What does it really mean to build an audience?🤔

I was just speaking to someone the other day who had success without building an audience, she wasn't up for it and focused in on simplifying things so that she didn't need an audience (and went down the mobile app route).

I have heard other stories of people just having their heads down on building a successful business.

I don't think you need an audience, but it can help. Not just the people who are in your audience, but the whole network effect on how they may recommend and share your stuff to people outside of your audience.

There is also the argument that an audience is often helpful for info type products, but not necessarily for SaaS.

This post is interesting and related: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/adam-wathan-says-to-build-distribution-not-necessarily-an-audience-793c418957?commentId=-MQANXZaFqpHXCeIx6XC

An audience is simply a group of people with similar properties whether it is a behavior, demographic, intent or position in a market you want to talk with. Those people, which are likely to accept your message and react. Every single product needs an audience if you are going to offer it. Audience is more generic term as like as people who come to listen to the musician bcs they most likely are interested in listening to music.

If you come to the concert hall and start singing without telling people to come, you will have to wait for your first listeners to hear about you and come. If you tell a promoter you are going to sing, a promoter will promote you to her audience so they come and you can sing to the people from second 0.

Of course, you can read here and there "build your audience first", but that just means that you start communicating a promise to potential leads - a poster, landing page with waitlist, i.e.

First off - define your persona and test it. Who is the potential buyer? Where those people are? Which media do they visit? There is a whole plethora of questions which will help you to find out who is, probably, your customer and only then you start building your audience.

The more proofed persona you have, the better audience you can have.
The better audience you have, the less resources you spend on campaign learning.
The higher quality audience you have, the more likely audience members will convert.
One audience can be great for more products and vice versa.
Audiences are being shared, sold (selling leads is just selling audience closer to the purchase behavior).

This is the reason why the personal data are new gold. You can have sort of quality audience even before you have the real product and use that audience to hit the product/market fit faster than your competitors find out you are online.

Find more on the internet about "custom audiences". You can start with that very quickly i.e. using your website + Google remarketing tag and that's absolutely free. You can also start building your audience for example by placing relatively cheaper display ads on pre-selected placements (you get them from your persona research) where you know those people are - a good tool is for example this one - https://www.placementsfinder.com/de/index.html (I am not affiliated with that link).

No reason to have a headache! :-)

Good luck!

Depends on the business and your goals. Having an audience is a (partial) substitute for marketing. And yes, your type of audience dictates how valuable it is for marketing.

There are plenty of B2B businesses where the owner has no social presence. They are quietly working away on their business and getting the word out through other means.

There is also a selection bias for conferences. As a conference organizer, if you are unaware of a business in a given niche, you would never know to reach out to them to ask if the owner wants to speak. And visa versa, if a business owner isn't the type to want to work on building a social presence, then they are also unlikely to submit a request to speak at a conference.

There are a lot of business owners like this and they are mostly lurkers on forms like this and HN. They have no need/desire to be involved and try to build any awareness. That effort isn't really going to drive additional value for their business.