Building in Public: What Seven SaaS Founders Actually Mean by It

On the saas.unbound podcast, bootstrapped founders keep coming back to the same idea: your best marketing is the work itself. Not the ad spend, not the growth hack, not the viral launch. The product, the process, the honesty about what’s working and what isn’t. From open-source frameworks to email forwarding tools to Slack apps, here’s how seven founders turned transparency into their primary growth engine.

“Here’s my secret to marketing: I don’t do any marketing. My customers are the Ruby developers that are my peers. And the way I market is I make the best, most amazing open-source package that I can. Sidekiq, the free project, is my marketing. When you use Sidekiq and you say yeah, this works well, it’s really easy to use, it looks great, let’s use it. And so you use it for six months or a year and then you realize, oh wait, I need this feature that is a commercial feature. Maybe we should think about buying it. That’s the entirety of my customer acquisition.”

Mike Perham @Sidekiq – episode #2

“The secret is the free plan. They would not write about us or record those videos if there would not be the free plan. Or if it was just a bad product. We have a lot of productivity experts, business experts, whatever, they record free product demos for us basically. And it’s funny because shooting some kind of video like this for us would cost a ton of time, money, etc. But some people are doing it for free and it’s really good production value.”

Antoine Minoux @Fernand – episode #5

“About 20 to 30 percent of your content should be about the product. The rest of it should just be general stuff. I operate in this problem space. I so happen to have something to help you, which is open source. But if you’re interested in this problem, here are my thoughts, here are some resources. I fell into the trap of once a day, once every two days sharing a product update. And it’s so easy to fall into that trap. But taking a step back and saying, don’t focus on product content. Just lead with content and free content and thoughts and shares and opinions. People react to that a lot better.”

David Boyne @EventCatalog – episode #15

“I have the closest thing to the one weird trick that has worked really well. Whenever someone signs up, a couple days later, from my inbox, I send them an email in complete plain text that says, hey, this is an automated email, but if you reply, it is going to me. It’s not going to some customer service agent. It’s going straight to me. Just want to understand why you’re checking out the product. And people really do respond to that in a way that feels more earnest. The reply rate is in the five to ten percent range for every single new registration.”

Justin Duke @Buttondown – episode #46

“Building in public is so amazing because you can say, hey, we’re thinking about doing this, and someone goes, no, that’s a dumb idea, do it like this. And so it allows for rapid feedback. We also think that a lot of people want to work in startups but it’s a little bit tricky to see how startups work. So what we decided to do was show-and-tell videos, like 15-20 minute videos, very simple, unedited, unscripted. We just talk about what we did in the past week. This is what we built, this is why we built it.”

Stefan Avram @Wundergraph – episode #10

“I didn’t try to sell anything. There was no paid version at the time. I simply wanted feedback. I posted in German finance forums, the bank’s own community forum, Reddit. And then I get a few hundred signups and they tried it, they liked it, I got a lot of feedback. Two months later I just added a pro feature and a subscription price and checked if anybody would be willing to pay for it. And when the first euro came in, that was the magic moment where I thought there could be a business there.”

Sumit Kumar @Parqet – episode #32

“When we got started, we interviewed 40 people leaders to learn more about their priorities, their schedule, what they would be doing first time in the morning on Monday. That kind of question that helps you shape the vision of your company and your product. And depending on who are the 40 people you interview, you can have radically different answers and then radically different products. That’s why I’m not worried about sharing everything I learned along the way, because I’m convinced that no one can replicate it. It actually benefited us more in terms of learnings, because it generates conversation with other founders willing to share learnings with us.”

J.Y. Delmotte @BuddiesHR – episode #19

The thread connecting all seven stories is the same. Your product is your top of funnel. Your transparency is your moat. And customer conversations, whether on Reddit, in a plain-text email, or through a 15-minute unscripted video, shape the roadmap better than any strategy deck.

For founders who have spent years building something real, this kind of organic, community-driven growth creates assets that go well beyond code. Active users who talk about your product unprompted, feedback loops that drive retention, and a public record of decisions that builds trust over time. At saas.group, we see these qualities in the strongest businesses we work with, and they matter whether you’re scaling, sustaining, or starting to think about what comes next.

Check out these and other episodes of saas.unbound podcast to hear the full stories behind how these founders built, grew, and kept going.