I tried building in public. I'd rather just build.

I gave building in public a proper go. From about April to September 2024, I committed to posting on X about what I was working on. Five months of sharing progress, tweeting updates, trying to be part of the community.

I stopped. Here's why.

The scroll trap

Building in public is meant to be low-friction. Stream of consciousness. Share what you're working on, attract an audience, get feedback. Simple enough in theory.

In practice, I found myself spending more time scrolling X than actually posting or building anything. I'd open the app to share an update and forty minutes later I'm reading about UK planning law reform instead of thinking about distribution for whatever I was working on. The platform is engineered for exactly this. Every time I opened it with intent, I left with less focus than I started with.

I tried to fix this with structure. Paid for a scheduling tool, set up a queue, blocked out time to batch content. In theory, that's the smart approach. In practice, I spent more time managing the scheduling workflow than thinking about what I actually wanted to say. The tool became another thing to maintain, another tab to check, another layer between me and the work.

I know scheduling works. I've watched other people do it brilliantly. But for me it turned posting from one time sink into two: the scrolling and the admin.

The audience problem

Here's the thing I noticed about build-in-public as a distribution strategy: it mostly works if you're selling to other indie devs.

The community is largely builders watching other builders. Which is great for morale and genuinely inspiring, but if your product isn't aimed at that audience, you're performing for people who'll never be your customers. You end up optimising for engagement from peers rather than traction with the people you're actually trying to reach.

I don't say this as criticism. People like Marc Lou have built something genuinely admirable. The whole community has this energy of just doing stuff, trying things out, putting it in front of people. I respect that deeply. It's the best antidote to overthinking and perfectionism that I've come across.

But respect for a community and that community being the right channel for your work are two different things.

The idea exposure problem

This one became harder to ignore as 2024 went on. The cost of building software is collapsing. AI tools mean that if you share a genuinely good idea publicly, someone with better reach or more experience in distribution can take it and ship a version before you've finished yours.

That sounds paranoid, and maybe it is. But the calculus has changed. When building was expensive, ideas were cheap and execution was the moat. Now execution is getting cheaper by the month. The moat is shifting towards distribution, taste, and speed. Publicly broadcasting your roadmap in that environment felt increasingly like giving away the one advantage I had: knowing what to build before anyone else did.

What I actually learned

The five months weren't wasted. I learned that I'm better off spending that time building. Not because posting is pointless, but because for me, the ratio of time spent to value gained was terrible. Every hour I spent on X was an hour I didn't spend on the product.

I still check in. I keep up with trends, see what people are shipping, get a sense of where things are heading. But I've stopped trying to be a participant in the content layer. The building layer is where I'm more useful.

If building in public works for you, brilliant. For me, I'd rather just build.