Build in Public: A Practical Guide for Indie Hackers Validating SaaS Ideas

What “Build in Public” Actually Means for Validation

The term has been stretched to cover everything from daily Twitter updates about your morning routine to detailed revenue dashboards. For validation purposes, it means something specific: sharing the process of figuring out whether an idea is worth building, in real time, with the people who would use it.

That last part matters. Most build-in-public content is written for other founders. Product updates, launch retrospectives, MRR milestones. This content finds an audience because the founder community is active on the platforms where it’s posted. But other founders are not your buyer. If you’re building a tool for restaurant managers, the founder audience on X is the wrong audience to cultivate during validation.

Build in public works as a validation channel when you’re reaching your target buyer, not when you’re building a following among people who won’t pay for what you’re building.

What to Share (and What to Keep Private)

Share the problem, not the solution. At validation stage, you don’t have a product. You have a hypothesis. Posts about the problem you’re investigating (“talked to 12 field service dispatchers this week, all of them said the same thing about scheduling”) are useful to your target buyer and don’t require you to have anything built.

Share customer discovery findings. What you learned from conversations with potential buyers (anonymized, with permission) is genuinely useful content. It demonstrates that you’re talking to real people rather than building in a vacuum, and it attracts people with the same problem.

Share your validation metrics. Traffic, conversion rate, waitlist size, survey response patterns. This creates accountability and generates feedback from people following along. Be consistent about which metrics you share so progress is trackable.

Keep individual conversations private. Don’t share specific customer quotes, company names, or identifying details without explicit permission. Don’t share financial terms from early customer agreements. Don’t share technical implementation details that represent a real competitive advantage.

import InlineSignup from ‘@validation/ui/components/inline-signup.astro’;

Which Platforms Work for Which Audiences

Platform choice should follow your ICP, not your comfort zone.

X/Twitter has a strong indie hacker and founder community. If your buyer is a technical founder or developer, this is a legitimate channel. If your buyer is a small business owner in a traditional industry, this platform won’t reach them.

LinkedIn reaches B2B buyers across industries, particularly management, operations, and professional services roles. Content about business problems gets organic reach with relevant audiences. A post about “the scheduling problem every HVAC dispatcher faces” can reach HVAC dispatchers if you target the content right.

Reddit has communities for nearly every industry and role. The rules vary by subreddit, but posting in relevant communities with the framing of sharing a problem and gathering feedback, rather than promoting a product, tends to work. Self-promotion posts get removed. Problem discussion posts generate conversation.

Indie Hackers works specifically if your buyer is also a founder or indie hacker. Validea is building for this audience, so posting there makes sense. For most other niches, the audience is wrong.

Turning Followers Into Waitlist Signups

Followers are not validation signal. Someone following your account because they find your build-in-public journey interesting is not the same as someone signing up for your waitlist because they have the problem you’re solving.

Every post about the problem you’re solving should include a path to your waitlist. Not in every post (that gets repetitive), but regularly. “If you’re dealing with this exact problem, we’re building something for it. Waitlist link in bio” is a low-friction, non-spammy way to convert interested readers.

Track where your waitlist signups come from. If you’re posting on three platforms and only one of them is driving signups, focus there. The others might be building a general audience, but they’re not contributing to your validation.

When Building in Public Is the Wrong Strategy

Three situations where it doesn’t work:

Your buyer isn’t on social platforms. Plumbers, dentists, restaurant owners, and many other small business buyers don’t use X or LinkedIn. Building in public to reach them is the wrong channel. Find where they actually are: trade forums, Facebook groups, industry associations.

The problem is sensitive. If your product addresses a problem buyers wouldn’t publicly admit to having (financial difficulty, compliance failure, HR issues), they won’t publicly engage with content about it. The validation channel here is direct outreach and private conversations, not public content.

You’re building in a competitive market where the roadmap is strategically valuable. Most early-stage ideas don’t have this problem. Competitors aren’t watching, and the idea isn’t novel enough that sharing it creates meaningful risk. But if you’re in a space where a large incumbent could copy your approach quickly if they saw it, build more quietly.

The default for most indie hackers should lean toward transparency. The accountability and audience-building benefits outweigh the risks at validation stage. But match the channel to the buyer, not to the platform where build-in-public culture is strongest.

import DefinitionBlock from ‘@validation/ui/seo/definition-block.astro’; import AnswerBlock from ‘@validation/ui/seo/answer-block.astro’;