Building in public has become a popular go-to-market strategy for early-stage founders, particularly in the SaaS and AI product space. The pitch is compelling: share your progress publicly, attract an audience, convert that audience into customers, and generate the kind of authentic word-of-mouth that paid advertising cannot produce. There is a version of building in public that works well for distribution — creating an audience, building credibility, and generating inbound interest. There is a version that does not work and is actively harmful: using the audience’s response to your building-in-public content as validation that the product has a market.
The people who follow founder journey content are systematically different from the people who will pay for the product the founder is building. Founder journey followers are primarily other founders, aspiring founders, people interested in the startup ecosystem, and people who enjoy watching companies develop. These audiences have genuine overlap with paying customer audiences in some product categories — a developer tool will have overlap, a productivity tool aimed at knowledge workers will have some overlap. But in most B2B SaaS categories, the population of people who find a founder’s progress updates interesting and the population of people who will pay to solve the specific operational problem the product addresses are largely non-overlapping groups. Getting signal from the wrong population produces misleading conclusions about the right one.
What building-in-public audiences are actually measuring
When a founder shares their product development progress and receives positive engagement — likes, comments, follows, encouraging replies — they are receiving signal about the quality of the content, not about the product’s market viability. A well-written thread about the process of building a SaaS product generates engagement from people who found it interesting to read. It does not generate evidence that the people who read it would pay for the product, that the problem the product solves is one they have, or that they are in the market segment the product is targeting.
The engagement metric is particularly misleading when it comes from other founders. A founder who shares a problem they encountered and the solution they built will receive the most enthusiastic engagement from people who have encountered a similar problem in their own building process. This engagement feels like validation — other builders resonate with the pain point, they say it describes their experience exactly, they ask where they can sign up. But other builders are a specific and often unrepresentative sample of the target market. They share the founder’s frame of reference, vocabulary, and concerns in a way that most end customers do not. Their resonance reflects the shared experience of building software, not the market’s demand for the product being built.
The waitlist conversion rate from building-in-public audiences is consistently lower than from direct outreach to target customers, because the audience contains a large proportion of people who were interested in the content and a small proportion who are potential buyers with an urgent need for the product. The interest-to-intent gap is larger in a building-in-public audience than in almost any other acquisition channel, because the channel selects for content interest rather than problem urgency.
The specific ways building-in-public validation misleads
Beyond the audience composition problem, building in public as a validation strategy produces two specific misleading signals that shape product decisions in ways that can be costly to correct.
The first is feature prioritization based on audience enthusiasm rather than customer need. A founder who shares progress on different features and measures which ones generate the most engagement will observe that certain features — typically the technically interesting ones, the AI-powered ones, or the ones that make for compelling demonstrations — generate more engagement than the ones that solve the most acute customer problems. The boring infrastructure that makes a product reliable, the workflow integration that makes it indispensable, the pricing flexibility that makes it accessible to the target segment — these do not generate social media engagement. Building toward audience enthusiasm rather than toward the features that would make the product work for paying customers produces a product optimized for demonstration rather than for daily use.
The second misleading signal is market size estimation from audience size. A founder who has built a large audience while building in public may interpret audience size as evidence of market size. These are unrelated measurements. An audience is a set of people who found the content worth following. A market is a set of people who have an urgent problem and the willingness and ability to pay for a solution. A large audience for building-in-public content is evidence of distribution capability — a genuine asset for product launch. It is not evidence of market size or of the proportion of the audience that will convert to paying customers.
How to use building in public without using it as validation
Building in public is a legitimate distribution strategy when it is used for what it is good at — building an audience, generating inbound interest, and creating accountability for progress. It is not a validation strategy and should not be treated as one. These practices keep the two activities separate.
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Separate audience engagement metrics from validation metrics entirely. Track likes, followers, and comments as distribution metrics. Track paying customers, trial-to-paid conversion rates, and churn as validation metrics. Never use the first category as a proxy for the second. Report them to co-founders and advisors in separate sections and resist the framing that a growing audience is evidence of a growing market.
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Validate with the target customer segment directly, in parallel with building in public. The building-in-public audience will not tell you whether your specific target customer will pay. Find twenty people who match the exact customer definition — job title, company size, industry, problem urgency — and talk to them or charge them before concluding anything about the market. These conversations happen outside your public content, with people who may not be following you, and they produce a different quality of signal.
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Use the building-in-public audience to recruit validation subjects, not to generate validation responses. A large audience is useful for finding people who match your target customer profile and recruiting them for customer interviews, prototype sessions, or paid pilots. Post a specific call to action aimed at the exact customer you are looking for: “If you are a head of operations at a company with 20–100 employees and you currently track vendor contracts in a spreadsheet, I would like to talk to you.” The audience converts from an engagement audience to a research recruitment tool.
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Measure the audience-to-paying-customer conversion rate and use it to calibrate how much signal to draw from engagement. After the first launch cohort, calculate what percentage of your building-in-public audience became paying customers. This ratio tells you how predictive your audience engagement was of commercial demand. If it is very low — as it typically is in B2B SaaS — recalibrate the weight you give to audience response as a validation signal for future product and feature decisions.
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Share failures and wrong turns as much as wins. Building-in-public content that only shares progress and wins selects for audience members who are attracted to success narratives. Building-in-public content that shares genuine uncertainty, wrong turns, and hard customer conversations attracts a more rigorous audience and, more importantly, keeps the founder’s own framing honest about what is and is not working.
What building in public is actually useful for
Building in public is useful for distribution, for accountability, and for building the credibility that makes launch press and early customer conversations easier. A founder who has built an audience of ten thousand followers before launch has a distribution advantage that a founder who built in private does not have. That advantage is real and worth cultivating deliberately.
The mistake is to treat the distribution advantage as a validation advantage. Distribution gets the product in front of people. Validation determines whether those people have the problem, whether the product solves it, and whether they will pay. The founder who conflates the two will launch to a large audience, generate a burst of signups from people who found the content interesting, and discover that the conversion to paid customers is far lower than the audience size suggested — because the audience was selecting for content interest, not for problem urgency.
The founders who use building in public most effectively are those who treat it as a megaphone for their validated product, not as the research that validates it. They build the audience while doing the separate, less public work of finding their specific customer, understanding their specific problem, and testing whether the product solves it well enough that people will pay. When they launch to their audience, they are launching a product that is validated through direct customer work — and the audience is the distribution channel that gets the already-validated product in front of the people most likely to convert.
