Building in public is terrible advice for founders who haven’t gotten traction on social media yet.
The problem with building in public before you have a loyal following? Nobody cares.
That worked 5 years ago when it was new. In 2026, nobody wants to read the 10 billionth post about failing to get users.
When a new founder tries to start building in public, they will get no views, nobody will share their content, their account will not grow, and they will probably give up.
I’m not anti-build in public.
Once you have a following, it is a great strategy to promote your products.
But you need to build the following first. I know because I built mine in the last 4 months.
In June, I went from a cold start on X and Threads, not having posted in years, to getting 3.6 million views last month, building my newsletter to over 1,000 subscribers, and getting 40 people to sign up for the beta of my new SaaS (I was hoping for 10 to 15).
I didn’t do it by building in public: I did it by sharing my opinions in public.
My biggest post was six words: “The AI job tsunami is coming.”
It got 638,000 views. No story about my journey, no revenue update. Just an opinion.
And one comment I left under it turned those views into 160 newsletter subscribers.
Here’s why opinions work, and build-in-public posts don’t.
A build-in-public post asks strangers to care about you. “Day 14 of building my SaaS” only works if people already know who you are and want to see what happens next.
An opinion asks strangers to care about something they already care about. When people agree with you, they share it. When they disagree, they reply and quote it to argue with you. Either way, it reaches thousands of people who have never heard of you, and some of them follow you.
Do that enough times, and you have an audience. Then building in public starts working.
So the order is:
- Share your opinions to build an audience.
- Turn that audience into users.
- Build in public once you actually have people watching.
Most founders start at step three, get no views, and quit.
I wrote down exactly how I did this process in a 38-page guide called Building Your Million View User Funnel on X and Threads. It’s built on my real X and Threads data from the last four months: the posts that broke out, the ones that flopped, and the numbers behind both.
Inside, you’ll learn:
- The topic that brought in nearly 7x more signups than any other
- Why 1 in 5 of my posts drove 78% of my views, and how to get more of those
- The type of post that was only 4% of what I published but brought in 21% of my new followers
- The exact comment I left under the tsunami post, and why it worked
- My top 20 posts on X and Threads, broken down with the numbers behind each one
It’s only $25.