1. Treating it as a diary
"Day 23. Worked on auth." records that time passed. It gives the reader nothing. The unit that works is the piece of work, not the day.
2. Announcing instead of showing
"Excited to announce our new dashboard" is a press release. "The dashboard was three clicks deep, so I moved it to the front and here is what broke" is a post. The second one contains information.
3. Only posting wins
An account that only reports success is either lying or boring, and readers work out which within a month. The dead ends and the things that took longer than they should have are frequently the better material, because everybody has those and almost nobody writes about them.
4. Manufacturing failure because failure performs
The overcorrection. Vulnerability posts do well, so people start inventing setbacks or inflating small ones into crises.
Readers detect this faster than you would expect, and it costs more than the boring version would have. If nothing went wrong, do not invent something that did.
5. Sharing numbers you will regret
Revenue screenshots get attention. They also set a permanent baseline, invite a category of unpleasant attention, and are close to impossible to walk back.
Once you have posted a number, every future post is read against it. Growth becomes the story whether you want it to be or not. Some people are happy with that trade. Make it deliberately rather than because a screenshot did well once.
6. Building an audience for the wrong product
Post about indie hacking and you get an audience of indie hackers. That is a great audience if you sell to indie hackers. If you sell warehouse software, you have built a following that will never buy anything, and you will have spent a year doing it.
Post about the problem you solve, in the domain you solve it in.
7. Inconsistency
Someone finds a post, checks the profile, sees the last entry was six weeks ago, and moves on. Not because the content was bad. Because there is no evidence of ongoing work.
Steady and ordinary beats sporadic and excellent, at least until you have an audience.
8. Writing for other builders when you sell to someone else
Build in public communities are full of builders, so the feedback loop rewards posts about building. That is a fine strategy if your customers are builders.
If they are not, you have optimised for the wrong readers. The engagement feels like progress and is not.
9. Confusing engagement with progress
Replies from other builders congratulating each other is a pleasant loop and not a business. The metrics that matter are profile visits, clicks through to the product, and people who arrive because they have a problem you solve.
A post with forty likes from peers and no clicks did less for you than a post with four likes from people who signed up.
The through line
Most of these are variations on one thing: the exercise is for the reader, not for you.
Posting because you committed to posting produces diaries. Posting because a format performs produces manufactured drama. Posting to peers because peers respond produces the wrong audience.
Asking what a stranger would get from this eliminates most of the list.