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

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 wi