How would you build an audience from scratch?

There's no right way to do it. But imo this is the most fool proof:

• Start “folllowing” 100+ people in your area.
• If you like something they do tell them. Don't ask for anything.
• Join online spots where your audience hang out. Be helpful. e.g. - if you want to grow a newsletter there's a newsletter creators group you could join ...
• Start creating stuff yourself. Share where your audience hangs
• Don't scream and shout. It takes time.
• Repeat

It's combination of hanging out in the right places, taking an interest in others, being helpful and creating cool stuff yourself and then just let time take it's course ...

Same way I did Indie Hackers:

1. Pick a hobby, interest, skill, or career that I care deeply about and that others do as well.
2. Learn where these other people hang out, what they talk about there, what their problems are.
3. Put together a useful resource to help these people out.
4. Collect email addresses, and continue to update the resource.

1. Find someone with an audience who is engaged and open to new ideas.
2. Build/make/write something useful for that audience.
3. Make it good enough for the person in Step 1 to share it with their audience.
4. Make it easy for the interested subset of that group to follow you, sign up for your thing, etc
5. Grow your new audience by <insert various growth tactics here>.

Create as much value as I possibly can for those who are publicly voicing problems trying to be successful at something or accomplish something. Make sure that I can capture the value I provide in some way so that I can keep following up with more value for them.

Startup from the basics. Contribute, learn and share.

The only tool I'm using is Grammarly - write better and faster.

Try not to spam all topics, pick your niche and slowly develop your presence.

The target audience is out there somewhere. They key is to find where that community is and interact with them in a way that they understand and is digestible to them. Build your own community within the target community by contributing to it, establish relationships, and so on.

Understanding the community will help you decide what tools to use and also not what to do. You want to be empathetic to the community and conservative in your approach in a lot of ways. Don't just throw wrenches at them.

Community building is more art than science.

In addition to my last comment, Neil Patel just shared this gem: https://neilpatel.com/blog/#p-91116

1. Find someone with an audience - borrow traffic
2. Write hyper-focused blogs on search terms very specific to your product with low volume and competition
3. Use PhantomBuster to automate getting in front of your competitors their audience
4. In B2B? Good old cold email!
5. Google or Medium search for growth hacks. There is so much information out there which is top-notch that it's making my head spin of all the stuff I need to execute on

What I wouldn't do? Depends! If I know my target audience through and through I would consider using paid traffic and have done so successfully in the past. However if you get it wrong you'll end up burning yourself. Badly.

Read my most recent post. Your app to run them all please!