🤔 Did you build an audience before launching your product/s?

I think people should be building an audience because it is the right thing to do, not necessarily with a focus on their product. As individuals we can take our audiences wherever we choose to go, they don't have to be associated with our employers or products. An audience will almost never do you any harm to have. I personally use Twitter, newsletter and my own website where I write lots about community building.

Definitely, I'm building Casa (https://trycasa.app) a community platform for startups and I actively build my audience on Twitter. My awesome audience has been my source of strength especially because I'm a solo bootstrapped founder. I've made so many friends and I'm so grateful for all the help I've received 🙌

If you want you may publish and promote content that builds your authority up in the topic areas that your target market is interested in, however do bear in mind that building an audience and building a product are two different things altogether. It is not at all necessary to build your own audience when you can easily access communities and social sharing platforms like Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Twitter, Kickstarter etc. Instead, in my experience it makes far more sense to build the product and then focus on marketing so that whichever of these communities benefit from your product get to know about it. Then if the product is discerned enough, or provides sufficient value, those communities will pick up on the product and establish the first echo chamber to give you the beginnings of product market fit.

Hi Evelina, this is an essential topic to discuss. You should launch your product after validating it's need (product-market fit) and be sure that you will have actual users. Otherwise you will fail, cause no one will pay you/ or pay for your product. So, YES! You should build an audience before launching your product. Now my team is working on building the audience. We are planning to do it on Product Hunt (for example) and with other similar platforms as well. Also, you can use your network. Network effect always works better than any other platform. Define your product's user persona and reach out to your personas, get some feedback and adjust accordingly.

I think it's essential. The most important things are being consistent & relevant. Consistency is perhaps easy to understand, but relevancy includes researching and understanding your audience and their needs. Also, it includes producing various types of content that your audience finds useful (whether educational, entertaining, promotional, etc.). Another important thing - listening. You may not get it right from the first try. There's nothing wrong with adapting based on your audience's feedback. Hope I helped!

Just trying that now - mostly focusing on building my audience on Twitter. But starting from a very small base. To start I'll be sharing my my journey, things like build in public posts and then after that I'll start to share on a niche (to be decided!)

Last year, I started building an audience on Twitter alongside shipping digital products like notion templates. Twitter has since been the main traffic to my products. Building in public on social platforms is highly recommended.

Yes, we always do competitor research first. Then create a buyer persona accordingly. We focus on social media platforms for the activities.

I just got 700+ upvotes for my product (fundraising guides, templates, and tools on Notion). I teased the Notion in a couple of startup communities and asked for feedback. More than 300 founders reached out to me! I responded to all of them. I literally had 300+ 1x1 conversations going on. Today I reached out to all of them and asked if they want to support the launch.

Yes. That is the ideal way to go about it. Launch will only get you limited eyeballs and few users. Having an audience before the launch will in a way help in spreading a word about the launch as well.

Product or no product, I think building an audience is always great. It opens up a totally different world for you and as a result, you get the opportunities to learn and experience things you would have never gotten a chance to, otherwise. Also, if you are going to launch a product, a big audience definitely is going to help :-)

Hhahaha I wish... we actually decided to launch just the day before, and I think we spent maybe 6h preparing for the launch, to do the videos, screenshots, thumbnail GIF. I think we did pretty well at the end :) But next time (soon), will most definitely build an audience... using ship and social media

Hey Evelina. For my previous product which was a community for startup founders, I focused too much in the product initially and was hard to figure out engagement later on. Audience building actually saves you a lot of time as giving back to the community and sharing your journey with them will help build an authentic relationship. So I'm focused more on the audience-first approach for my next venture, famewall.io which makes it fun to build a wall of fame from social media

Yes im doing this now, main places where im building is twitter, insta and discord- doing live spaces on twitter educating the community- giveaways on the discord, and cool content on insta :)

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We built a large waitlist using @viralloopshq - which was incredibly helpful in building early traction. We also leveraged the social channels where our customers were primarily posting and engaging content.

This is a great question and something we are unsure of. I definitely see its importance, but for our specific product, it is hard to rationalize the type of audience-building necessary (mainly because of the two customer types we have). It's really a chicken or the egg issue that we keep running into on building an audience first or providing some type of value first, because the audience is selfishly only interested in the value they'll be getting from it. (I am in this audience so it is easy to 'think like them' Regardless, we will most likely start building some buzz on Twitter regardless, and once there is some traction, begin building a Facebook group as well. Seeing the success of MicroAcquire and its build-in public + audience building early on is definitely what helped give them the early momentum, so it is inspiring to see it executed + working so well.

I'm gonna play the contrarian a bit and say the 'audience' hype is overrated. Every boring product doesn't need its own audience. If the product is boring or dumb and there's still an audience, it's probably multi-level marketing. Products need to solve problems. If that problem gathers an audience around it, good. But it's never audience-first. It's problem-first.

I personally do support this idea. Not only on PH but on every other online/offline platform as well. It basically should be the first step of any marketing funnel; need creation. You need to "fertilize the soil" before you actually plant your seed in it. This way, by the time you reach your launch date, a good load of leads is already present in the market for you.