Build-in-public venues 2026: is anyone actually reading?

Research brief, 6 September 2026. Hypothesis under test: "people try to build in public, but nobody reads."

Method: 51 web searches; direct scrapes of Indie Hackers front page, WIP.co feed (plus 56 individual todo comment endpoints), Reddit RSS for r/buildinpublic, r/SideProject and r/indiehackers (100 newest posts each, plus per-post comment RSS for 29 posts), and the Hacker News Algolia API for every Show HN in Aug 5–Sep 4 of 2025 and 2026. Reddit's HTML/JSON and X pages are blocked from this environment, so subscriber counts come from third-party trackers (GummySearch, Reddiscope) and post samples from Reddit's RSS. "Estimate" is flagged wherever a number is mine or a third party's model rather than a platform-reported figure. Numbers older than 2025 are marked with the year.

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1. Venue map

Not found anywhere: official MAU for Indie Hackers, WIP, Peerlist; official #buildinpublic post volume; Indie Hackers Discord size; Threads BIP volume.

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2. Reader evidence for the five living venues

Sampling rule: newest posts old enough to have had ~a day to collect replies; counts are replies (comments), distinct non-OP commenters where I could compute it, and upvotes where the platform exposes them. All samples were taken 6 Sep 2026.

2a. r/SideProject (829K members, ~300 posts/day est.)

Ten posts aged 5–8 hours, via post RSS:

Median 1.5 comments at ~6 h; tracker 30-day average 6 comments / 18 interactions per post (Reddiscope). Readers vs posters: 89.3% of posts are self-promotion (same), and the post that drew the most replies was itself a "let me try your SaaS" offer — i.e. posters replying to posters. Posters-vs-readers ratio: 300 posts/day against 829K subscribers means ≈0.04% of members post on a given day (estimate); the other 99.96% are, at most, readers. The upside case exists: one founder reports 47,000 visitors in 24 h from a single r/InternetIsBeautiful post vs 2,000 from r/Entrepreneur — general-interest subs out-deliver founder subs ~23:1 (Draper, Jun 2026).

2b. r/indiehackers (191K members, ~2 approved posts/day est.)

Nine posts aged 3–10 days:

Median ~64 comments, ~32 distinct commenters. This matches the tracker's 79 comments/post (Reddiscope). The mechanism is scarcity: the sub lets through only ~2 posts/day (the "hot" RSS of 100 spans Dec 2025–Sep 2026), so each one gets the whole sub's attention. Caveat: a May 2026 piece says "r/SaaS, r/micro_saas, and r/sideproject are almost entirely consumed by AI comments" (MentionKit) — the 49–64 distinct commenters cannot be verified as human from RSS.

2c. r/buildinpublic (115K members, ~70 posts/day est.)

Nine posts aged 20–29 hours:

Median 0 comments; 5 of 9 posts had none after a full day. Tracker average 3 comments / 3 upvotes (Reddiscope). The sub quadrupled in members in a year while per-post engagement stayed near zero — the clearest "void" in the dataset.

2d. Indie Hackers (indiehackers.com)

Front page, 6 Sep 2026 (my scrape of 30 entries). Community-authored posts:

Staff interviews (author "IndieJames") do 33–142 upvotes and 17–94 comments. Comments-per-upvote is unusually high (often >2:1), which is the pattern the community itself flagged in January: "many comments followed an identical formula: compliment + summary of lessons" — 26 likes, 46 comments on that complaint (IH). So IH has readers-who-reply, but an unknown share are engagement-farming or AI. Firsto's claim that "many threads get zero replies" (Firsto) did not match the front page; it may hold for non-featured posts, which I could not enumerate (the /posts?sort=newest route renders client-side).

2e. Hacker News – Show HN

Full population, not a sample (Algolia API, Aug 5–Sep 4 2026, n = 3,659):

• 122 posts/day (83/day a year earlier)
• median 2 points, median 0 comments
• 63.9% get zero comments (65.4% in 2025)
• 4.5% get ≥10 comments (5.6% in 2025); 2.6% reach ≥50 points (3.5%)
• /shownew snapshot on 6 Sep: 21 of 30 newest had 0 comments, 25 of 30 had ≤2 points (HN shownew)

Repliers on HN are overwhelmingly strangers (readers, not fellow Show HN posters) — that is the venue's value — but only ~1 in 22 posts reaches a real discussion. A post titled "Where do indie hackers build in public these days?" got 1 point and 5 comments; the one substantive reply: "only developers will watch you coding or read your blog… you have nothing to sell them" (HN).

2f. WIP.co (for completeness)

56 todos sampled (15 from today, 41 from yesterday): 0 replies on all 56; the comments endpoint returns "No replies yet" (example). Forum posts get 1–6 replies from a recurring cast of Pro members (Alex, Marc, Jason Leow, etc.), i.e. fellow posters. Views are not exposed.

Posters-vs-readers ratios (estimates)

• r/SideProject: ~300 posts/day ÷ 829K = 0.04% post daily; ~6 comments/post means ≈1,800 commenting acts/day ≈ 0.2% of members.
• r/buildinpublic: ~70 posts/day ÷ 115K = 0.06%; ~3 comments/post ≈ 210 comment acts/day.
• Show HN: 122 posts/day; 36% get ≥1 comment.
• WIP: ~40–80 todos/day from 3,765 nominal members (1–2%) with ~0 replies — a diary, not a forum.
• X "Build in Public" community: 255K members; posting/reply volumes not obtainable.

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3. Success stories with reader-side numbers, and the counter-evidence

It worked (2025–26, with numbers)

• SuperX (Rob Hallam) — 900 → 40K X followers via daily posting; $23K MRR, ~650 customers at $39/mo, "95% of users came from organic content", $5K total ad spend; ~30% trial-to-paid (Feb 2026) (Indie Hackers). Note the product is itself an X-growth tool — the audience is the market.
• Marc Lou — 384K X followers (+14.7K/30d); $56.7K MRR, $3.0M lifetime across 17 products, verified via his own TrustMRR (TrustMRR). Audience took ~30 months to build before ShipFast (Draper).
• Tony Dinh — ~100 (2021) → 181K+ followers (2026); TypingMind $137K MRR; "the audience was buying before he even asked" (18 months of audience-building before Xnapper) (Supabird, Draper).
• Small Bets as a venue — sold for $3.6M to Gumroad (Apr 2025), price raised to $450 (Oct 2025), 4,500 → 7,727 members (Vassallo, Profitable Founder). Paid, closed rooms are the one venue type growing in both members and price.
• r/indiehackers thread "4 months in: 43 paying users, $1,247 MRR" — 95 comments, 51 distinct commenters within four days (my scrape). Readers exist when supply is throttled.
• Vendor case studies with tidy numbers (e.g. "200 → 3,500 followers, 87 paid customers on launch day") appear in Teract and AutoTweet — unnamed founders, unverifiable; excluded from the verdict.

It didn't / "nobody reads"

• 70-founder first-customer dataset (2023–26): communities 34% of first customers, Reddit alone 25%; "Build in public/Twitter/X: minimal standalone success"; one founder hit $17K MRR "with fewer than 100 followers on X" but "more than a million Reddit views"; another: "LinkedIn and X produced almost nothing while one small, extremely targeted subreddit produced all the traction"; a #18 Product Hunt finish = "2,000 visits, 200 signups and zero paying customers" (Lead-Scorer).
• "Build in Public Is Dead. Here's What Replaced It." (Jan 2026): "the feed got crowded… tens of thousands of people posting daily… a tweet about your MRR disappears in 48 hours"; the followers of BIP accounts "are other builders… not the dentist who needs scheduling software" (LaunchKit).
• "Is this the end of Build in Public? Top indie hackers are suddenly disappearing" (Feb 2025, 96 likes / 75 comments): above ~$10K MRR founders go quiet because of clones and "sharing revenue becomes bragging" (IH).
• "When everyone builds in public, no one builds in public" (Sep 2024): "out of 10 posts, 5 or 6 are sharing revenue"; X BIP community was 33.3K then — it is ~255K now (laike9m).
• "The truth about building in public" (Nov 2025): "No likes, no responses. And honestly? That's where most people quit… Wins → engagement / Failures → silence" (DEV).
• WIP review (Dec 2024): "I posted updates… expecting feedback… Instead, I got silence… a broadcasting station where everyone is shouting into the void" (ilikekillnerds) — confirmed by my 0/56 reply count in Sep 2026.
• r/buildinpublic itself: "Got 700+ visitors in one day but made $0, what am I doing wrong?" — 5 comments (my scrape).
• Venue deaths 2024–25: Buildspace (Aug 2024), Polywork (Jan 2025), Makerlog (domain repurposed), Launch House (community shut ~2023), Indie Worldwide (sold for a 5-figure sum and folded into Ramen Club). Every independent, free, feed-style BIP venue launched 2018–2021 is gone or static; only the subreddits, HN and paid clubs grew.
• Reach mechanics: LinkedIn follower-first reach fell to 10–20% (GrowedIn); on X a reply earned 12K impressions vs 400 for an original post ("30x the eyeballs") (Graham Mann) — the algorithm rewards commenting on big accounts, not broadcasting your own log.

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4. Verdict

Partly true — and truer in 2026 than in 2024. "Nobody reads" is false at the top of the funnel and largely true at the median: readers exist, but they are concentrated in a few throttled or stranger-facing venues, while the open, high-volume BIP feeds are diaries with no audience. The three strongest facts: (1) In the 30 days to 4 Sep 2026, 3,659 Show HN posts went up (122/day, +47% YoY) and 63.9% received zero comments; only 4.5% reached ten (Algolia). (2) r/buildinpublic grew +441% to 115K members in a year (GummySearch) yet averages 3 comments per post (Reddiscope) and 5 of 9 day-old posts I sampled had none; WIP.co's feed had 0 replies on 56 consecutive updates. (3) Where attention is rationed it is abundant: r/indiehackers admits ~2 posts/day and each drew 18–126 comments from 13–64 distinct accounts in my sample, and the only venue category growing in members and price is closed paid rooms (Small Bets $99 → $450, 4.5K → 7.7K members, sold for $3.6M). The 2025–26 success stories (SuperX, Lou, Dinh) all rest on 18–30 months of prior audience-building on X, and the one broad dataset of first customers finds BIP-on-X yields "minimal standalone success" while niche subreddits deliver (Lead-Scorer). So: a real public exists on Reddit's big subs, HN and inside paid clubs; posting into the branded "build in public" feeds — WIP, r/buildinpublic, the #buildinpublic hashtag — is, for the median poster, posting into the void.

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Counts: searches run: 51 (WebSearch) plus ~40 direct fetches/scrapes (WebFetch, curl, Algolia API, Reddit RSS). URLs cited: 89 distinct.