8 weeks of building in public got me real reach and basically zero signups. Here is what I think I got wrong.

Honest build-in-public checkpoint, because the numbers this month deserve a post even though they are not a win.

I run a small marketing agency and I have spent this year building a lightweight analytics tool for it, mostly so I would stop guessing about my own channels. Alongside that I have been posting build-in-public content for about eight weeks.

The reach worked. Build-in-public posts have been my best performing content by a wide margin: one launch-style post hit 424 impressions, a "same post twice, 140 views vs 3" story hit 218, opinion posts with no link consistently out-traveled anything promotional.

The conversion did not work. Across all of that, on one channel, eleven hundred plus impressions produced one link click and a couple of reactions. Early-access signups from the whole run: effectively zero.

Here is what I think went wrong, and I would value being told I am wrong:

1. I optimized for the metric that feels good (reach) and never built a real mechanism for the metric that matters (a person taking one concrete next step).
2. My only CTA was "link in comments," which is high friction and easy to ignore. There was never a same-day reason to act.
3. I may have an audience-buyer mismatch. Builders enjoy the content. The people who actually pay for marketing services are not the same crowd.
4. I never gave anything away that someone would trade an email for. The single strongest asset I have, the actual audit findings, I kept showing off instead of handing over.

The change I am testing now: stop treating reach as the goal, give the reach a job, hand over one genuinely useful resource with as little friction as possible, and measure the one next step instead of impressions.

For those of you who built in public before launch: did the audience you built actually convert, or did you discover the people cheering you on were never going to be customers?