The promise
I started writing about my SaaS launch before I launched it. Day counters. Screenshots. “I’m shipping X today.” The indie hacker playbook, pretty much verbatim.
The promise behind building in public is simple: you share the process, people get invested, and by launch day you have an audience rooting for you. A waitlist that converts. A community that shares your links.
That was the theory.
Nine days ago I launched on Product Hunt. I have zero paying users.
What the playbook said would happen
I followed the recipe as best a 25-year engineer with no marketing background could. Posted on X. Wrote reflections on Medium. Replied to other founders. Talked about what I was building before it existed. Showed the messy middle.
By launch day, I was supposed to have:
Some volume of inbound interest
A small group of supporters ready to upvote and comment
Enough credibility signal that strangers would trust the product enough to try it
Here’s what actually happened on launch day: I ended ranked somewhere around #40 with a handful of upvotes. Key Points score of 0, which on Product Hunt means you’re effectively invisible to anyone who doesn’t scroll to the bottom of the page.
Two days later, my X account got flagged and frozen. I submitted an appeal. I’m still waiting.
Three Medium posts in ten days. Total stats: 3 views, 0 reads, 2 claps from the same person.
What “building in public” quietly didn’t deliver
I don’t think building in public is a scam. I think it’s a good practice — sharing process, being honest about numbers, building a public record of your thinking.
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But the thing nobody says out loud is that the distribution part of building in public requires a different skill than building. You need to be someone who can write threads that get shared. Who can turn every small win into a narrative. Who is comfortable posting five times a day about themselves.
I’m none of those things. I’ve been writing code since I was a teenager. Writing code is a specific kind of output — it works or it doesn’t, and the output speaks for itself. Marketing output is the opposite. It doesn’t work until enough people decide it works.
Twenty-five years of training your brain to value “does the code run?” over “did the post get 2K likes?” is not easily undone in a launch week.
So the first lesson I’m actually taking from launching: building in public only works as advertised if you already have public-building skills. If you don’t, the “public” part never really activates, and you’re just building — quietly — with a blog attached.
What did happen — quietly
One thing did happen during launch week that wouldn’t have happened without it.
Someone from a country I’ve never been to — whose industry I’d never worked in — found my product on Indie Hackers and emailed me. Not from the launch-day rush. From a place where people still read past launch week.
He works in digital PR. I’d never thought about PR agencies as a user segment. He explained a concept called “newsjacking” to me, for free, across three emails. He wasn’t selling anything. He just saw the tool and saw a use case I hadn’t seen.
He’s still explaining concepts to me. No contract, no deal, no certainty it turns into anything. It might. It might not. But that conversation doesn’t exist if I hadn’t shipped.
That’s the honest version of “launching was worth it.” Not “users flooded in.” Not “went viral.” Just — one door opened that wasn’t open before. What’s behind it, I don’t know yet.
So, overrated?
Depends on what you were buying.
If you bought “build in public and launch day will fix your distribution problem” — yes, overrated. For most of us, it won’t. The loudest voices in build-in-public already had distribution before they started building in public. The causality runs the opposite direction from what it looks like.
If you bought “ship, write honestly, and over enough months some small number of useful things will happen that wouldn’t have otherwise” — probably not overrated. Just much slower than the Twitter threads suggest.
The post-launch phase I’m in now doesn’t have a 24-hour feedback loop. It has a months-long one. I won’t know if building in public worked for me until it’s been twelve months and I can count: how many emails like that one did I get? How many turned into something? How many people who saw a Medium post in April 2026 eventually trialed the product in September?
Ask me again in a year.
Until then, I’m going to keep shipping, keep writing, and try to stop measuring myself by launch-day numbers that were always going to be small for someone with my background.
The door opened. That’s all I know right now.
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