Launching products is, without a doubt, much easier when you’re famous. Elon Musk or Pieter Levels, all they have to do to promote their latest creation is write a single tweet. Fame begets more fame, and no need to spend a dime on ads too.
Most of us are not there yet. I’m fairly sure we make more meaningful products than flamethrowers. But we rarely make headlines and often have to fight our way through.
From obscurity to becoming an influencer, what are the steps to follow?
#ask-ih
"Build an audience first" is very common advice, but I've changed my mind on it. If you have an audience, that's great! But if you don't have an audience, I don't think you should let that stand in the way of you launching your products. In fact, I believe the opposite:
Building an audience is the side effect of doing cool things and launching successful products. In other words, the best way to build an audience is to first build a successful product.
For example, I had almost no "audience" whatsoever before building Indie Hackers. AJ wouldn't have an audience if he hadn't built Carrd, HTML5 Up, Pixelarity, etc. Pieter Levels wouldn't have his audience if he hadn't constantly shipped successful products. Etc.
There are some additional details worth mentioning:
Hope this helps!
Just wanna say I really enjoyed the read. Thanks for the insights.
Thanks for the reply. Guess this part
was directed specifically at me :)
Solid advice for those who don’t yet have a product. I do though, and I cannot abandon it just like that in search of a new audience. But you gave me an idea. My app alone is not enough to build a community around. However, creating a community around productivity mind hacks in general is something I could do. This seems to be a recurring theme for the products I make, so why not.
Alan Wiess' concept of Market Gravity is pretty niche as he targets consultants, but it might give you some ideas
https://www.alanweiss.com/styles/pdf/Marketing Gravity.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hfd4WoZwEY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X26LmOd-ds
Do things. Tell people.
Serious. The reason Levels has an audience is he creates and shares stuff all the time.
Start as square one. Do something that is valuable, interesting or useful. Tell a few people about it. Preferably in a scalable way like writing. Share that with a few people who might find it useful, or interesting or valuable. Keep doing that.
You will be surprised how far that gets you.
Answer in one word: Create.
Create something. Anything. Show it to people. You now have to capture them in a sustainable way. Email, Twitter, sure those work. Google spreadsheet works too. Google Contacts works as well.
I would actually disagree that launching products is easier when you're famous. Totally understandable if many disagree with me. Once you establish something, anything. and change it. You'll lose some people.
Anecdote: I created a 100k strong Twitter following and it was hard to pivot to a different type of content. An Instagram account with 50k went to almost ZERO engagement because I changed the content. I didn't change. Just what I created.
Some creators love to let the thing they create speak more than they do. Some love speaking their mind and want to promote a certain type of living or a certain mission in life. Make your platform what suits you.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.