🤔 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.

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 :)

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.

No, I don't most of my products can be used by anyone and are keyword-focused so the only audience I have to capture is organic. I do pretty much everything related to growing my project after I launch it.

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.

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!)

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 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.