Build in Public: Does It Actually Make Money?

You shipped something. You posted about it. A few people liked it, one left a nice comment, your follower count ticked up. It feels like progress, and in a way it is. But a week later you check the numbers and the thing that actually pays rent, revenue, has not moved. So you post again, and the loop repeats. This is the quiet trap of building in public: it produces a very convincing feeling of momentum that has almost nothing to do with whether anyone is paying you.

Where does the money actually come from?#

Building in public does not make money directly. Nobody pays you for a progress update. It makes money the same way any content does: a fraction of the people who see it turn into people who trust you, and a fraction of those turn into people who buy. The number that matters is not how many people watch. It is how many of the right people watch.

Here is the fork in the road that decides everything.

                    Build-in-public post
                            |
              +-------------+-------------+
              |                           |
        reaches BUILDERS            reaches BUYERS
        (your peers)                (people with the problem)
              |                           |
        likes, follows,             curiosity, recognition
        "great work!"               "wait, that is my problem"
              |                           |
        applause                    visit the product
              |                           |
        no purchase                 try it / sign up
        (they sell the                    |
         same dream)                pay you
              |                           |
         vanity metrics             revenue

Both paths generate the same dopamine. Notifications, follows, encouraging replies. Only one path ends in money. The reason so many builders post for a year and make nothing is that they are pouring effort down the left branch and reading the applause as if it were the right branch. If you want the underlying model laid out plainly, where does online money come from walks through the mechanisms, but the shape is always this: attention has to reach someone who has the problem before any of it can become revenue.

How it actually works#

Building in public is a distribution strategy disguised as a hobby. You post about the process of making a thing, and over months that steady stream does three useful jobs. It keeps you top of mind so that when someone finally has your problem, your name is the one they remember. It builds trust, because people watched you sweat over the details instead of just seeing a polished ad. And it creates a body of work that pulls in search traffic, gets quoted, and gives new people a reason to follow.

None of that is fake value. The mistake is assuming the audience assembles itself correctly. It does not. Audiences form around the content you make, and if your content is about the meta-game of indie hacking (revenue milestones, tech stacks, launch tactics, the founder journey) then you attract an audience of people who love the meta-game. Those are builders. When your content is about the problem your product solves, the workflow it fixes, the mistake it prevents, the hours it saves, you attract people who have that problem. Those are buyers.

The exact same account can be built in public two completely different ways. "Day 47, refactored my billing code and hit 300 signups" speaks to builders. "Here is the specific tax mistake that costs freelance designers a few hundred dollars a year, and how to catch it" speaks to the freelance designers you actually sell to. First one gets the founder crowd. Second one gets a customer. This is the same reason followers do not automatically make money: the composition of the audience matters far more than the size.

Here is the part that stings. The build-in-public genre rewards the wrong version. Milestone posts, teardown threads, and vulnerable founder stories get shared inside the builder community because that community is enormous and hungry for exactly that content. So the algorithm and your own reward system both push you toward the audience that will never buy. You have to consciously fight the current.

A simple example with numbers#

These numbers are hypothetical, made up to show the mechanism, not a promise or a typical result. Say two solo devs each build the same small tool for freelance bookkeepers over three months, and each grows to 3,000 followers on the same platform.

Builder A posts the genre classics. MRR screenshots, "how I built this in a weekend," stack breakdowns, the emotional ups and downs. The audience that assembles is roughly 90 percent other founders and aspiring founders. Of 3,000 followers, maybe 300 are actually freelance bookkeepers or close enough. A launch post reaches, say, 1,500 people, of whom 150 are plausible customers, and a handful click through. On a good day that is one or two sales.

Builder B posts about bookkeeping. The messy client that never sends receipts, the reconciliation trick that saves an afternoon, the year-end checklist. The product shows up only as the natural answer to problems the audience already feels. The audience that assembles is maybe 70 percent freelance bookkeepers and adjacent freelancers. Of 3,000 followers, roughly 2,000 are plausible customers. The same launch post reaches 1,500 people, but now around 1,000 of them have the problem, and a meaningful slice tries the tool.

Same follower count. Same effort. Wildly different revenue, because the audiences are made of different people. Builder A has a fan club. Builder B has a market. If either of them started routing those watchers onto an email list, Builder B's list would be worth many times more per subscriber, which is the whole argument in turn X followers into an email list.

What you need#

You do not need a big following to start, and chasing one first is usually a mistake. What you need is:

• A clear picture of who your customer actually is. Not "developers," not "small businesses." A specific person with a specific problem. If you cannot name them, your posts cannot aim at them.
• A steady supply of things worth saying to that person. This is the real fuel, and it comes from doing the work, talking to users, and solving real problems, not from a content calendar.
• One platform you will actually stick with. Consistency beats presence everywhere. Pick where your customers already are, which is not automatically where the loudest builders hang out. How to grow on X from zero covers the mechanics if that is your platform.
• A way to capture interest before you need it. An email list, a waitlist, a free resource. Follows are borrowed attention. An email address is attention you own.
• Patience and a thick skin. Early posts land quietly. That is normal, not a verdict.

What it costs#

Required (roughly free, but not actually free): Your time and your attention. Realistically a few hours a week to post consistently and reply to people. The hidden cost is opportunity: hours spent crafting a milestone thread for the founder crowd are hours not spent talking to actual buyers.

Optional: A simple email tool to capture subscribers (many have free tiers to start). A basic landing page. Maybe a scheduling tool so posting does not eat your day.

Nice to have, not now: Paid analytics, design tools, a newsletter platform with automation. None of this makes the difference between revenue and no revenue. The composition of your audience does.

The most expensive thing about building in public is not money. It is the months you can burn feeling productive while aiming at the wrong people.

How long it takes#

Longer than the highlight reel suggests, and the timeline depends almost entirely on aim, not effort. If you are posting to the right audience, you can get useful signal in weeks: replies from real prospects, the occasional "how do I use this," early sales. Compounding, where old posts keep pulling in the right people and your name starts preceding you, tends to take many months of consistency.

If you are posting to the wrong audience, it can take forever, because the feedback loop lies to you. Applause arrives quickly and revenue never does, so you keep optimizing for more applause. People spend a year "building in public" with a healthy follower count and a dead Stripe dashboard for exactly this reason. Speed here is not about posting more. It is about pointing sooner.

What beginners usually get wrong#

Reading engagement as demand. Likes from other founders are not buying signals. A comment that says "great work, following your journey" is a peer, not a prospect. Learn to distinguish "this is inspiring" from "I need this."

Posting the genre instead of the value. MRR updates, stack posts, and founder-diary content feel like building in public because everyone else does it, but they select for builders. The instinct to post them is strong precisely because they perform. Performing and selling are different jobs.

Confusing being known in the community with being known in the market. You can be a respected name among indie hackers and completely invisible to the people who would pay you. Those are two separate rooms.

Trying to convert followers with a link and a pitch. Dropping "check out my product" into a feed of peers converts poorly, which is the same failure pattern behind why "drop your link" threads do not work. Attention gathered around your journey does not automatically transfer to your offer.

Believing the audience has to come before the customers. It does not. You can get your first paying users through direct conversations while your audience is still tiny, and let building in public compound in the background. Getting your first 10 customers is usually a conversation problem, not an audience problem.

How I would start#

If I were a solo dev deciding whether to build in public, here is the sequence I would follow.

First, I would get clear on the single customer I am building for, down to where they already spend time online. Everything downstream depends on this, so I would not skip it.

Second, I would not wait for an audience to start making money. I would go have direct conversations with people who have the problem, offer to help, and try to close a handful of paying users by hand. This teaches you what your customers actually care about, which is the raw material for every post worth making. The idea that distribution beats product starts here, in the unglamorous work of reaching people one at a time.

Third, I would build in public about the problem, not the process. For every post about my revenue or my code, I would post several about the thing my customer struggles with. The product appears as the answer, not the subject.

Fourth, I would send everyone somewhere I own. A post is rented ground. I would offer a genuinely useful free resource in exchange for an email, so that interest I earn today is reachable when I have something to sell tomorrow. If you want the customer-getting side turned into a concrete plan, I put together a free companion, the First 10 Customers Playbook, and you can grab it here.

Fifth, I would judge the whole effort by the right metric. Not followers, not likes. Conversations with real prospects, emails captured from actual buyers, and sales. If those move, it is working. If only the vanity numbers move, I am on the left branch of that diagram and I need to change what I post.

What I would not do#

I would not post revenue screenshots as a growth strategy. They pull the founder crowd almost exclusively, and while they feel like proof of momentum, they mostly recruit an audience that will never buy.

I would not measure success by follower count. It is the easiest number to move and the least connected to money, which is a bad combination.

I would not treat building in public as a substitute for talking to customers. It is a complement. The builders who make it work are usually doing founder-led sales at the same time, not instead.

I would not keep aiming at the same room and expecting a different result. If a year of consistent posting has produced applause and no sales, the honest read is that the audience is made of the wrong people, and posting harder will not fix the composition.

And I would not fall for the idea that this is optional busywork. Distribution is the actual job once the product exists, a point how making money online works keeps coming back to. Building in public is one good way to do that job, as long as it is pointed at buyers.

The close#

Building in public is not a scam and it is not magic. It is a slow, compounding way to earn distribution and trust, which are two of the most valuable things a solo dev can own. But it only makes money when the crowd it gathers is your market, not your mirror. The default, if you post the genre everyone else posts, is a warm and encouraging audience of other builders who will cheer every milestone and buy nothing. That is not a failure of the strategy. It is a failure of aim.

So before your next post, ask the only question that matters: is this for a buyer, or for a builder? Do that honestly, week after week, and building in public stops being a vanity treadmill and starts being the reason people who have your problem already know your name.