You’re 'Building in Public' for the Wrong People

I used to think “Build in Public” was the answer. You’ve heard the sermon, right? Share your journey, post your MRR charts, tweet every little win and crushing defeat. The community will reward your transparency, and customers will flock to your digital door.

It’s a great story. And for most founders, it’s a trap.

I watched a founder—let’s call him Li—do everything by the book. He shared his progress on a cool AI tool for marketers. He got the likes. He got the encouraging DMs. But after eight months, his user base wasn't the marketing managers he was building for. It was a crowd of other developers, aspiring founders, and people who just liked watching the show.

He wasn't building a customer base. He was building a fan club. And he’s not alone.

The problem isn't that sharing your journey is bad. It’s that we’re all doing it wrong. We’re mistaking applause from the wrong audience for a product that people will actually pay for.

What’s Wrong with “Building in Public”

Most advice on this feels like a recipe for getting internet famous. “Document the grind,” “be vulnerable,” “share your metrics.” It’s no wonder we end up performing for an audience of our peers instead of connecting with our customers.

The real issue isn’t that your customers hate transparency—it’s that they aren’t even in the room. They’re too busy doing the job you’re supposedly trying to help them with.

When you post your journey in generic startup channels, you attract a predictable cast of characters who will never, ever pay you.

The Startup Voyeur: Loves the drama of entrepreneurship. They'll talk your ear off about your strategy and vision, but they don't have the problem your product solves. Their feedback is a hobby, not a need.
The Tool Collector: Is addicted to free betas. They’ll sign up for anything new, offer some vague, enthusiastic feedback, and disappear the second a credit card form appears. Their validation is a sugar high.
The Fellow Founder: Looks like a user, but they’re just doing homework. They’re mining your public struggles for their own competitive research. They're a student of your journey, not a customer for your product.

You end up in an echo chamber of other founders. Someone called it “startup karaoke”—everyone’s singing, but nobody’s buying a ticket. And you’re building your product based on feedback from all the wrong people.

What Actually Works: Solving in Public

The fix isn’t to go build in a secret basement. The fix is to change who you’re talking to and what you’re talking about.

Stop "Building in Public." Start "Solving in Public."

The focus shifts from your process to their problem. It's a simple change, but it makes all the difference. This means fixing two things: your message and your stage.

1. Talk About Their Problem, Not Your Code

Your customers don’t care about your tech stack. They don’t care that you refactored the database or finally squashed that bug. They have a problem, and they only care if you can solve it.

Instead of sharing your git log, share their outcome.

Show the "Before and After." "Here's how our target user does this painful task now. It takes 2 hours." (Before). "Here's how they do it with our tool. It takes 5 minutes." (After). This speaks a universal language.
Document you solving the actual problem. Building a tool for house flippers? Don't show your code. Show yourself trying to flip a house using your own tool. Document the wins and, more importantly, where your own tool falls short. That's real, valuable content.
Share user wins. When a customer achieves something great with your product, celebrate it. "Sarah just saved 10 hours this week on reporting." That's more powerful than any feature announcement you could ever write.

The key: Make your product the solution to a story they’re already living, not the story itself.

2. Go Where Your Customers Actually Are

Even the perfect message is useless if it’s delivered in the wrong room. Your ideal customer—the construction manager, the accountant, the florist—is probably not scrolling through #startup Twitter.

You have to become an anthropologist for your customer. Find their digital watering holes.

Where to look:

Niche Subreddits: Forget r/startups. If you’re building for lawyers, you need to be in r/LawFirm. Lurk first. Learn the culture. Answer questions. Be useful.
Specific LinkedIn Groups: The real work on LinkedIn happens in groups like "E-commerce Logistics Professionals." Join the conversation.
Industry Forums and Slacks: Every profession has them. These are the hidden-gem communities where real practitioners talk shop. An invite here is worth more than 10,000 Twitter followers.

The key: You can’t fake being part of a community. Go there to listen and help, not to broadcast.

The Unsexy Work That Wins

The best feedback will never come from a public post. It comes from the "boring" work of talking to people one-on-one.

Your real customers are busy, but they will make 15 minutes for you if they believe you can solve a huge pain for them. The most important work is still the stuff you can’t automate:

Finding 20 people on LinkedIn who are your perfect customer.
Sending them a personal, non-spammy note asking to learn about their job.
Getting on a call and just listening.

These quiet conversations are where you find the exact words they use to describe their problems. This is where you find out what they'd actually pay for.

Getting Started (Without the Performance)

If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, it’s not your fault. You were following a popular playbook that's flawed. Time to pivot.

Audit your audience. Look at the last 20 people who liked your "build in public" post. Do they match your ideal customer profile? Be honest.
Find one new channel. Identify one subreddit, LinkedIn group, or forum where your customers actually hang out. Spend the next week just reading.
Rewrite one post. Take your last update about your process and reframe it around a customer's problem and outcome.
Schedule one "boring" conversation. Find one person who fits your ICP and ask for 15 minutes to learn about their work. No pitch. Just listen.

That's it. No "growth hacks." No "vulnerability porn." Just a focused effort to solve a real problem for a real person.

The Bottom Line

"Building in Public" works when it's not about you. When you genuinely solve a problem for a specific community, they'll want to know what you’re working on. When you're just performing entrepreneurship for a crowd of other performers, they can tell.

The best validation isn't a viral tweet. It's the quiet sound of a new customer—the right customer—signing up because you proved you understand their world.

And that's not a strategy you can fake—it's just being useful.