Build-in-public audience is not your market. I learned the the slow way
The author reflects on the disconnect between building an audience in public and finding actual customers for their product. They emphasize that engagement from fellow builders does not equate to market demand for their software aimed at freelancers. The article highlights the importance of identifying the right channels to reach potential customers rather than focusing solely on audience-building efforts.
- ▪The author initially found success in building an audience among fellow founders but realized they were not the target market for their product.
- ▪AI has made building easier, leading to a noisy environment where applause from peers can be mistaken for product traction.
- ▪The author stresses the importance of being present in the right communities where potential customers are, rather than just focusing on public engagement.
Hacker News (Newest) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 5,306 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (Newest) |
| Canonical URL | https://www.indiehackers.com/post/your-build-in-public-audience-is-not-your-market-i-learned-the-difference-the-slow-way-2cbea1089d |
| Publication time | Wed, 03 Jun 2026 05:47:39 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-06-03T06:11:56.795Z |
| Last seen | 2026-06-03T06:11:56.795Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | P59K4ctDVpuK |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
One of my posts on this site did 500 views and 50 comments in 24 hours. For a solo founder with no following, that felt like a win, and in one sense it was. Then I looked at who was in the thread. Founders. Builders. Other indie hackers. People I genuinely respect and learn from every week. Not one of them is the person I built my product for. I make software for freelancers. Designers, consultants, writers, people who bill by the hour and run their whole business out of four browser tabs. I have spent months getting good at writing for Indie Hackers, and the audience I built here is almost perfectly disjoint from the audience that pays me. That is not a tragedy. But it took me an embarrassingly long time to notice, and I think a lot of us are making the same quiet mistake right now.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Newest).
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