Build in Public to Get Customers, Not Claps

Most build-in-public advice is about the wrong number. It teaches you to grow a follower count, watch the likes climb, and collect little bursts of encouragement from other founders doing exactly the same thing. That number feels like progress. It buys nothing.

Followers are an audience you rent. The platform decides whether your post gets shown, and it can stop showing it whenever it likes. Claps come from people building their own thing, not people who'd ever pay for yours.

Here's the version that actually works. Building in public done right is a way to get customers: every honest update puts your product in front of people, and every so often it reaches the exact person with the exact problem you solve, and they reach out to you first. This page is how you post so that happens, and it's also where I document MyPip's own zero to one, in the open, so you can watch the thing being argued in real time.

Why chasing followers is renting an audience you don't own

Chasing followers is renting reach from a platform that can evict you without notice. The count goes up, your ego goes up, and none of it converts, because a follower number is a status signal, not a customer. Worse, most of the advice pushing it is people using their audience as proof they're worth trusting, which is a different game from selling a product.

Updates are the opposite. An update is your product, out in the world, being seen and judged on its own terms. It's you practicing how to talk about what you built, getting more eyes on it, and letting people decide for themselves whether it's for them. You don't need the platform to crown you. You need the work to be visible enough that the right person stumbles onto it.

So the goal isn't a big number. It's exposure that occasionally lands in front of someone who needs the thing. That reframes every decision below.

What kind of update earns a DM instead of claps?

This is the whole difference, and it's a small change in framing. An update about how the work looks earns claps. An update about who the work is for, and why it matters to them, earns a reply.

Post "I just shipped a new onboarding flow" and you'll get "looks great, nice work" from other builders. Pretty, useless. Now post the same ship differently: "I noticed people coming from a certain background kept getting stuck before they hit the useful part, so I rebuilt onboarding to get them there faster." Same feature. But now anyone reading it who has that same problem sees the value for themselves. You've used the update to explain what your product is actually for, while just describing your day.

That's the test for every post: does a stranger with my problem see themselves in this? If the answer is no, you're posting for applause. If yes, you're posting for customers. The second kind is the only kind worth the time it takes to write.

You don't need reach. You need the one right person to see it.

Reach is a vanity target. The person who buys is one specific person, and it only takes one of them, in an otherwise empty room, seeing your work to change everything. A tiny audience of exactly the right people beats a huge audience of the wrong ones every time, because a product falls out of one person's need, not a thousand people's applause.

Reggie Watts is the story I keep coming back to. Before he was a mainstream name, he was an obscure, genre-bending performer doing a live set in a tiny New York venue with fewer than a dozen people in the room. The way the story goes, one of those few was a comedy writer close to Conan O'Brien, and he walked out floored and told Conan he had to see this guy. What's certain is what happened next: Conan hand-picked Watts to open his 2010 Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television tour, in front of sold-out arenas, and it launched him out of obscurity and clean past years of grinding out a slow following. One right person in a near-empty room did what a hundred thousand followers couldn't. Your ten viewers, one of them could be your Conan.

Marc Lou is the clearest living example I know. He builds in the open and posts his monthly revenue publicly across products like ShipFast and DataFast. He doesn't perform success, he shows it, numbers and all, and that honesty is what people trust and buy from. Adam Robinson does the same candid, in-front-of-the-camera building with RB2B. Neither is chasing claps. They're being useful and honest in public, and the right people find them because of it.

The catch is that "the right person" means you have to know who that is. Vague posts reach vague people. If you haven't nailed it yet, get clear on who that one right person actually is first, because it decides what you post and where.

Where should you build in public?

There's no magic platform. The right one is wherever your specific customer already spends time, which is a research question, not a default. That said, the mechanics differ a lot by place, and they're worth knowing before you pick.

The big, built-out networks like X and LinkedIn are hard to break out on organically. The feed is crowded and the algorithm gates your reach, so early on you're often shouting into a room that isn't listening yet. Reddit and IndieHackers are much easier to break out on, but only if you understand how they work. You can't sign up on Monday and expect results on Tuesday. Each has its own culture, its own way of speaking, and its own fast, allergic reaction to anyone who shows up to promote. Learn the mechanics of the room before you post in it.

Whichever you choose, the updates you write are also content, and content compounds. The same honest post can become a thread, a short writeup, a reference you point people to later. Here's more on turning the updates into content that compounds.

What if you hate posting and think you have nothing to share?

This is the most common block, and it's almost entirely fear, which is a feeling, not a fact. Two things dissolve it. First, nobody is watching as closely as you think. It's the dinner party where you stumble over one sentence and spend the night mortified, convinced everyone noticed, when the truth is everyone else was busy worrying about their own sentence. You are not the main character in anyone else's feed.

Second, a bad post costs you nothing. It's door-to-door selling. You knock, someone says no thanks, the door closes, and that no has zero effect on the next hundred doors. Each post starts fresh. The downside is a shrug and a quiet post. The upside is uncapped, and humans are famously bad at feeling how big an uncapped upside is because we think in straight lines, not curves.

As for "nothing to share," you have more than you think, because the honest stuff is the good stuff. Share the decisions, the things that broke, what you changed your mind on. Founders post their revenue and their mistakes precisely because that candour is what earns trust. Hold your cards back and the idea never gets the air it needs. Put it out and someone tells you they disagree, and that disagreement is how you find the right angle.

How I'm documenting MyPip's own zero to one

I'm holding nothing back on this one. I'm building MyPip in public, decisions, dead ends, and all, because the more the community pushes on an idea, the faster it gets right. That running log lives here as a series, so you're not reading a finished story with the mess edited out, you're watching the argument happen.

If you want the direct route rather than the slow-trust one, the fastest path to paying customers is still the conversations themselves. Building in public warms people up so they arrive already knowing you, but it sits alongside the direct way to get your first customers, it doesn't replace it. Do both. Post honestly in the background, and talk to specific people in the foreground.