Does Build in Public Get Customers? What the Evidence Says

9 min read

Came here from Instagram, LinkedIn, X or YouTube? Here is the full source list you came for. Everything below is built from these, nothing else.

The breakdown

• "Build in Public" Is Everywhere. Does It Actually Get You Customers?, DEV Community, Oct 22 2026

The receipts inside it

• The Senja interview (March 2023), RB2B coverage and the Indie Hackers retrospective (September 2025), as summarised in the same article
• The reader reply from Oleksandr, founder of JSONex Lab, in the comments, Oct 22 2026

A breakdown published on DEV Community on October 22, 2026 asked the question most indie founders avoid: does building in public actually get you paying customers, or just applause? It lined up three documented accounts. Senja, where one in four paying customers came from Twitter and building in public. RB2B, reported at $5 million ARR in about 13 months. And a six month effort that ended at $18 in monthly revenue.

The answer it lands on is neither yes nor no. The evidence is self reported, it can't separate building in public from everything else those founders did, and we mostly hear from the people it worked for. Where it did work, the audience was already close to the buyer. The article closes with a four week experiment you can run on your own product instead of guessing.

Key takeaways

• Senja's co-founder said 1 in 4 paying customers and 1 in 3 signups came from Twitter and building in public, at about 7 hours a week.
• RB2B's Adam Robinson reportedly reached $5M ARR in about 13 months, posting to SaaS operators, who are exactly the people RB2B sells to.
• One Indie Hackers founder posted daily for six months and got 43 signups, 2 paying customers and $18 MRR.
• None of these numbers are audited, and none isolate building in public from SEO, existing audiences or product demand.
• The common thread: it seems to work when your audience is your buyer, the content helps that buyer, and there is a clear next step.
• You can test it in four weeks by measuring qualified conversations, not likes or revenue.

What happened with build in public, and why is it in the news?

The trigger is a long, careful post that refuses to pick a side. It starts with Senja, a customer testimonial tool. In 2023 its founders noticed how much attention revenue screenshots were getting and nicknamed the makers who focused on milestones "milestone men". They started sharing losses and context alongside wins.

But they were not skeptics. In the same March 2023 interview, co-founder Olly said Senja had reached $4,000 MRR in under a year, and called building in public, along with SEO, the best return marketing work they did.

So the same practice earned some founders applause and, by one founder's account, earned another founder paying customers. The article is about the gap between those two outcomes.

Why does this matter to a developer shipping a product?

Because if you build software, posting about it feels like the cheapest marketing you have. It is not free.

Olly said he spent about seven hours a week on it. For a solo founder that is nearly a full working day. The honest comparison is not "posting versus nothing". It is posting versus the same hours spent building, or messaging people who fit your buyer profile directly.

The second reason is that likes mislead in a very specific way. The article lays out a simplified funnel, and it is worth keeping next to your analytics:

Stage	What you can count	What it tells you
Attention	Impressions, likes, followers	People saw it. 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	Someone tried it, maybe got value
Revenue	Paying customers	Someone valued it enough to pay
Durability	Retention or repeat purchases	The value held up

A post can do brilliantly at the top and add nothing at the bottom. The article's example: if your audience is mostly other founders and you sell to dentists, a viral thread is a pleasant event with no commercial consequence.

It cuts the other way too. Olly said far more happens in DMs than people assume, especially around launches. Someone who never clicks a link may still remember your name later. So you track conversations, not just clicks.

What do the three founder accounts actually show?

Here is each one, with the caveat the article attaches to it.

Senja: customers, with conditions. One in three signups and one in four paying customers came from Twitter and building in public, at $4,000 MRR, in March 2023. Those figures combine Twitter and building in public, so they don't isolate the strategy. Olly also said it is easier if you make a product for other makers, it can take months to produce sales even then, and he was not starting from zero. He had a small audience from an earlier project.

RB2B: the spectacular one. Interviews, including a ProductLed podcast episode, report that Adam Robinson took RB2B, a website visitor identification product, to $5 million ARR in about 13 months with a tiny team, using LinkedIn heavily. A write-up by Trueframe, a content agency, says he attributed about 75% of site traffic to LinkedIn in an October 2025 snapshot. The same write-up notes his launch retrospectives disagree on basics: 1,600 waitlist members in one telling, 3,000 free signups in another. And his meme content drew people outside his buyer group.

Look at what surrounds the numbers. He already ran a larger, established company. His LinkedIn audience was SaaS operators. RB2B sells to SaaS operators. That is less "I posted memes and got rich" and more "I posted to the exact people who buy". These are his claims, not audited results.

The six month failure. In September 2025 a founder on Indie Hackers described posting daily updates and sharing on Reddit. Result: 43 signups, 2 paying customers, $18 MRR. Their own diagnosis was that the people cheering them on were supporters, not people with the problem. It is one self reported anecdote, the post ends by linking the author's product, and it is as much a story about weak demand as about posting.

What can't this evidence prove?

This is the part most build in public threads skip, so I want to be precise about it.

1. Every number is self reported. Nobody audited any of them.
2. Nothing is isolated. Senja credits SEO alongside Twitter. Robinson had a company and a reputation among his buyers. The failed project may simply have lacked a real problem. Building in public might be the cause, a contributor, or just along for the ride.
3. You mostly hear from the visible. Founders who posted for a year, got nothing and moved on rarely write retrospectives. The author flags this as an inference, and says they found no controlled comparison of founders who build in public against similar founders who don't.

So if you see a neat "founders who build in public grow X times faster" stat, ask where the denominator came from.

What changes in practice?

Stop treating "build in public" as one thing. The article splits it into four activities that attract different people:

• Progress sharing. Changelogs, screenshots, technical decisions. Mostly interesting to people who care about the process.
• Metrics sharing. Revenue, signups, churn. Builds credibility, and easily turns into a performance.
• Teaching. Posts that solve a reader's problem whether or not they buy. Content marketing under your name.
• Conversation. Asking users for feedback and answering people who have the problem you solve.

Progress and metrics posts tend to pull in people who like following founders. Teaching and conversation tend to pull in people with the problem. If you sell to anyone other than founders, that difference is your whole funnel.

A reader reply under the article makes the point better than I can. Oleksandr is building a B2B API at JSONex Lab. He is still waiting for his first ten paying customers, but he knows where the signups came from: almost all of them from one technical article about how his ingestion pipeline works. Not the launch, not the build in public posts, not the landing page. The article solved a specific problem his buyers were already searching for.

The conditions the source suggests, framed as hypotheses rather than rules:

• Audience overlap. Your customers have to be where you post.
• Content a buyer would value. A revenue screenshot shows a business exists. It rarely shows a buyer you will solve their problem.
• A route from reading to trying. A free tier, a waitlist, a DM follow up. Attention without a path leaves people nowhere to go.
• An honest time budget. Count your hours against building and direct outreach.

One more: transparency is a choice, not a duty. Customer details, security specifics and anything under contract stay out of public updates, however well they would perform.

I build Art of Code in public on X, so this is aimed at me as much as you.

What should you do this week?

Start the four week experiment. It measures leading indicators, not revenue, because Senja's experience suggests sales can take months. The single question it answers: is public content producing conversations with people who look like buyers?

This week, before you post anything:

1. Record a baseline. How many signups you get per week now, where they come from, and how many hours you can honestly spend. Without a baseline, any result is uninterpretable.
2. Write one sentence naming who pays you and where they already read or talk. If you can't write it, you learned something before posting a word.
3. Set a hypothesis with a number. For example: "Posting twice a week in [place] will start conversations with at least [N] people who fit my buyer profile." Pick N now, from your baseline and what the same hours of direct outreach would produce. Not after you see results.
4. Set up attribution. A distinct tracked link per channel, a hand kept DM log, and one free text "how did you hear about us?" question at signup that lets people name more than one touchpoint. Accept that it undercounts, because people who see a post and come back later often look like direct traffic.

A plain log is enough. Something like this:

Date	Channel	Post type	Who replied	Fits buyer profile?	Next step
		teaching / update / reply		yes / no	trial / call / none

Weeks one to four:

• Pick one or two places where buyers already spend time. Reply and take part more than you broadcast.
• Mix teaching posts on a buyer's problem, build updates framed around what changed for a user, and replies in existing communities. Revenue screenshots are optional.
• Log which post type led to each qualified conversation.
• At the end of week two, check if the routine is sustainable and the content is landing with the right people.

At week four, decide. Look at the quality of conversations (one qualified chat can beat ten polite likes), whether any became trials, how much time you spent, and whether you reached the right audience. Then continue, change the channel or content, or run another cycle. If attention is high but buyers are absent, that usually points to the wrong venue or topic, not the wrong product. If qualified conversations stay near zero after two cycles, the author suggests demoting it to an accountability and networking habit.

Don't use four weeks to call the whole strategy a success or a failure. Paying customers and retention probably won't show up that fast.

FAQ

Does building in public actually get you customers?

Sometimes. In the documented cases where it did, like Senja and RB2B, the audience was already close to the buyer, the content was useful to that buyer, and there was a path from reading to trying. Without those, it may still help with accountability, feedback and networking, but its value as an acquisition channel is much less certain.

How much time does building in public take?

Senja's co-founder said he spent about seven hours a week on it. For a solo founder that is close to a full working day, so compare it against the same hours spent building or doing direct outreach, not against doing nothing.

Is there data proving build in public works?

Not the kind that settles it. The accounts available are self reported, they mix building in public with SEO, existing audiences and product demand, and the author of the breakdown found no controlled comparison between founders who do it and similar founders who don't.

What should I measure instead of likes?

Replies and DMs from people who fit your buyer profile, and qualified visits to your site. Then signups and activation in the middle, and paying customers and retention last. Use a tracked link per channel, log DMs by hand, and ask new users how they found you.

Write your one sentence buyer profile today, then use the free tools on Art of Code to handle the busywork while you run the test. For a case where one public article really did move revenue, read how Postiz went from $17K to $191K MRR.

Written by Adithya Guttha, Founder of Art of Code.