Building an Audience is Harder than Selling your Product

An audience-first approach to building a successful startup is almost always a bad idea.

Don't get me wrong. Having a large, engaged audience is a superpower that can lead to many profitable opportunities. (Check out Nathan Barry's Billion Dollar Creator for one of the best articles on the topic.) However, building that audience is much easier said than done.

If you think marketing your product is hard, try building an audience first.

It's definitely not impossible. There are many examples of those that have succeeded.

It's just very difficult and time-consuming. Most are not cut out for that level of effort with so little return.

For a little perspective, less than 4% of the estimated 50 million creators earn a full-time living.

Growing an audience is hard. Damn hard.

Ali Abdaal writes that, the average YouTube channel with 1k to 10k subscribers has made 152 videos.

How many hours would it take to record, edit, and publish 152 videos? Is that the most effective use of a startup's limited resources? I think not.

If you have a solid product that is solving a real need, then your time is probably better spent advertising and selling that product. Profits are much more powerful than likes, follows, and even subscribers.

Instead of spending 10 or 20 hours per week creating content, what if you spent that time on paid advertising, cold outreach, networking at events, or doing small test projects for people in your home city?

Interacting with potential clients is going to out deliver that same time spent on content marketing in the early days

It's Not an Audience Problem.

If few people are buying your product or service after a consistent sales and advertising effort, then the problem is what you are selling. No size of audience is going to fix that.

Creators Need Audiences, Startups Don't

If you want to be a creator, then you need to build an audience. No question. That requires a lot of creating and promoting.

Writers need to write. Podcasters need to podcast. YouTubers need to make videos.

That's a tough business model, but if it's what you love to do, all the power to you.

I publish my newsletter because I love learning about startups and marketing. Despite the recent hype, newsletters are a lousy business model. I knew that when I started and I'm okay with it. I want to be a creator.

If you want to grow a successful business, building an audience or community probably shouldn't be the main priority early on.

Creator = Startup

Startup ≠ Creator

Creators definitely need to think more like startups if they want to build a sustainable business. The top creators have large teams, multiple income streams, and often do a lot of paid advertising. That's what it takes to compete.

However, startups rarely need to be creators. At least not in the early days.

Startup > Creator

It's much easier to build an audience off of a successful business than it is to build an audience to promote a product.

One of the key issues is that inexperienced creators have nothing meaningful to publish.

Running a startup and experimenting with new marketing tactics gives you knowledge and expertise that others can learn from. Even if the startup ultimately fails, there are always valuable insights to be gained.

The opposite is true in the creator space. The internet is overflowing with banal platitudes and generic advice from creators without much experience. No one needs rehashes of the same listicle or motivational quote that everyone has seen a hundred times.

I've been curating my newsletter for over a year and a half and I've just crossed 1800 subscribers. I spend 10 to 20 hours on it each week. That is easily over 1000 hours by now.

I learn a lot every week and I enjoy the curation process, so I'm not complaining. I just want to emphasize that it is not easy to build an audience.

For another project, with no social media presence, I've added tens of thousands of subscribers with a minimum of effort. I don't even publish there, I just notify subscribers of upcoming sales.

A successful business naturally builds an audience of customers and potential customers. Growing a following is inevitable if you have a good business and a way to connect online.

Trying to build an audience with the vague hope of turning it into a business rarely works. As my friend Jakob Greenfeld says, "Build a business, not an audience."

I curate the IdeaEconomy Newsletter. I spend a lot of time every week finding the best links to help you grow your business. I'd love it if you checked it out.