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21 Comments

Build a business, not an audience

  1. 13

    The problem is not that building an audience is bad advice. It's that it's very specific advice that's good for some founders and bad for others.

    Building an audience takes a ton of time. You're working to accrue social capital, which means goodwill from lots of people: feelings of trust, reciprocity, sharing, and cooperation.

    That said, goodwill isn't always useful for building a great business.

    If you're investing, selling paid content or courses, building a community, hosting events, or doing consulting or advising work, then yes, it's great. Probably your best first step is to build goodwill with people however you can.

    But if you're, say, constructing a SaaS company, or creating a product, or building a service business, you don't necessarily need goodwill. You're better off worrying about product-market fit and finding distribution channels, potentially through other people's audiences.

    Patrick Collison was better off building Stripe than he would've been building an audience for 2 years beforehand. But I was better off putting out content to build an audience with IH than I would've been had I tried to start with a community right out of the gate. So it depends what you're trying to do.

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      Weren't most of Stripe's first customers from their Y Combinator cohort? Arguably, Patrick acquired the perfect audience for his product, but did it by joining YC.

    2. 3

      This is (not surprisingly) very good advice, and I'd like to add two more things:

      1. Another important benefit of audience-building (in addition to goodwill and trust) is credibility. Would Patrick Collinson's personal credibility have moved the needle much for Stripe in the early days? Probably not. But credibility is very important if you're selling a course/ebook/info product.

      2. A built-up audience is usually a one-time boost to revenue. An audience that hasn't been sold to yet is pent-up demand, and selling to your audience will usually result in a huge spike in revenue. But once everyone in your audience who wants to buy your product has bought, you'll usually see a large drop to low levels which means you're going to have to find new sources of customers to continue growing. This doesn't mean you shouldn't build an audience – the benefits are still there. Just be prepared for your revenue growth to drop significantly and start looking for more sustainable/ongoing growth channels.

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        An audience that hasn't been sold to yet is pent-up demand, and selling to your audience will usually result in a huge spike in revenue.

        Perfectly put. So it then becomes essential to constantly expand that audience to ensure new sales keen trickling in.

    3. 1

      But if you're, say, constructing a SaaS company, or creating a product, or building a service business, you don't necessarily need goodwill. You're better off worrying about product-market fit and finding distribution channels, potentially through other people's audiences.

      This is so true. Just make something people want, and find distribution channels.

      Those channels may or may not include your own audience.

    4. 1

      Patrick Collison was better off building Stripe than he would've been building an audience for 2 years beforehand.

      Because he was a pioneer. I wouldn't expect such great result with any new payment system nowadays.

      1. 2

        I'm not sure this only applies to pioneers.

        The teams behind Riverside.fm and VEED.io have both grown to massive revenue numbers in the past year. Neither of them built an audience beforehand, and neither of them are true pioneers — video editing and podcast recording software existed well before these companies did.

        I really think it just comes down to what you're selling.

        If you want to sell me your content or your expertise, great, I want to sample it first. I want to read your tweets or your blog or something so I trust that you're good before I buy your book, your course, etc.

        But if you want to sell me a SaaS product, for example, then I want to try the product, or I at least want see that others are using it successfully. It doesn't much matter to me what you're tweeting about.

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          In the company I cofounded which was a SaaS product that our customers used to perform the most important tasks for their job function, I designed the product and built the market from zero to 100+... so my sales function was not only MRR, but customer development and insights for business and product development, and informed building the entire customer journey.

          Started with 12 beta testers - converted 10 to our first paying customers of our mvp. Sales increased as product maturity improved, payment friction and pricing got figured out as well as how to ensure customer success/ onboarding and adaption and the very important getting the messaging right and having evidence plus understanding our value and what peoples objections could be.

          But when people started evangelising about it, that endorsement is what was really needed to make sales cycles accelerate. So my experience is that it really mattered what people were saying and that they started talking about it.

          Credibility and endorsements helped speed up cycle of awareness, demo/ buy/ onboard and increased motivation and urgency.

          It could mean the difference of someone immediately getting started or bookmarking and thinking about it for a while.

        2. 1

          I wouldn't agree about veed. From my understanding what they were doing a couple of years or so before the massive growth could be called exactly "building an audience". They didn't build the product in a stealth mode, they were actively pushing it everywhere. Yes, they created the editor first but not the business that started much later.

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            I just interviewed Sabba a week or so ago, so now it's too late for me to ask him about this for the podcast episode ;-)

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              We can ask him here, @sabba :-)

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                Hey! This is such a big topic and there is no right or wrong answer. @csallen and I dig into this a little on the podcast episode too so check it out once it's out.

                When building VEED, we were very public about what we were doing / growth / revenue and product. We did this because we were "Throwing spaghetti at the wall" and trying to see what stuck! We definitely were not trying to build an audience, just getting the word out.

                Did it help VEED grow? Not really, so we stopped.

                Having an audience does not magically solve the product-market fit problem. Casey Neistat had a huge audience, launched an app and it failed to grow.

                Rob talks about this too in this great episode of startups for the rest of us, he said his audiences helped at the start, but topped out super quick -
                https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-499-the-first-six-stages-of-saas-growth

                1. 1

                  Hi Sabba,
                  thanks for responding here.

                  When building VEED, we were very public about what we were doing / growth / revenue and product.
                  ...
                  Did it help VEED grow? Not really, so we stopped.

                  It actually has nothing to do with the building audience. But you started a youtube channel and this IS the building audience. I have a lot of doubts if you would succeed if you wouldn't post videos and all the stuff - not about what you were doing but about what users could do with your product.

                  Having an audience does not magically solve the product-market fit problem.

                  Nobody said it. But I believe it helps in 99% of cases.

    5. 1

      That's a very lucid response to a polarizing topic. Thank you for that.

      There is more to it though, that provides overlap (again, as you've mentioned, for specific situations and not ALL situations), which is... the act of building an audience can also define what your SaaS, product, service business should exactly be. How? One approach to audience building is identifying problems that a group of people have (in aggregate) and providing solutions in the form of blog posts, videos, etc... The content solutions identified as providing the most impact (across the broadest set of people) then set you up for the exact features to build for your SaaS, product, etc...

      1. 1

        Uncovering problems is definitely an ancillary benefit of audience-building. But you can also just go out and do customer interviews and market research directly, without any sort of content creation.

        So if that's your goal, I'd say just go do that, and skip the audience building part unless you have some specific reason you really want to do that, too.

        It's also worth mentioning that some people are just natural audience builders. They have to tweet, or write, or talk, or meet people. They just feel compelled. If you're someone like that, then I would never suggest you don't build an audience. If you're doing what you love, it's not aimless.

  2. 3

    I think most business can profit from both.

    Balance is always 🔑

  3. 3

    Maybe not the most popular advice in circles like this but I think it's very pertinent. Like the article says, it's somewhat a fake productivity since you're not spending time on your actual product.

  4. 1

    In my opinion you should consider the middle way.

    I fully agree with Jakob on the aspect of not focussing on "growing your twitter audience", but this does not justify striking out building an audience out of the equation completely.

    Your audience does not have to be on big social media platforms like twitter, facebook, or Instagram.
    You can have an audience by people listening to you on niché forums, slack channels, or through mouth-to-mouth recommendations even in real life!

    Without an audience you are just a soulless business, interchangeable and easy to ditch.

    I think the argument at the end is the key.

    You have to have something meaningful you are doing.
    Let this be the start of your communication to other people on- and offline.

    Imagine a huge market and one person is just summarizing all the other guy's businesses.
    Boring.
    Now imagine a new person telling fresh and new stories about how he came up with the new soap he is selling.
    Or another one talking about why his fruits are the best, as he grows and picks them with his cute little daughter.

    Without an audience you are interchangeable, but without a business you are just a random screamer.

  5. 1

    Having a large audience will not automally make you reach product market fit but I do think that having a large audience can help you get feedback and iterate which increases your chances of getting to product market fit.

  6. 1

    This opinion follows the pattern "don't do that, do this" exactly as "to build a business you should build an audience first" what means the right approach would sound like "IT ALL DEPENDS".

    For example, if your business is aimed at pet owners and it's no anything unique or innovative, it's extremely hard to find customers. If you start just building your business with all the staff like cool landing page, cool online store, you will eventually sit with nobody if you don't spent a lot of money for ads.

    Starting from the audience allow you to avoid such expenses. You still need to spend a lot of time and efforts to find your audience, appeal them somehow, build trustworthy but:

    1. it can be done without spending tons of money for ads
    2. after you're done you can try to sell you primary product even if it's commodity.
  7. 1

    Personally, I've found passively growing a small audience has been helpful to find people interested in the specific product I'm building. We're talking about a small handful. It's not taking much time away from building, and it's grown my group of beta testers and potential customers. I'm quite comfortable sharing little tidbits here and there to start a conversation with people, while staying far away from the world of sharing everything while getting nothing done.

    It's great to have some sort of conversation, especially in the age of COVID. Working independently in a city while taking COVID really seriously is isolating. Getting feedback and participating in conversation with others is healthy for me, product aside.

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