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

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.

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.

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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.

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!)

Get familiar with this community before launching your product, is the most essential part.

If you have an audience before the launch, you can create a buzz around the launch.

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!

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.

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.

That depends on your resources. If you have time/energy/people to build a community from day 1, you should definitely do it (it's way more timing consuming than building the product) ... otherwise, you should have your key early adopters and focus on building a testable prototype then shipping your product for them to test. I've built communities before and as I was splitting my attention between it and building the product, the product shipping took longer and I wish I had done differently. As for the platform: depends on your target audience. If you are in the crypto market as I am, twitter/telegram/discord. The correct platform is where your users are interacting with themselves and preferably they access on a daily basis.

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.

dev/designer 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.

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.

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

It is an interesting question I always thought about the first movers who launch their campaigns on PH and wonder if they exactly knew who their audience is before targeting

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 :)

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

I would say it's absolutely essential. Even better if it's not just you, but your team as a whole, whose audiences would then coalesce when your product goes live on PH. And in the spirit of #shamelesspromotion, here's our platform, going live on PH anytime soon! https://sonarapp.com/