Build in Public
How to Build in Public for B2B SaaS Without Attracting Only Other Founders
Use the BUYER Filter to make build-in-public content relevant to B2B buyers instead of attracting only other founders and builders.
By Uriel Bitton · 4 min read
The short answer
For B2B SaaS, building in public works best when updates are framed around buyer problems rather than founder milestones. Use the BUYER Filter: start with a buyer problem, show useful proof from real work, add your judgment, make a specific invitation, and publish where target buyers already participate. Measure relevant buyer conversations and audience fit, not follower growth alone.
Building in public for B2B SaaS works best when the people following your work overlap with the people who might buy the product. Do not lead with founder milestones alone. Translate real startup work into buyer-relevant problems, evidence, judgment, and invitations, then publish where those buyers already participate. The goal is not fewer founders in your audience; it is enough buyer relevance that public work can create useful commercial conversations.
The audience mismatch starts with the unit you share
A founder update such as “shipped v2,” “hit 1,000 users,” or “rewrote the backend” is understandable to other builders because they share the founder context. A B2B buyer often needs a different entry point: the workflow that is painful, the risk it creates, the decision you made, and what changed for the user.
A hypothetical example: instead of “We rebuilt our reporting dashboard this week,” write, “Agency teams kept exporting three reports before client reviews because one screen could not separate margin from utilization. We rebuilt that workflow around the review itself. I am curious how other agency operators handle the same handoff.” The work is identical. The framing tells the buyer why it matters.
Use the BUYER Filter
Before publishing a build-in-public update, run it through five questions.
B — Buyer problem
Start with a problem, job, constraint, or decision the buyer already recognizes. Stripe Atlas’s early-sales guide recommends identifying the industries and roles that could use your product and looking at the communities and forums where those customers already gather. That same discipline should shape your public content: know whose work you are describing before you write the post.
U — Useful proof
Show something that actually happened: an anonymized workflow pattern, a before-and-after screen, a failed assumption, an implementation tradeoff, a customer-safe observation, or a result from an experiment. Proof makes the update more than an opinion, but it does not need to be a revenue screenshot.
Y — Your judgment
Explain what you concluded and why. The 2025 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that hidden B2B buyers actively consume and evaluate thought leadership, and that strong ideas can help lesser-known vendors earn consideration. A changelog says what changed. Founder judgment shows how you think about the buyer’s problem.
E — Explicit invitation
Ask for a response that only the right person can easily give. “Thoughts?” invites everyone. “If you run client reporting at a 10–50 person agency, where does this workflow still break?” tells the buyer that their experience is relevant. Buildside’s guide to attracting opportunities while building in public uses the same principle: make the useful person and next action recognizable.
R — Right room
Publish where the buyer already has professional conversations, then audit whether your audience is actually shifting. LinkedIn’s audience analytics can show follower demographics such as job title, industry, seniority, company size, and company. Those numbers are estimates, but they are more useful for audience-fit checks than follower count alone.
If your buyers are not founders, do not rely only on founder communities. Buildside can remain the durable home for your product journey while buyer-facing posts and conversations happen in the channels where your market already spends attention. The guide to building in public with no audience explains how to start inside existing customer conversations instead of waiting for your own feed to grow.
Measure buyer density, not applause
Review your public activity each month and separate peer engagement from buyer-relevant outcomes. Track replies from target roles, repeated interactions with likely buyers, product questions, demo requests, qualified conversations, and feedback that changes positioning or product decisions.
A post with 40 founder likes and no relevant conversation may still help your founder network. It just should not be counted as buyer distribution. A post with six reactions and two serious replies from the exact role you sell to may be commercially more useful. Do not force every post to sell; simply label what job the post actually performed.
Run a four-week audience correction
Week 1: List five recurring buyer problems using the language customers use, not your feature names.
Week 2: Publish two updates that pass the BUYER Filter and keep the product mention secondary to the problem.
Week 3: Spend more time contributing to buyer conversations than broadcasting founder milestones.
Week 4: Review audience demographics and the conversations created. Keep the formats and channels that produced relevant follow-through.
Building in public for B2B SaaS does not fail because other founders are watching. It fails as a customer channel when buyers cannot see themselves in the work. Keep the real founder journey, but translate each useful part into the language, evidence, and decisions your market already cares about.
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Frequently asked questions
Does building in public work for B2B SaaS?
It can, especially when the public content addresses problems your buyers recognize and appears in channels where those buyers participate. Building in public does not replace direct sales, customer research, or other distribution channels.
How do I stop attracting only other founders?
Write from the buyer's workflow instead of the founder's milestone. Replace generic shipping updates with a specific customer problem, evidence from your work, your interpretation, and a bounded invitation for the target role.
What should a B2B SaaS founder share in public?
Share customer-safe problems, product decisions, experiments, workflow lessons, implementation tradeoffs, and evidence that helps buyers understand the problem better. You do not need to publish revenue, private customer details, or every feature you ship.
How do I know if my build-in-public audience includes buyers?
Review who follows and replies to you, including job titles, industries, company sizes, and the quality of conversations. Track buyer-relevant replies, demos, product visits, and qualified conversations alongside platform engagement.
A note from Uriel Bitton
Building in public is most useful when the people following the work overlap with the people the product is meant to help. For B2B founders, I would rather have a smaller stream of relevant buyer conversations than a large founder audience that applauds the journey but never encounters the problem.
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