Build in Public Is Broken—But Not For the Reason Everyone Thinks

The founder Twitter drama over the last week has been predictable. "Build in public" is dead. It's free R&D for well-funded clones. It's just an audience of other founders who won't buy.

All true. All missing the point.

I've been building in public for 15 years across 150+ projects—agencies, failed experiments, bootstrap SaaS, product exits. The pattern I see isn't that transparency is broken. It's that most people doing it are shipping fake products.

Why 70% of "Build in Public" Creators Fail

The narrative is that building in public attracts the wrong audience: other indie hackers, other founders, people optimizing for engagement instead of sales.

True. But here's what nobody says: if your product is real and solves a problem, those 70% of non-customers don't matter. What matters is the 30% who see you solving their problem.

The founders making real money from this—the ones building ListingVid, OhMyLead, real products with revenue—aren't complaining about clones or wrong audiences. They're too busy shipping.

The noise comes from people documenting hobbies and expecting customers to appear. Of course they're getting cloned. They haven't proven the idea works yet.

Here's What Actually Works

From shipping products for 15 years:

Ship real, fast. The more you talk before you ship, the more you attract feedback-loop thinkers instead of builders. Move. Push. Get to a point where someone will pay.
Talk to customers, not audiences. "Building in public" doesn't mean Twitter. It means your first 20 customers know your roadmap. That feedback loop is invaluable. Thousands of followers watching you iterate? That's just noise.
Obsess over revenue, not visibility. If you're measuring success by likes and retweets instead of MRR, you're not building a business. You're building an audience. Those are different games.
Expect clones. Celebrate revenue. Well-funded companies will copy your idea. Good. It validates the market. The only question is whether you got paying customers before they did. If yes—you won. Visibility doesn't matter.
Know the difference between "building in public" and "publicly failing." There's a huge gap between sharing your wins and documenting chaos. Real builders share patterns, not excuses.

The Meta: Why This Debate Exists Right Now

The "build in public is broken" discourse exists because the indie hacker playbook of 2021-2023 ran its course. Everyone copied it. Signals degraded. Now founders are overcompensating by going silent.

Wrong direction. The answer isn't silence. It's ruthlessly focusing on real metrics: customers, revenue, product viability.

Visibility is a tool. Use it or don't. But don't use it as an excuse for not shipping. That's where 99% of the discourse falls apart.

The bottom line: Build in public works great when you're building something real. It fails catastrophically when you're building something fake. The "broken" part isn't transparency. It's that most creators are shipping bets, not products.

Ship fast. Talk to customers. Stop obsessing over how many people are watching. That's the 15-year lesson.

What do you think—is the problem the visibility, or the product?