action (more on that below). If it's almost all builders and your buyer isn't a builder, more posting won't fix it. The venue is the problem.
Build in public where your buyers are asking
Keep sharing your work. Just move the sharing into the conversations where buyers already gather, and write it as an answer rather than an announcement.
Every build-in-public update has a buyer-facing twin: the lesson you learned shipping a feature is often what someone in a niche subreddit is asking this week.
Your build-in-public post | The buyer-facing version | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
"Shipped CSV import today 🚀" | A reply explaining how to get data out of the tool they're stuck with, with your import mentioned as one option | "Migrating off [competitor]" threads on Reddit |
"Why I chose Postgres over Firebase" | A plain answer to "what should I use for X at my size?" | Ask HN, r/webdev, X reply chains |
"MRR hit $2k 🎉" | Nothing. Buyers don't care about your MRR. | Keep it for your builder friends |
"Lesson: users never found the settings page" | "Here's what we learned watching people try to do this" | Help and "how do you handle…" threads in your niche |
"10 tools I used to launch" | The same list, cut to the 3 that answer the question asked | "Best tool for…" recommendation threads |
Two rules make this work without getting you banned. First, the answer has to stand on its own if you delete the product mention. Second, say you built the thing whenever you mention it. My guide on promoting on Reddit without getting banned covers the subreddit-by-subreddit details, and the Hacker News version explains why HN comments outperform a Show HN for most founders.
Bonus: Reddit threads rank in Google, so a good reply keeps getting found long after your X update scrolls away
What still works on your own feed
Keep posting updates, just don't expect them to do a buyer's job. The LigoSocial data has useful notes for the posts you keep:
Save-lists were the most reliable format. Curated lists of tools, resources or ideas showed up from 11 of the 15 creators, ran at 1.66x their median, and got the best bookmark rate of any common pattern.
Short wins on consistency. 140 to 280 characters, roughly a hook plus 2 to 4 short lines, had the best median engagement rate.
Images aren't a default booster on X. Text-only tweets edged out image tweets (1.60% vs 1.39% median engagement rate).
Posting time barely mattered for the biggest hits.
The bigger fix comes from Chris Leo's own post-mortem: give the reach a job. Hand over one genuinely useful thing (a template, the audit findings, a checklist) with one low-friction next step, then measure that step instead of impressions.
A weekly build-in-public routine that reaches buyers
Here's the split I'd run if I were starting from zero followers:
One update post on your own feed. Lessons and decisions, not victory laps. This is for your builder network, and that network is still useful for feedback and intros.
Five replies in buyer threads. Find threads where someone describes the problem you solve, and answer with what you learned building it.
One save-list every two weeks, built from the questions you answered that week.
One number to watch: people who took the next step (signup, reply, DM), and where they came from. Ask "how did you hear about us?" on signup.
If you already schedule your updates with a tool like Postiz, you've got the posting half covered. The Postiz + Social Cue playbook walks through pairing the two.
Where Social Cue fits
Posting and reach are two separate components, and both demand your time. The slow part of that routine is step 2: finding the five threads worth answering without losing an hour to the feed.
That's the half Social Cue handles. It's a Claude Code plugin that runs on the Claude subscription you already pay for, so there's no extra AI bill and no platform API that can be pulled out from under you. It browses Reddit, Hacker News, X, Threads and Product Hunt in a dedicated Chrome window, scores each conversation 1 to 10 for relevance to your product, and drafts a reply in your voice. Nothing posts until you approve it.
Rewrite the drafts in your own words before you send them. My post on why Reddit replies sound like AI lists the tells to cut. The free tier covers discovery, scoring and drafted replies. Pro ($19/mo) adds posting your approved replies and tracking which ones gained traction.
Build in public FAQ
Is build in public dead?
No, but the default version (MRR screenshots on X) is crowded and mostly reaches other builders. It still works well when your buyers are builders themselves, or when you share the work inside the communities your buyers already use.
Should I build in public if my customers aren't founders?
Share the work, but change the venue. Turn your lessons into answers in the subreddits, forums and reply threads where your customers ask for help. Keep a light update feed for feedback and peers.
The takeaway
Build in public was always about letting people watch you solve a problem until they trusted you to solve theirs. That still works in 2026, as long as you do it where the people with the problem are, which usually isn't your timeline. Run the builder-or-buyer test this week. If the answer is "mostly builders", take your next update into a buyer's thread.