Build in public, sell in replies

Build in public is a good way to grow an audience and a slow way to get customers. Replying to people who have your problem is the reverse. I'd do both, but until your following is real I'd spend most of my time on replies and treat posting as the side project.

That's not a knock on building in public. It's just that the two do different jobs, and early on the job you need done is revenue.

What building in public actually gets you

Posting updates compounds. Each post adds a few followers, and those followers see the next one. After a year you have an audience that trusts you, and launches get easier. But look at who follows a build in public account in its first months: mostly other founders. If you sell to founders, great. If you sell uptime monitoring to agencies, those followers are friends, not buyers.

What replies get you

A reply has tiny reach. The person you replied to sees it, plus a few dozen people reading the thread. But the reach is targeted. You picked that person because they just posted about the exact problem you solve. In my experience, around 1 in 10 helpful replies to the right people turns into a conversation. Posts from a small account rarely do that.

Rough math for an hour a day

Say you have 60 minutes a day and about 300 followers. A decent post takes around 20 minutes to write. A good reply takes about 3, once you've found the post.

These are rough rules of thumb, not promises. Set your own minutes and split below and see how the trade looks.

The numbers shift as you grow. At 10,000 followers, a good post can start real conversations on its own, and the split should move toward posting. Below a couple of thousand, replies win almost every time.

A build in public split I'd start with

Make the two feed each other

Replies give you material. If ten people this week complained about the same thing, that's a post: "Talked to 10 people about uptime alerts this week. 7 had the same problem." Don't name anyone. Just share what you learned.

Posts give your replies a home. Some people you reply to will click your profile. If they see a stream of real updates and a pinned post explaining what you build, they're much more likely to write back.

What to skip

Engagement pods, reply guys on huge accounts, and threads about your morning routine. They feel like progress because the numbers move. Revenue doesn't. The same goes for paid X ads at this stage: you pay for reach when what you need is the right twenty people.

If you want the reply side to take less of the hour, KittyLeads finds the people posting about your problem and drafts each reply, which keeps that part to about 20 minutes a day and leaves the rest for building and posting. More on the reply side in getting your first 10 customers from X.