A simple, actionable four-step guide that will help you build and retain an audience for your side project.

Article Outline

  • Step 1: Define your audience personas 🤗
  • Step 2: Find your audience 🗺
  • Step 3: Reach out to audience 📢
  • Step 4: Retain audience ⛓

Step 1.

Know who you're talking to.

Define your audience personas. An audience persona is a document that characterises the people in your product's typical audience. It includes demographic markers, their goals, ambitions and fears, and their pain points. It should be based on both quantitive and qualitative insights, though your first version is likely to be based on gut-instinct.

Simply, define the people who you believe are most likely to use your product.

🔗 The good news is that Hubspot has built a simple, powerful tool to help you generate audience personas quickly and easily. Start with the most obvious personas and then explore from there.

Step 2.

These personas on paper actually exist in the real world. So your next job is to find out where you can reach them.

Create a Trello board with the digital and real-world communities that your personas are part of. Don't stop there. Document the people and publications that influence them. And consider the social networks they use, emails they read, and the search queries they make. 

Here's an example public Trello board I made for SAAS businesses that details where startup personas - COOs, founders, front-end developers, HR people - spend time. You can filter by persona type on the menu. Your Trello board should include:

Communities

  • Subreddits they read
  • Digital Communities they post in
  • Slack Channels they join
  • Facebook Groups they post in
  • Meetups and events they attend

Search

  • Digital searches they make

Emails

  • Email lists they read

Influencers

  • Influencers they follow
  • Journalists they read
  • Blogs or publications they read

Social

  • Social networks they use most

Step 3.

Reach out.

When it comes to communities, whether digital or real world, gracefully promote your product. Build your authority and influence in these spaces and with these people by creating value, consistently. Use these spaces to solicit feedback, refine your product and drive sign ups. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

With influencers, engage early, and often, explaining your product vision. Listen to their feedback, get them on board, and ask them to help when the time is right.

For search and social, experiment with paid advertising. Use small budgets of $5/10 per ad set, a/b test and get a hold on the meaningful metrics for your marketing acquisition. And start to build out your search footprint with content marketing.

After a few week's work, measure referrals from each source and prioritise the ones that are most effective at building your audience. Do them more often.

Step 4.

Got 'em? Retain them.

It's easier and cheaper to retain a user than to acquire one, so once you've got them, keep them.

Optimise your landing page or product for a notification, Twitter follow or Facebook like, email drop, sign up or browser notification. Publishing on these platforms will drive people back to your product.

From there you can continue to build credibility with the user, refine your product and positioning, and ultimately generate more product sign ups.

🌈A public Trello board I created with 100 actionable ideas for getting your side-project's first 100 users.