Building audience first and product after? Or building product first and audience after?
Shreyas Prakash
19 replies
This question stems from an inherent observation surrounding the launch and distribution of successful products on Product hunt.
In most cases, even great products die down after the launch on PH as they suffer from the distribution problem. However, the ones that become successful are the ones that leverage their own audience for the successful distribution of their own products.
How do fellow indiehackers and makers approach these two sides of a coin — (a) Building an audience, and (b) Building a product?
If you were to start from zero again, what would you build first? Audience or the Product?
How would you approach both these phases while taking your product from launch (0 to 1) and successful distribution (1 to n)? How deeply are audience-building and product-building interlinked?
Replies
Tarun Muvvala@youngtarun23
This is based on the Book 'The cold start problem'.
He defines the above problem as atomic network. It is the first small set of users for which your product will solve problems. As the product keeps solving, more and more things for your core users it will attract a lot of adjacent users into the system.
So, this process of 0-1 is continuous one and that you need to iterate on in the initial days.
Share
Super relevant discussion.
I think it's more practical for info product business owners and contentpreneurs to build a minimal viable audience first and then work with lead prospects to build for and with them.
For indiehackers, they should build in conjunction with building an audience. #Build in public exemplifies that.
I wouldn't ignore either. It's one of those extremely hard trade offs that keeps fluctuating for me personally.
@shivam_jha3 Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Usually audience building and product building get into a chicken-and-egg problem. You need a sizeable audience to even get some traction for a great product. But for building a good audience, you need to show some proof-of-work first.
I like the idea of building a — minimum viable audience first and then using your products to leverage and build more products in the future!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts :)
The audience-first approach is always the better way, as that way you are building a product with constant feedback.
In product first, it may get difficult to build an audience without your own biases. The audience-building is skewed towards marketing than genuinely sharing information that matters.
The best approach is doing both simultaneously with #buildinpublic. It helps you even make pivots easily.
@gayatri_taley I agree with your second point. Building an audience without having built any product almost seems like you have a hidden agenda which you might potentially gain from.
Build in Public seems much more genuine helping make pivots easily
If one can have a balance in between building an audience & building a product, imo they get benefitted more than doing one thing alone.
Often when you're building only audience and not building anything, it attracts irrelevant audience outside your niche, target audience of your potential product.
But if you can manage to do both at the same time, you keep attracting audience who are relevant to your product & also helps you gain audience while you build it. Example : Build In Public (Doesn't necessarily need to share everything, a balanced way of doing it would help a lot.)
Hope that make sense.
If you are building a product for an expected profit (e.g. service or product which someone will need to purchase), then it would be beneficial to begin building your audience first. Your product is answering their problem (assumably), so their input would be vital to your product's design and subsequent success.
But I wouldn't wait until "enough feedback" has been provided before you begin. There are certain aspects of your product which could be started/built while you are analyzing the feedback.
Using social media and sites like this one are a good way to get quick exposure and input to begin the audience building stage and provide feedback, which can then be used to help build the solution part of the product.
I have been building products and been handing a community of builders at Micro SaaS HQ - https://microsaashq.com
Nothing beats having an audience. If you already have an audience, leverage as much as you can.
If not, its okay.
Take the mid way and start building your product while you build audience in parallel.
We have many scary stories with founders building products in stealth mode only to realize no one cared for the product after the launch.
The easiest hacks would be to 'Build In Public' or 'One week marketing week and One week development week' and build both.
I think you should focus on product first, then some reasearch.
By then you will know the market fairly well allowing an educated guess about how your MVP migh lt fair. At THIS point or a little before is when you can start building your audience because you will even have some content to share with them based on your previous research and findings.
At the end of the day you need to be able to provide something to people for them to become your audience, some market research will give you this.
Product should be the priority. Assuming you have the audiences but its either 1) Not your ICPs or 2) Having no products to prove your vision.
We're once bootstrapped startup, but with the Product-led mindset. Spending an entire year just to fully develop WriterZen with no revenue was our primary goal and later on publishing it at Appsumo.
As it turns out, we gained an enormous audiences following us from day 1 because at that stage was well-refined (and still improving). Gaining a lot of traction and about to launch another in-house product in Nov 29.
Product should always be first. Audiences will follow.
Prioritize distribution.
Not to leave distribution as a post product build afterthought.
Often we confuse audience is equal to distribution.
It's not true.
Own audience is just one channel.
Distribution is a function of (owned audience, influencer owned audience, rev sharing & non rev sharing partnerships, paid but warm leads, referral / word of mouth earned audience)
Can we discuss this "build in public" a bit more? How do you do this? Is your project open source then? Do you make videos about what you are going to develop? Shout out on twitter a code snippet that you found out during building ?
Let me know your opinion :)
It is important to understand that it depends on the use case we are building the product for. If this is a fairly new player in an already existing market, you can build in public and learn from the users of your competitors. You can also choose to build out a product and improve later on feedback.
From my experience, I would go heads-down and get clarity on the problem I'm solving while seeking active feedback from potential users and friends. This would help people build some skin in the game. Once there's some clarity, I'd build an MVP and start building an audience around it (reminds me of how Pocus' Alexa did this: https://www.gorelay.co/t/notes-o... and then I'd keep on refining the offering as I keep on building the audience. Think in the long run, it's both distribution as well as the product you need. But early-stage the biggest advantage of the audience is to get useful feedback that gets you to PMF.
i think it depends on the type of product too but for indiehackers i think distribution is definitely more important. because the tech is kinda commoditized, you can hire folks to help you build it, or even acquire (microacquire).
It's better to think of distribution as a proxy for TRUST.
Also i think this is why Building In Public is so popular. it's not just a trend. it's a convenient way of coupling audience-building and product-building. the "building process" itself becomes the content which leads to more reach, distribution. saves time!
I'm working on the product, while I'm trying to gather like-minded people for me to seek validation on!
Product Hunt has been super helpful in it, but they surely need to work on ways to get rid of spam/fake users and it's content.
I think it's easier to build a product and get successful with that if you have an audience. That being said building an audience is hard and you have to add value in some way.