Why selling to devs and launching on X is the default plan that kills most early SaaS

I've got a decent community on X and I've launched products there, some with tens of thousands of impressions on the launch post. Here's what actually came out of it, because the plan everyone shows up with here is: build a SaaS, build in public, sell it to builders, launch on X. It reads like a strategy. It's three separate bets and I got to test all three.

1. Build in public costs more than it returns

On paper you get attention while you build. In practice you're recording, screenshotting, writing the update, explaining every decision, and doing it consistently for months. Those are real hours taken out of building and talking to users. And the audience you get is mostly other builders watching other builders, which brings me to the second problem.

2. Builders are close to the worst ICP you can pick

If a technical person needs your tool, most of the time he can just rebuild it. Maybe not as well, but well enough for his own use. And he'll do it to save 10 bucks a month, because the build cost feels free to him. It's his weekend, not his budget.

Then look at who you actually convert: people who are "getting started". Motivation is basically their whole business model, and motivation churns. I spent 2 years in a structure that coached startups and saw the same thing there, most people who announce they're launching something are gone within a few months. You inherit that as churn.

3. The X launch isn't the event you think it is

Two things get inverted. First, people design the product for the launch instead of designing it for a market, and then expect the launch to create the demand. That order doesn't work. If the product already sells where the buyers are, X becomes a nice complement. If it only sells on X, you don't have a product, you have a moment.

Second, launches worked when they were rare. Now there are several a day just on the French speaking side of X, and the audience is saturated. Impressions are the easiest metric to hit and the least correlated to anything. Tens of thousands of views on a launch post converted into a number of paying users I would not brag about, because the people watching are the same few thousand accounts who launch things themselves.

What I'd build instead

Design the product so it can be sold somewhere other than X. That's the whole test. If the only place it moves is your timeline, you built a product for an audience, not for a market. Write down where the buyer is before you write a line of code, and if the answer is "on my feed", start over.

Make the product itself do the selling. Not in the buzzword sense, just: someone lands on it, understands it in ten seconds, gets value before he ever talks to you, and shows it to someone else because it solved his thing. That's what lets you stop launching. A launch is a spike you have to repeat forever. A product that pulls its own users is the only thing that compounds while you sleep.

Then think in years, not in quarters. Ask yourself whether the problem you're solving still exists in ten years. Most tools built on top of an API trend or a platform feature die when the platform ships it natively. Invoicing, scheduling, retention, payments, those problems have been there for decades and will still be there. Boring is a feature.

And seriously look at B2C, or at any buyer who isn't technical. A normal person cannot clone your product. He doesn't want to. He wants the thing to work on Tuesday morning and he'll pay 9 euros a month without thinking about it, where a dev will spend a weekend rebuilding it to avoid paying you 9 euros. The gap between "can build it" and "will pay for it" is where your entire business lives.

Competition in those markets isn't a red flag either, it's the only free proof you'll ever get that people are willing to pay. Back when founders told me "we're the first in the world to do this", that was the actual red flag, every time.

The idea was never the hard part. Selling it better than the other guy is.