Your build-in-public audience is not your market. I learned the difference the slow way.
One of my posts on this site did 500 views and 50 comments in 24 hours. For a solo founder with no following, that felt like a win, and in one sense it was.
Then I looked at who was in the thread. Founders. Builders. Other indie hackers. People I genuinely respect and learn from every week.
Not one of them is the person I built my product for.
I make software for freelancers. Designers, consultants, writers, people who bill by the hour and run their whole business out of four browser tabs. I have spent months getting good at writing for Indie Hackers, and the audience I built here is almost perfectly disjoint from the audience that pays me. That is not a tragedy. But it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice, and I think a lot of us are making the same quiet mistake right now.
The 2026 version of the trap is worse than the old one
Here is the thing that changed. AI made building nearly free. A weekend and a decent prompt now produces what used to take a quarter. So everyone is building, and everyone is building in public, because that is the playbook we all absorbed. The result is that the rooms where builders gather are louder than they have ever been.
Loud rooms are flattering. You post a milestone, you get applause, the applause feels like traction. But applause from builders is a measurement of how good your post was, not how good your product is. Those are different signals and in a noisy year they are easy to confuse.
The uncomfortable reframe: on a build-in-public platform, you and the other founders are each other's audience. You are almost never each other's market. A founder building a Notion-for-lawyers tool is not going to buy my freelancer app, and I am not going to buy theirs. We will both upvote, comment, and move on. The engagement is real. The revenue implication is roughly zero.
Two jobs, not one
I had collapsed two separate jobs into one word, "marketing," and they do not belong together:
- Building an audience is about reach, reputation, and reps. Build in public is excellent at this. It compounds, it makes you a better writer, it occasionally opens a door. Worth doing.
- Finding customers is about going to where the people with the problem already are, and being useful there. For me that is freelancer communities, the searches a freelancer types at 11pm when an invoice is overdue, the Slack groups where people complain about losing billable hours. Not a single freelancer I have talked to has ever read a build-in-public thread. They do not know this genre exists.
When I conflated the two, I optimized the easy one. Writing a good IH post has a fast, warm feedback loop. Sitting in a freelancer forum being quietly helpful for weeks with no applause has a slow, cold one. Guess which I did more of.
What actually moved the needle
The honest answer is unglamorous: showing up where my buyer already has the problem, and shutting up about myself.
I answer the boring questions. "How do I track hours across three clients without losing my mind." "Is there one tool that does tasks and a timer together." I do not pitch. I help, and once in a while it is genuinely relevant to mention what I built, and then I do, plainly. The conversion rate on being useful to the right person dwarfs the conversion rate on being clever in front of the wrong crowd, by an amount that is almost funny in hindsight.
For the record, the thing I build is Flowly, one workspace for tasks, time, and what you can bill, made for freelancers who are tired of reconciling four apps every Friday. I am not linking it because I expect this crowd to sign up. I am linking it to make the point concrete: this is the product, you are not its market, and that is completely fine.
Where I have landed
I have not quit build in public. I have demoted it. It is my audience channel, and I treat the numbers it produces as audience numbers, not demand signals. When a post does well I no longer let it tell me the product is working. It tells me the post was good. Separate dashboard.
The test I now run before any distribution effort is one question: is the person I want as a customer actually in this room, or is it just people who are easy for me to talk to. Most of the comfortable channels fail that test. Almost everything that has ever produced an actual paying user has passed it.
So a question for the founders here, because you are exactly the audience I am describing: what is your single best channel for finding customers, as opposed to building an audience, and how long did it take you to tell the two apart? I suspect most of us figured it out later than we would like to admit, and I would rather learn the pattern from you than the slow way again.
The split you're naming is really two audiences wearing the same word. There's the audience that engages — the founders who reply and upvote — and the audience that converts, which for you barely overlaps with it. I hit the identical wall building a tiny iOS memo app: this site taught me how to write and gave me reps, but my actual users surfaced in one narrow forum where nobody talks shop about building products. The engagement crowd is a craft-and-distribution engine; the market is somewhere quieter and worse at giving feedback. The trap isn't building the wrong audience, it's assuming one audience can be both. Worth running each for the single thing it actually returns.
This is spot on. The applause vs. revenue distinction is something I learned the hard way too.
For us, the channel that actually produces paying customers is social listening on Reddit and LinkedIn. People will literally post: "What CRM should I use for my agency?" or "Best tool for lead gen?" Those are the highest-intent signals you can get.
The challenge is finding them across dozens of subreddits and timezones. We built Rixly to automate that — it watches relevant conversations and surfaces the ones where someone is actively asking for a solution. But even manually checking a few niche subreddits daily is more effective than another build-in-public post for finding real buyers.
Social listening is probably the cleanest version of what I was describing — you are not interrupting anyone, you are just showing up where the intent already exists. The Reddit signal especially is underrated because the person typing "what tool should I use for X" has already done the internal work of admitting they have a problem. That is a different conversation than anything you can start cold.
The timezone and volume problem is real. Even manually, staying consistent across subreddits is the kind of unglamorous daily work that loses every internal competition against writing a post that gets applause the same afternoon. Makes sense you built something around it.
This resonated hard. I launched an app for designers in 2024 and walking the line between attracting a broadly relevant audience vs. targeting actual buyers has been a constant tension (the type that makes you second guess your comms/positioning decisions).
I would add though that there is third job that often gets collapsed into both: distribution partnerships. It's not audience-building (you're borrowing someone else's) and it's not direct customer-finding either. It's more like renting distribution from someone who already cracked the channel you haven't.
The problem is there's no clean way to signal this between indie makers at similar (often early) product stage. And at the beginning, most people aren't focused on it as they are rushing submissions left and right across product directories and hoping for the best.
The third job framing is right and I had not named it that cleanly. Borrowed distribution is genuinely different from both — you are not building reach from scratch and you are not hunting individual buyers, you are plugging into trust someone else spent years earning.
The signaling problem is the hard part. The indie maker at the same stage has no channel worth borrowing yet, and the one who does rarely needs what you can offer back. The closest I have found is looking inside the buyer's communities for people who serve the same person but do not compete — same room, different solution. Has that kind of lateral partnership worked for you, or has it mostly been one-directional?
The "no channel worth borrowing" thought is worth challenging. What shifted my thinking was focusing less on audience size and more on user journey extension.
Even a maker attracting 50-100 users has something valuable with a specific moment in a workflow. If you plug into that moment naturally (not as an ad, but as a logical next step) you get exposure to the right people at the right time. Setting up many of these "small" pipelines created for me a real and tangible ripple effect for exposure and engagement.
For example: I run an AI color tool for designers. A natural partner was a logo generator/brand kit builder. User generates a palette, gets a prompt to apply it to their brand assets and vice versa. Not promotional. Just overlapping users and a moment where the transition makes sense and can create exposure/awareness for the other product.
Went and looked at what you are building out of curiosity. Clean. What is the one thing it does that the four-tabs setup does not?
Appreciate you looking. The one thing: the timer and the task are the same object, so the hours attach to the work automatically and the weekly view is just true, no Friday reconciliation. The four-tab setup is not broken, it just leaks time in the gaps between the apps, and that gap is where freelancers quietly lose billable hours. If you want to poke at it, it is at flowly.run, free tier, no card. Genuinely not expecting this crowd to be the buyer though. That was sort of the whole point of the post.
"Freelancer is not a community, it is a tax status." Stealing this.
Take it. It cost me about three months of posting in the wrong rooms to learn, so it is the least I can do.
I think this is downstream of the AI build glut. When building was hard, shipping something was itself a signal of quality. Now anyone ships in a weekend, so "look what I built" carries almost no information, and the rooms full of builders are pure noise. Attention got cheap, trust got expensive. Curious if you see it the same way.
Exactly the same way, and you said it better than my post did. When output is cheap, output stops being a signal, so the build-in-public milestone post ("shipped X") is now worth roughly what it costs to produce, which is nearly nothing. What did not get cheaper is being genuinely trusted by a specific person with a specific problem. That is the scarce asset in 2026, and you cannot prompt your way to it. The irony is that the founders flooding the build-in-public rooms are competing in the one arena where supply went infinite, and ignoring the one (trust, narrow relevance) where it stayed scarce. I am as guilty as anyone, which is why I wrote this mostly to myself.
I am pre-launch and was about to go all-in on build in public. Should I not bother?
Bother, but with the right expectation. Treat it as writing practice and reputation, not as your acquisition channel, unless you are selling to builders. The skill you build writing here transfers everywhere. Just do not measure your product's health by how a post does. Decide today which number tells you the product works (signups from your actual buyer, trials, retention) and refuse to let upvotes stand in for it.
Hard disagree. Build in public got me from 0 to 10k MRR. The audience I built WAS my market because my product is a tool for builders. You are generalizing from a case where your buyer happens to not be on this platform. The advice should be "know where your buyer is," not "build in public is the wrong job."
This is the best objection and I think you are mostly right. If you build for builders, then build-in-public reach and your market are the same population, and the two jobs I split apart collapse back into one. Lucky overlap, and you should run at it hard.
My claim is narrower than it landed: for everyone whose buyer is not a builder, the audience you build here is not your market, and the danger is that the feedback loop is so warm you optimize for it anyway. So I would actually take your reframe. "Know where your buyer is" is the general law. "Build in public is the wrong job" is just the special case for those of us selling to people who have never heard of this website. Tools-for-builders founders get to skip the entire problem, and I am a little jealous.
Okay, so where DO you find freelancers then? Asking because my product is also for them and I am drowning in the same problem.
Honestly, where they already complain. A few that have worked for me, roughly in order:
This matches my data almost exactly. My launch thread did 11k impressions and got me maybe 4 signups, all founders, all churned in a week. My boring SEO page for one specific job-to-be-done converts 30x better and nobody ever claps for it. Took me a year to stop chasing the dopamine of the launch threads.
The "nobody claps for it" part is the whole trap in one sentence. The channels that actually convert tend to be quiet, slow, and unglamorous, so they lose every internal competition against the channel that gives you applause the same afternoon. I think a year is normal. I would honestly love to know what the specific job-to-be-done was on that SEO page, because the ones that convert are usually weirdly narrow.
Isn't this post itself build in public? You are doing the exact thing you are warning against, on the exact platform.
Fair hit, and yes. This is build in public. The point is not that it is worthless, it is that it does one job (audience) and people keep grading it on a different job (customers). I am happy to write here for reach and reputation. I just stopped letting the upvotes tell me my product is healthy. Different dashboard. You proving my post got engagement is, ironically, the post working as designed.