So you just spent one week, one month or one year—wow! hold on there, you already spent too much time on it!—on your product. Now it's time to launch! Yay. Only one problem. What? How? Where? Some will answer: “Post it to Product Hunt”. “Share it on some Reddit!”. “Submit to HN”. And while these outlets might give you some eyeballs (even a lot in some cases), it often won't convert in many paying customers. And customers are the key to a thriving business. Who would've guessed!
The advice to build an audience is often the kind of advice you don't want to hear as an indie hacker, as it is something you cannot make yourself in just a few hours or a day. You need to spend time on it. And time it sure takes!
Why building an audience is so important for your success
It's not a business if you have no customers. How to reach them? Just passively posting to the aforementioned platforms isn't likely to get you many loyal customers. But reaching out to your audience increases your changes to a great extent. These are people you have been in contact with for some time. Depending on your means of audience-building, they might even say “they know you”. That is really powerful!
They trust you as you gave them valuable content that was really useful for them—you even didn't charge anything for it!
You can reach out to your audience to give them a sneak-peek into what you're building. People in general love to get an exclusive insight into new things, so this is a double incentive for them to provide you with feedback before your public launch.
For all this goodwill they like to return the favour and share your new product with their friends and coworkers—even without you asking! Awesome!
Audience first done right
Need some prove of people pulling the “build an audience first” trick off well?
Ryan Hoover, Product Hunt
Ryan Hoover, founder of Product Hunt: “Because I built that small audience in the beginning, it allowed me to then get it off the ground, or at least get some critical mass of people using it.” [1]
Refactoring UI
Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger from Refactoring UI started about a year ago working on Steve's Twitter following [2]. This was done by pushing quality content about practical design tips through his Twitter account, step-by-step redesign articles on Medium, and redesigns as screencast on YouTube. His following went from less than 1000 to more than 40k. This was all to build up to the big splash of launching (“finally”—according to their audience) their book package which sold 6000 copies in the first two weeks.
Pieter Levels, NomadList
Early on Pieter Levels understood the concept of building an audience by story-telling. This was first done by his quirky style of writing on his blog [3]: “12 startups in 12 months” all the while moving and living in different places in the world. Together with having and sharing a strong opinion on how products should (not!) be built, made him a prolific internet persona with a huge audience. This makes it so much easier for him to find the first users for his (new) products.
Ideas to build an audience
Building a big and loyal audience doesn't happen overnight (just like success doesn't). So persistence is in order. Don't stop if your growth, and other conversion metrics, are stagnant for some time. Push for quality over quantity. Rather one great email per month, than one good email every week. Test different ideas early and often. See what sticks and ask for feedback.
Decide who you want your audience to be and find where your ideal audience hangs out. Tell a story. Find your own unique voice. Nobody is looking for something that has been said before. You don't have to be as outspoken as Levels (or DHH from Basecamp[4]). If you are not comfortable with that, find your own angle. At the same time, don't stay in your comfort zone either. It is really okay to have people that disagree with you. This only means that people actually care about what you have to say. Way to go!
Places to interact and reach your audience
Besides the obvious places to reach and interact with your audience like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Quora, also consider niche product or industry-known forums. Their reach might be less significant, but you can be sure it's filled with people who care more about what you have to say.
Another great way to grow your audience, but not appealing to everyone, is to speak at conferences. Start small at a local meet up. Try it a few times—as this is the kind of thing that doesn't come easily to most—to see if you get better at it and you actually start to enjoy it.
But the end-boss amongst all these is the platform-agnostic email newsletter. Email is 48 years old [5] and isn't planning to leave us anytime soon. It's the only direct line you have with your audience without being dependent on any platform. Use it!
Build your audience starting today
The most easiest way to get started is by utilising Twitter. Follow that up by writing articles for blogs that are relevant to your audience (ask them about the subject you want to write about)—most will be happy to add a canonical URL to your blog too. Always ask to subscribe to your newsletter to get more quality content.
If the examples above show anything is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. It does show that it's important to be in it for the long haul and to find your own unique angle to it though.
Building an audience is not easy and even having a big audience is obviously no guarantee for success. You still have to build great products too. But when done right: you teach your audience things they don't know and, in return, you will learn great things from them.
With many things: if yesterday was the best time to start, today is the second best option.
NB/disclaimer about the title: no, your business doesn't have to fail if you don't have an audience, but you sure will make it harder for yourself.
[1](https://www.intercom.com/blog/podcasts/product-hunts-ryan-hoover-on-growing-a-happy-community/)
[2](https://twitter.com/steveschoger)
[3](https://levels.io)
[5](http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/60at60/2015/8/1971-first-ever-email-392973)
Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash
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