I finally compared who follows us with who actually uses the product. There's almost no overlap.

I've been "building an audience" for about four months. This week I did something I should have done at the start: I put the two lists side by side. The people following us, and the people who have actually signed up and used the thing.

They're not the same people. They're barely adjacent.

Followers, by job function:

Business development — 48.6%
Product management — 4.1%
Everything else is single digits, one or two people each

Actual users, from about 2,400 signups:

Product and planning — 63%
Business — 17%
Developers — 6%
Designers — 6%

So the group that makes up nearly two thirds of my user base is the second-smallest slice of the audience I spent four months assembling. And the largest slice of that audience is a group that, as far as I can tell, has never once signed up.

I've been sitting with why, and the cleanest way I can put it is this. An audience assembles around what you talk about and how you show up. Users assemble around a problem they already have. Those two only overlap if you're talking about that problem, in the place those people already are. I was mostly talking about my own process, in rooms where people who like founders hang out. Different thing entirely.

Here's the second number that made it worse.

This week a subreddit auto-removed a post of mine. Not for content. The bot said my account had under 10 comment karma in that specific community, and it's an anti-spam threshold. Fair enough. But that's the punchline: four months of building in public, and in the one community where my actual users hang out, I had not earned ten comments' worth of standing.

I'd been accumulating something in places that felt like my market. Followers, impressions, profile views. All real numbers, all going up, none of them attached to a person with the problem.

The part I find genuinely hard is that the audience number is the one that feels like progress. It moves every week. Overlap doesn't have a dashboard. Nobody hands you a chart of "percentage of your followers who could plausibly become customers," so I never looked, for a year.

So the question, and I'd honestly like an answer because I don't have a good method:

Have you ever checked the overlap between your audience and your actual users? Not felt it, checked it. And if you did, what did you use to measure it job titles, surveys, just asking people, something better?

And if the overlap turned out to be bad, did you go find a new audience or change what you talk about to pull in a different one? I can see arguments for both and I'm about to have to pick.