Why I didn't build in public

JohannKrugell — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:29:06 +0000

I decided not to build my app (https://planhq.tech/) in public, for a couple of reasons. They are:

I don't have a computer science degree and initially doubted myself, but I shipped an app. Fake it till you make it but it comes with an undeniable feeling of being an imposter. PS: I haven't made it yet.
I feel that my projects lose energy as soon as I mention it to other people. I would at most mention it to my close family. Never to friends. For the same reason I never have New Years resolutions or tell anyone if I do. Projects in their infancy are so fragile one judging look can suffocate them.

The major downside of this approach is that you end up doing very varied things. I have gone from a gym instructor, to an accountant, took up singing lessons, managed IT services (although not qualified), dabbled in PowerBI and data science.

The upside? I get to nurture projects in private until they're mature enough to survive the world.

Is idea validation still valid for building SaaS apps in 2025?

JohannKrugell — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 09:33:29 +0000

If you asked me 5 years ago if it is good to validate your SaaS idea before building it, I would have answered 'yes' without hesitation. But recently I have become a bit more skeptical. Why? Well I have built a SaaS application called https://planhq.tech/ and learned a bit along the way.

We can approach the question of validation from a sales and a cost perspective. The goal of a business is to have sales, so validating beforehand makes sense. But how do you validate?

My family and friends can not validate the idea. They will tell me anything to see me happy (they're biased).
Creating a MVP page and requesting e-mail sign-ups is flawed as well. Anyone will sign-up but when it is time to key in their master card details they won't.
Building a basic page and analyzing the page traffic after a short advertising campaign could create false momentum. Ad-driven traffic is noise.

From a sales perspective it is much more important to have a path to a customer. A path to customer means getting in front of someone who's already identified the problem and wants to see if your solution works. This skips validation entirely and goes straight to problem solution fit.

I built https://planhq.tech/ after project hell, trying to implement software in a hospital with a 3rd party IT services provider and various software vendors. If someone built it for me, I would have signed up straight away, there is problem solution fit.

We can also approach this question from the perspective of cost. 5 years ago you would have needed a front end engineer, back end engineer, designer, database expert the list goes on. You can easily spend $200 - $300K just to get the MVP a couple of pivot's later you would have blown $1M easy.

In 2025 I would argue that it is no longer valid and that Cursor, Claude Code, Grok could code the app for you at a fraction of the cost. You could survive much longer on a lower cost base until you find that problem solution fit.

The validation question isn't really 'will people want this?' It's 'can you afford to build until you find them?'" Or whatever feels right to you.

DEV Community: JohannKrugell

Why I didn't build in public

Is idea validation still valid for building SaaS apps in 2025?