The Uncomfortable Truth About Building in Public
Building in public on Twitter sounds simple: share your journey, grow an audience, get customers. Thousands of founders are doing exactly that. Most of them are doing it in a way that generates polite applause from other founders and zero paying customers.
The problem is not effort. The problem is strategy. Most build-in-public advice tells you to be authentic and share your numbers. That is not a strategy. That is a vibe. And vibes do not compound.
After analyzing 329 build-in-public tweets for engagement patterns, content type performance, hook formats, and hashtag impact, a clear picture emerges - and much of it contradicts what the standard BIP playbook recommends. This article gives you the actual strategy: what content to make, how to open it, what to skip, and why the whole thing falls apart if you treat BIP as your distribution channel rather than your trust engine.
Why Twitter Is the Right Platform for Building in Public
Twitter is the center of gravity for founders, indie hackers, and early adopters. The distribution mechanics favor smaller accounts who post consistently. A single retweet from someone with 20K followers can send your tweet to an entirely new audience of people who have never heard of you. That does not happen on LinkedIn at the same rate, and it definitely does not happen in a Slack community.
More importantly, Twitter compresses timelines. You can go from zero followers to a warm audience of 2,000 people who genuinely care about what you are building in under four months - if your content is right. The emphasis is on if.
The platform is also uniquely suited to narrative. A founder sharing a raw, unpolished thought about what broke this week will outperform a polished brand tweet every single time. That rawness is exactly what BIP content produces naturally. You are not performing - you are reporting. Twitter rewards that.
The Content Type Hierarchy Nobody Talks About
Here is what is counterintuitive: the content types most founders post the most of are the lowest performing formats. And the types they shy away from - controversy and myth-busting - are the highest performing by a wide margin.
From analysis of 329 build-in-public tweets broken down by content type:
| Content Type | Avg Likes | Avg Views |
|---|---|---|
| Controversy / myth-bust / stolen idea | 197 | 12,318 |
| Lessons / what I learned | 38 | 3,310 |
| Failure / nothing working | 36 | 7,401 |
| Accountability / showing up | 30 | 1,352 |
| Revenue / MRR milestones | 29 | 1,237 |
| Day X progress logs | 17 | 501 |
Controversy and myth-busting tweets averaged 197 likes - that is 6.8x more than revenue milestone posts. The daily Day X log format, which is the single most common thing founders post, is the lowest-performing format in the entire dataset.
This does not mean you should manufacture drama. It means that tweets which challenge a conventional belief about building, fundraising, productivity, or the startup process itself travel further and faster than pure status updates. A tweet that says I just passed $500 MRR earns approving nods from your existing audience. A tweet that says the advice to niche down before building killed my last product sparks a conversation that pulls in people who were never following you.
The lesson: reframe your content calendar. Lead with the counterintuitive insight first. Back it up with your story second. Your MRR number becomes the supporting evidence, not the headline.
Stop Using the BuildInPublic Hashtag
This is the finding that surprises founders the most, and it is consistent across the full dataset.
Tweets with the #BuildInPublic hashtag averaged 24 likes. Tweets without any hashtags averaged 111 likes - a 4.6x difference.
The likely mechanism: the hashtag signals to the algorithm that this is insider content for the builder community. The algorithm then serves it primarily to people already deep in the BIP ecosystem - other founders, indie hackers, and maker-types. These people will like the tweet, but they will not become customers. Strip the hashtag and the algorithm treats it as general content and distributes it more broadly.
There is also a quality-signal problem. Heavy hashtag use on Twitter has become associated with lower-quality, engagement-farming content. When you add #BuildInPublic #IndieHacker #SaaS to a tweet, it can undercut the credibility of the genuine thing you just wrote.
The rule going forward: write the tweet without any hashtags. If you feel the need to signal community membership, put it in your bio, not in your content.
How to Open a Build-in-Public Tweet
Your opening line determines whether someone keeps reading or keeps scrolling. From 152 high-engagement BIP tweets analyzed by hook format, the results are clear:
| Hook Format | Avg Likes | Avg Views |
|---|---|---|
| First-person story opener | 241 | 24,704 |
| Question hook | 164 | 13,894 |
| Specific metric / milestone | 103 | 16,795 |
| Contradiction / myth-bust | 71 | 1,647 |
| Numbered list | 53 | 2,072 |
First-person story openers lead both categories - 241 average likes and 24,704 average views. This is the format that sounds like: I quit my job in March. Six months later I had 4,000 subscribers and $4,000 MRR. Here is what actually happened between those two dates.
Notice what makes this work: it does not lead with a number. It leads with a person making a decision. The number becomes the payoff. Pure metric drops averaged 103 likes - solid, but less than half the performance of narrative-first openers.
The counterintuitive finding on specific numbers: tweets with specific dollar amounts or metrics averaged 123 likes. Tweets without specific numbers averaged 223 likes. Context and story outperform raw data. A number without a human attached to it is just trivia. A number at the end of a story is evidence.
The Day X Format Problem
Day 1 of building my SaaS in public. If you have spent any time on Twitter's builder side, you have seen this format hundreds of times. There is a reason for that - it feels accountable, structured, and easy to maintain. The data tells a different story.
From 52 tweets using the Day X tracking format:
- The average day number in the dataset is Day 42. Most people quit before Day 60.
- 58% of Day X tweets came from the first 30 days - the honeymoon phase where motivation is high.
- Only 19% of Day X tweets came from accounts past Day 100.
The founders who make it past Day 100 do see real results. Real case data shows one founder who documented from Day 1 ($32 revenue, $8 MRR) through 150 days reaching $4,000 MRR and 55,000 subscribers. But that trajectory requires surviving the desert between Day 30 and Day 90 - where growth is slow, engagement is low, and most people quietly stop posting.
The strategic problem with Day X beyond persistence: it trains your audience to consume your journey as a series of isolated check-ins rather than as a coherent story with stakes. When you miss a few days, the thread breaks and you feel obligated to restart or explain the gap. It is a format that punishes inconsistency more than any other.
If you want structure, use milestones instead of days. From zero to first dollar is a better story arc than Day 1 through Day 42. Milestones are inherently climactic. Days are just a countdown that most people never finish.
Failure Content Performs Identically to Success Content
Here is a finding that should remove every excuse for not posting when things are not going well.
Tweets sharing failures and struggles averaged 46 likes. Tweets sharing wins and milestones averaged 47 likes. Essentially identical performance.
This matters because most founders hoard their failure content. They plan to share it once things have turned around - then I can tell the comeback story. By that logic, they are sitting on some of their highest-potential content while posting lower-performing celebration tweets.
Failure content also has much less competition. On any given day, dozens of founders in your network are posting revenue milestones. Almost nobody is posting that a feature they spent three weeks building is getting zero usage and they are not sure why. That tweet gets engagement from people who have been there, people who want to help, and people who find the honesty genuinely refreshing.
Post the struggle in real time. You do not need the resolved ending to earn the reaction.
The Audience Problem Nobody Wants to Admit
This is the most strategically important section in this article, and it is the one most BIP advice completely skips.
Build-in-public content on Twitter disproportionately attracts other founders - not the customers you are trying to reach. From a widely-discussed Reddit thread on the buildinpublic community, one founder reported that 70% of early signups from BIP posts were other founders and operators, not the target customers the product was built for.
This is the core tension of building in public: your most engaged audience is your peer group, and your peer group is not your customer. They will like your tweets, cheer your milestones, and offer advice in the replies. They will not buy your B2B expense tracking tool or your niche community platform, because they are not the people with that problem.
One practitioner in that same Reddit thread put it directly: building in public is not a growth strategy. It is a trust mechanism that most people are using as their entire go-to-market plan. That distinction is the whole ballgame.
The fix is not to stop building in public. It is to stop treating it as your primary distribution channel. BIP creates a layer of social proof and founder credibility that warms up the people who do find you through other channels. When someone discovers your product through a Google search or a referral and then sees six months of transparent posts about your progress, your failures, your product decisions, and your thinking - they arrive pre-sold. One founder documented the exact moment this clicked: a DM from someone who had been silently following the journey for three months before signing up as a paying customer without needing a demo.
BIP is the trust engine. SEO, partnerships, communities, and cold outreach are the distribution channels. Stack them together and you have a compounding system. BIP alone is a way to build a Twitter following full of supportive founders who never pay you.