3 ways to build an audience before you even have a product
Old way: build a product, then find an audience for it.
New way: build an audience before you even have a product.
3 ways to gather an audience while your product is still under construction 👇👇👇
1️⃣ Show magic at the landing page and run a waitlist with a referral.
Example: Flowrite.com
Their landing page is like "shut up and take my money." There's absolute magic going on there: you write several words, and they turn into several paragraphs of text with the help of AI.
After signing up, you get an email saying that your place in a queue is 1000-ish. And you can invite friends to move up on the list.
They have already collected 30,000 emails, even before the product launch.
2️⃣ Start a niche newsletter.
Examples:
— Zeda.io is a SaaS enabling a PM job. Product Cafe is their newsletter for product managers.
— Toplyne.io is a SaaS helping Product-Led companies to grow. Top of the Lyne is their newsletter about PLG.
The thing is, you don't even need a product to launch at Product Hunt. You can launch with a newsletter.
Especially since your product is still in beta, it isn't easy to get loyal customers. But it's much easier to make a good newsletter.
3️⃣ Start a community where everyone gets together and co-creates.
Example:
Pallet.xyz is still in beta, but they already have a Slack space with their early users. They have channels for feature-request, bug reports, customer support, and even particular channels to brainstorm ideas for new products.
We can find many other examples in the Web3 space. They manage to bring people together in a community while there is no product yet. One of the reasons it becomes possible is the collective ownership they promise to the early community members. Another reason is that nobody seems to understand a lot about Web3, and everybody tries to learn together.
What other examples do you know of building an audience before the product launch?
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