Build in public without becoming a full-time content creator

Building in public takes me about three hours a week, and most of that is not writing.

Roughly twenty minutes capturing things as they happen, an hour writing two posts, and twenty minutes a day replying to people. That last one is the part that actually works, and it is the part every guide skips.

Why most founders quit at week six

They set up a system built for someone who makes content for a living.

Daily posting. A content calendar. Batching on Sundays. A hook formula. It holds for about four weeks, then a customer escalates something on a Tuesday and the whole apparatus collapses.

By week six the account is dormant and the founder has concluded that this does not work for them.

I have watched this happen to people who are excellent at their actual job. The failure is not discipline. It is that they adopted a system designed for a different job.

The mistake: treating it as content instead of exhaust

A content creator starts with a blank page. That is the job. They have to invent something.

You should not be starting anywhere near a blank page.

The work you already did this week is the material. You made a decision. You changed your mind about something. A customer said something that surprised you. A number moved and you worked out why. None of that needs inventing. It needs noticing and writing down.

That is the whole reframe, and everything below follows from it.

What three hours a week actually looks like

Capture, roughly twenty minutes total, spread through the week. Not a session. A note on your phone the moment something happens. One line, no polish. If you are trying to remember on Sunday what was interesting on Tuesday, you have already lost the useful detail.

Writing, about an hour, one sitting. Two posts from the week’s notes. The notes do most of the work because the thinking already happened.

Replying, twenty minutes a day. This is where the compounding is. A post reaches the people who already follow you. Comments and replies reach everyone who follows them. If I had to cut two of these three, I would keep this one.

Notice the ratio. Roughly a third of the time is writing. Most guides treat writing as the whole activity, which is why their systems feel so heavy.

What to post when nothing interesting happened

This is the week everyone fails, and the honest answer is that something interesting did happen, you just did not classify it as content.

Four sources that never run dry, because they come from operating rather than from thinking of ideas:

• A decision you reversed. You were doing it one way, now you are doing it another, and you can say why. This is the single best format and almost nobody uses it.
• A number that moved, and what caused it. Not a vanity number. A real one, with the mechanism.
• Something a customer said that surprised you. Anonymised. The surprise is the story.
• A thing you got wrong. Specific, recent, and with what you changed.

If none of those four produced anything in a given week, that is worth noticing on its own. It usually means the week was spent on maintenance rather than progress.

What not to post

Shorter section, and I have not seen anyone else write it.

Anything a customer told you in confidence. Obvious, and still the most common mistake. Anonymising is not enough if the details identify them to anyone in their market.

Revenue numbers, if you are about to hire. Transparency is fashionable. It also sets an anchor in every salary negotiation you have for the next year.

Opinions about named competitors. It reads as insecurity, it travels further than you want, and it makes partnerships awkward later.

Motivation. There is an enormous amount of it already and none of it is yours specifically. It attracts an audience of other founders looking for motivation, which is not who buys from you.

What “Build in Public” produced

Here’s what it actually produced. We got our first customer (Swyftin) before we’d even launched the company.

Most people doing build in public are SaaS founders talking to other SaaS founders. We were doing it for a services business, which meant less noise and fewer people competing for the same attention. When we launched NagMeLater later, the first customer came within an hour of launch, and they found us through the posting, not an ad. None of this happened overnight.

I’ve been posting on X and LinkedIn since April 2021. I’m at 47K followers on X and 10K on LinkedIn now. Four years of showing the work before the numbers looked like this.

Common questions

---

Close

You are not becoming a content creator. You are writing down work you were doing anyway.

That distinction is the difference between three hours a week and a second job. Doing it properly, without it eating your calendar, is what we build in Build in Public for SaaS.