Does building in public work?

The short answer: not as a way to get customers, at least not on Reddit. I followed 13,860 founders who kept posting about what they were building, and compared the ones who posted progress updates (“Day 30 of building X”, “Month 3: $400 MRR”) with ones who posted just as often without them. They went on to post a first customer at the same rate. What building in public does seem to do is keep some people going, and most people don’t keep going: 76% of the founders who posted an update never posted a second one. And the updates themselves show how slow the start is. Of the ones that said how many paying customers they had, 59% said none, and the typical update had no paying customers until month four.

I used every post since 2022 in seven builder subreddits (r/SaaS, r/SideProject, r/startups, r/indiehackers, r/Entrepreneur, r/microsaas and r/buildinpublic), already sorted into posts by people building something. Then I read 400 progress updates, one per founder, to see what they actually reported: how far in they were, their users, paying customers and revenue, and what they were doing to get noticed.

Building in public got four times as popular

Progress updates went from 5.8 in every 1,000 builder posts in 2022 to 21.9 in 2026, most of the jump coming in 2025. It’s now standard advice: post your progress, share your numbers, let people follow along, and the audience you build becomes your first customers. So it’s worth checking whether that happens.

Founders who post updates look like they do better, until you compare like with like

Here’s the raw comparison, for founders with at least three builder posts over at least two weeks, whose first post went up before July 2026 so everyone had four months to post again:

At first glance, building in public doubles your odds. But look at the last column: the same founders were also twice as likely to say later that they were stuck getting customers. And they posted twice as much. People who post more report more of everything, good and bad. The fair comparison is between founders who posted the same amount:

The ranges in brackets are 95% ranges. In every row they overlap: at the same number of posts, founders who posted progress updates were no more likely to post a first customer later. If anything, at 5 to 7 posts they were more likely to say they were stuck (10.2% against 5.9%), which fits people who are being open about how it’s going.

What does go with getting customers is sticking around. Founders with 26 or more builder posts were more than ten times as likely to post a first customer as founders with three or four, updates or not. That doesn’t mean posting more causes customers. People with something working have more to post about. But it does mean the format of the post isn’t what matters.

Most build-in-public series end after one post

Of the 1,921 founders who posted at least one progress update, 1,464 never posted another. Of the 457 who did, half had stopped within 4.2 days of their first, and 80.5% within a month. 38 posted ten or more updates, and 50 kept going for three months or longer.

A lot of these series announce themselves: “Day 1 of building in public”, “Day 1 of 100”, “I’ll post every day until I hit $10k MRR”. Most get one or two days in. That’s worth knowing before you start one, because a series that stops in public is its own kind of signal.

What the updates say, stage by stage

Of the 400 updates I read, 362 were a founder’s own progress post (the rest were ads or advice using the same format). Here’s what they reported, by how far in they said they were. Each median is only over the updates that gave that number, shown in brackets:

48% of the updates were from the first week, which tells you where the energy goes. In week one, about half the products weren’t live yet, and 72% of the updates that gave a number had no paying customers. By months two and three, nearly everything had launched and the typical update reported about 125 users, but 10 of the 19 that gave a number still had no paying customers, and the median monthly revenue among those that gave one was $76. Only from month four did the typical update report a paying customer at all.

Across all 362, 37 gave a monthly revenue figure; 21 of those said $0, and 6 said $1,000 or more. The few updates more than a year in (8 of them) reported far more, a median of $5,533 a month among the 4 that said, but those are the founders still posting a year later, which is survivorship in one row.

Almost nobody says whether it worked

I also recorded whether each founder said building in public had brought them users or customers. 14 of 362 said either way: 12 yes and 2 no. Several of the yes answers credited X, where their posts found an audience, rather than Reddit. A few more said it brought feedback or engagement, which I didn’t count. For most people writing these, the point isn’t distribution. It’s accountability: a reason to ship something today and say so.

That’s a fine reason. It just isn’t the one the advice usually gives.

Where they looked for users

55% of the updates didn’t mention any way they were getting the product in front of people. Of the ones that did, these came up most, as a share of all 362 updates:

Reddit is first because these are Reddit posts, so read that with care. What stands out is how far down the list the direct channels are. Cold email (3.6%) and cold DMs (3%) each came up in about one update in thirty. Some of the founders who described real traction credited small communities where their buyers already were, or writing to people who had described the problem in public, more than the updates themselves.

So does building in public work?

As a habit, it can. If writing down what you shipped keeps you shipping and talking to people, that’s worth having, and the founders who stuck around did better whatever they posted. As a channel, the evidence here says no: on Reddit, a progress update didn’t bring customers any more than any other post by the same founder would have.

My reading is the same as for Product Hunt categories: the people who read build-in-public posts are mostly other builders. If you sell to builders, that’s your market. If you sell to dentists, accountants or landlords, your updates are being read by people who will never buy.

What I’d do

1. Build in public for yourself, not for distribution. If a daily or weekly update keeps you honest, do it. Just don’t count it as your marketing plan.
2. Don’t announce a series you might not finish. Most stop within days. Post when you have something worth saying, not on a schedule you set on day one.
3. Put your updates where your buyers are. A progress post in a community your customers read is worth more than one in a community of other founders, unless founders are your customers.
4. Spend the same time writing to people one at a time. The time a daily update takes is the time ten personal messages take. The founders in Where did founders find their first customers? most often described answering people who were already asking for what they’d built.
5. Give it months, not days. The typical update had no paying customer before month four. If you’re in week two with nothing, that’s normal, not a verdict. Why it’s so slow now is in Why is nobody using what I built?

What I can’t tell you

This is Reddit. Most building in public happens on X, and several of the few founders here who said it worked credited X. A founder with a real following on X may see something very different, and I can’t measure that here.

The comparison is between founders who chose to post updates and founders who didn’t, matched on how much they posted. That removes the biggest bias, but it can’t remove all of them, and the outcomes are what people posted, not what happened to them. Most founders who quietly got customers never said so. And the update matcher isn’t perfect: on a hand check, 35 of 40 matches were a founder’s own progress update; the rest were mostly tools for people who build in public.

How I did it

The posts: every post since 1 January 2022 in the seven subreddits above, from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive, each sorted by a small model into whether the poster is building something of their own and what they’re stuck on. The method is in Building got easy. Getting anyone to care didn’t.

Progress updates: a builder post whose title gives a day, week or month count (“Day 30”, “3 months in”), numbers an update (“Update #4”), calls itself a weekly, monthly, revenue or progress update, or says it’s building in public. Founders: grouped by Reddit username, leaving out deleted accounts. The comparison uses founders with three or more builder posts over two weeks or more, whose first post was before 1 July 2026 and wasn’t already a success post. “Later posted a first customer” is the phrase match from the first-customers research (“I got my first paying user”, “we hit $1k MRR”, about 85% genuine on a hand check), counted only in posts that weren’t themselves progress updates. “Later said they were stuck” is the strict test from Why is nobody using what I built?, 31 of 40 right on a hand check.

The updates I read: 400 posts with a day, week or month count in the title and some text, one per founder, picked at random. Each was read by hand for how far in it was, whether the product was live, users, paying customers, monthly revenue, the channels mentioned, and whether the founder said building in public helped. Only figures stated as current were recorded, not goals or prices.

Cite as: GTM for One (gtmforone.com), “Does building in public work?”, https://www.gtmforone.com/blog/does-building-in-public-work.

I’m building GTM for One for the part building in public doesn’t do: working out who would actually want what you’ve made, and writing to them one at a time.