How Building in Public Grew My Audience Faster Than Any Tactic

I spent the first several months of this business trying tactics. Guest posts on sites where my audience wasn't. Social content that was generic enough to apply to everyone and therefore useful to no one. Engagement pods that generated meaningless interactions from people who'd never buy from me in a million years.

None of it worked. Or rather: it all worked a little, in the way that a leaky bucket holds a little water. I'd get a small traffic spike, gain a handful of followers, and then watch it evaporate. Nothing compounded.

Then I started building in public, and the pattern changed.

The Tactics That Didn't Pan Out

I want to be specific, because "growth hacks don't work" is vague advice.

Guest posting in the wrong places: I wrote posts for audiences who weren't my audience. Traffic referrals were minimal, and the few people who clicked through had no context for who I was or what I was building. Context is everything in audience building, and guest posts on unrelated sites give you none.

Generic social content: Posting tips and frameworks that weren't connected to my specific experience or work. These posts are interchangeable — the same content shows up in a thousand feeds from a thousand accounts. There's nothing to anchor someone to you specifically, nothing that makes them feel like they should follow this particular person.

Engagement pods: If you don't know what these are, consider yourself fortunate. Groups of accounts that mutually like and comment on each other's posts to game platform algorithms. The engagement is hollow, the follows don't convert, and the whole thing feels like exactly what it is — manufacturing the appearance of audience rather than building one.

None of these approaches gave people a reason to be specifically interested in me, my work, or what I was building. That's the common thread.

The Moment Things Changed

I'd been working on a product for about six weeks when I decided to post about it — not to announce it, but just to describe what I was building and why. I wrote a thread about the problem I was trying to solve, what I'd tried that didn't work, and where I was stuck.

The response was different. Not bigger, necessarily — but more substantive. People who had the same problem showed up and said so. People who'd tried similar solutions gave me feedback. A few people asked to know when it launched.

I had an audience of people who cared about the specific thing I was building. That had never happened before.

The product launched on MadeThis a few weeks later. The people who'd been following the process converted at a rate I hadn't seen on any previous launch. They weren't encountering the product cold — they'd watched it get built.

Why Transparency Compounds

Here's what I've come to understand about building in public that makes it different from the tactics that didn't work: it creates continuity.

One post about a topic gets lost. A week of posts about a topic gets noticed. Months of consistent posts about the same subject, from the same person, showing real progress over time — that's how audiences form.

The people who find you when you're small and unpolished become your most loyal audience. Not despite the fact that you were small — because of it. They feel ownership over your story in a way that people who discover you when you're established never quite do. They were there. They know how it started. That early audience is disproportionately valuable.

Building in public is a mechanism for finding those people and giving them something to follow. It's not a single post or a single tactic — it's an ongoing narrative that gets more interesting the longer it runs.

MadeThis Makes This Easier

One thing that's underrated about building in public: you need a live destination to send people to.

Even in early stages, having something real to point to matters. When you post about your process, people will want to see what you're building. When you describe a problem you're solving, people will want to know if the solution is available.

The fact that my storefront on the platform I use is live and accessible means I can include it in posts while I'm still working on the next product. People can see what exists now, understand what's coming, and buy when they're ready. Without that live destination, building-in-public posts end in a dead end — engagement but no conversion point.

The Long-Game Mindset

The single biggest reason people don't stick with building in public is that it doesn't produce dramatic results in the short term. You post consistently for three weeks, your follower count goes up by forty people, and the voice in your head says: this isn't worth it.

That voice is wrong, but it's also understandable. The problem is that it's measuring the wrong timeframe. Building in public produces results over quarters and years, not weeks. The audience you're building now is the one that will make your third product launch dramatically easier than your first. The trust you're establishing today is what will make a recommendation feel genuine six months from now.

The people who succeed at this are the ones who accept early that they're playing a longer game than the tactics people promised would work faster.

For more on the foundation of what building in public actually means — versus the way it gets misused — see what building in public actually means and why I do it. That's the mindset piece; this post is the mechanics.

Start posting what you're building. Be specific. Include the failures. Point to something real. Do it for longer than feels comfortable. That's the whole thing.