Product success without an audience?

Audience-building is just one type of marketing. There are many others that work: content marketing, SEO, paid ads, social media, etc...

In fact, I'd say that audience-building is really a sub-category of content marketing.

It depends a little bit on what you mean by "audience" - to me, that word means "a group of people whose primary interest is "you and what you have to say" rather than "the problem your product solves". Most solopreneurs don't have an "audience" in this sense.

In a recent Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, Rob Walling actually pushes back and says that most first-time entrepreneurs overestimate the importance of an audience in building a startup: it's great to get things rolling, but you still end up having to do the hard work of finding where people with this problem already gather (Slack workspaces, LinkedIn, subreddits, Discords, conferences). By doing this, you can take advantage of the audience-building that others have already done.

Building an audience takes a ton of time and is a job in its own right: trying to take it on as a first-time founder isn't a recipe for success.

In my experience, you should:

1. Focus on maybe getting a few precommitments from a well-crafted landing page that describes the problem and how you solve it (or at least validating the pain point by talking to would-be customers)
2. Build a very small, high quality solution that solves an important piece of that problem.
3. Monitor the existing distribution channels daily and every time someone posts about a problem that your tiny product solves, be there to helpfully guide them to your product.
4. Always be looking for new distribution channels

Once I made this shift from "proactively post a link to my thing in existing distribution channels" to "reactively helping people within the distribution channel when they say they have this problem", people start viewing you as helpful instead of spammy.

(A while back, I wrote some guidance on the importance of a "small, high-quality solution".)

At TinySeed (tinyseed.com) we've funded more than 100 bootstrapped SaaS companies. We get several hundred applications for each batch and pick the top few percent between ~$1k and ~$40k MRR.

5% of them had an audience before they launched their SaaS. Visit this page and assume that 1 in 20 had an audience: https://tinyseed.com/portfolio

If you are building info products and courses, build an audience.

If you are building SaaS or software, don't build an audience unless this is your sweet spot zone of genius. IMO it's not worth the time and effort for SaaS unless you have it already.

Hi Farez, I'm sure there are many examples of individuals who are successful but have small followings. My SaaS product and software licensing business is doing $50k ARR and my following is non-existent.

Software licensing (B2B) is 80% of my revenues. If selling to businesses is your model, then you don't need a big following, just a handful of businesses that have $5k/yr problems.

Why not both, building in public is very powerful. Not only do you hold yourself accountable, but other people do too.

When you promise to deliver X update by Y date, and people engage with you (audience), you are much more excited and motivated to finish it on time!

Building without an audience is terrible because you might be wasting your time on features that people won't use or are implementing them the wrong way without getting some feedback. (even if you want to build the product for yourself since you are biased)

I just started building in public, and I have gained a couple of Twitter followers. Still, most importantly, I got 150 beta testers to try my app in a couple of days by posting on Reddit about my progress and asking for feedback and insights!

Just yesterday, a user posted a very nice comment after a week of use, and it made me feel so good and motivated.

I had the same question and I have started building product without building the audience. 🙉

And boy, I have to tell you, I should have listened to the advice. 🙈

I am building a saas product for sales professionals which will help them improve customer acquisition with a lesser time.

Yes, I checked for the product market fit. And I don't have an audience yet.

But as per my target customer base - I'll like to use my product to advertise the product.

Let's see If I can create an exception.

I'm new to indiehacker. So, indiehacker is not allowing me to post my product here yet. But I'm one month away from beta test. You can pre register by sending your email on my twitter also I'll absolutely love to have a conversation.

Oftentimes you build an audience by building products.

But here are a few marketing ideas and resources you can use to market without an audience:

1. sell on marketplaces like Amazon or Udemy. They bring customers to you with their aggregated demand.
2. Create content for search engines, let people find you. If you have for example the best post on how to sync Salesforce to Asana people will find it, and your tool.
3. pay for ads. No audience needed, just money.
4. pay for influencers to make content about you and distribute it.
5. Direct sales. directly reach out to people who might need your product. Critical in the early days
6. Find groups of your target people and hang out with them. FB, Meetups, Reddit. Provide value. This is could be the start of you building an audience.
7. YouTube - content can go viral without an audience. Esp YouTube Shorts
8. TikTok - content can go viral without an audience.

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE?

it depends what kind of product and what kind of audience.
@arvidkahl distinguishes "borrowed" vs "owned" audiences, mostly for SaaS and some other products .
@robfitz says your "seed audience" is the key for info products, such as books, courses, etc.

In my limited experience, having your own seed audience for info products is gold.
Cannot say anything re: SaaS

So, as usual, is depends...

It depends on who your customer is. If you are building a product for people who don't use twitter, it can be useless to create a following on twitter.

But if you tweet about your product aka build in public, other builders and indie hackers will follow you. They won't be your customer but can give you immensely value feedback on your product, landing page, design, pricing, find market, and what not.

Would like to understand this as well. I am building an app, but in my mind app first then the audience. I feel like nowadays you'll have to pay to build an audience.

While it helps, you do not need an audience, you just need to know how to cut through all the noise and be heard which is difficult in this day and age.

Solopreneurs most times don't know what they want to build.

So, building an audience first helps you test out ideas before you spend weeks or month building a product.

But like every other advice, it's just an opinion of others.

What most solopreneurs do these days is to build side by side, listen for signals, iterate and build again.

There's no one size fits all.

While an audience is much of a leverage when building, you can build a product then an audience

I really believe success is about customer success, not audience. Your initial users/customers WILL build you an audience for you if they have a good enough experience.

For more common products with lots of competition and minimal differentiation, surely having an audience helps tremendously though. This is why celebrity brands tend to do so well. But they typically are selling you say, Booze, or Cosmetics, not something truly unique.

Games are generally an exception. Defining a game is no fun but u can only know the results after putting it in user's hands.
You can see that all movies/games are generally throwing things on a wall and hoping something sticks.

No one starts with an audience. In most cases, seems success is really about consensus; you have to demonstrate you deserve success before society at large will allow it.

An example of a success Solorpreneur is Marie Forleo, a Business Coach.

Forleo currently provides an extensive amount of free content, which includes mini-training on audio found directly on her website. She also regularly sends out newsletters filled with viable information for her subscribers and posts video tidbits answering viewers’ questions. In addition to that, Forleo also manages to broadcast an award-winning weekly web show called MarieTV, where she interviews prominent thinkers in the business or personal development industry.

However, the majority of her earnings come from her online business programs. One such program is called the Copy Cure, where she teaches participants ways to improve their writing skills to attract more business. Her more lucrative program, however, is B-School. This 8-week online course teaches effective marketing strategies to entrepreneurs that want to increase their revenue. Students can sign up at any stage of their career because she provides the fundamental tools needed to begin, grow, or expand a business. The course is only available once per year, which makes the selection process competitive. However, once a person has completed B-School training, they have the opportunity to retake the program without additional costs.

Most recently, Forleo released a New York Times best-selling book, called Everything Is Figureoutable, and has begun a book tour throughout the US.

At present, Forleo is valued at approximately $14 million. This is a great solopreneur success story.

Advice is nice, reality is often different. For new creators, many people make a simple product and then go market it.

Either you sell a dream
Or you give a product.

Join here at 2pm EST to chat more about it

https://vibehut.io/rooms/6304c25f8ac27200164bd65f

Hey Farez,

Two things.

First - if you are going to go down the audience-building route before building a product, make sure you also monetize that audience at the same time. The number one killer of all startups is not making enough money. So make sure you're selling something (that could be an information-based product or even doing something like crowdfunding).

A company like Bullet Journal is a great example of this - started off with no product but sold a BLUNT belief to its target audience (I've written a number of articles about this on this website and you can find more info on my website). Very quickly the founder launched a Kickstarter to raise money for a new website before branching out into physical products, then a book, an online course, and now a mobile application.

Second - you don't need a huge audience to make money.

For example, I don't get a huge amount of traffic but the traffic I do get converts at a pretty decent rate. Don't be fooled into thinking you need a huge audience to generate revenue.

TLDR: build audience + monetize at the same time. Don't need a huge audience to do so.

We built the Contact Tracing QR Code attendance addon https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/qr_code_attendance_for_classroom_employe/372652717544 for businesses, churches, schools during Covid-19 pandemic because we are the customers, the audience. Government required us to use "Contact Tracing" app so we built it. The best thing founders should do is to build the products they need.

I'm building an Ed-Tech product. And since we're aimed to give people relevant skills development of product never stops. Otherwise, we'll loose the trac and our students will not be able to find the job.

So, we're buideing it and attracting leads at the same time, thich soes work pretty effective if you calculate it correctly. In our case, lessons open after students completed previous, so we have to know when new lessons should be ready.