Growing an audience vs. building a product

I've built 5 commercial apps over the past 10 years, all without first building an audience. All of them were slow to start and gain users, and none of them ever generated any kind of traction, even though they were strong apps in a strong market -- as evidenced by the successful competition.

This time around I'm working on audience first. I have more grey hair than I did 10 years ago, and I don't want to put out another "Build it and they will come" app. There's nothing more disheartening than building a great product over many months and then releasing it into a silent void.

Building an audience is a lot easier than building a SaaS product (if that is your plan).

Having the audience makes it a lot easier to build the product as well.

I was able to build an audience of 500 instantly with https://saaspages.xyz/

Find out where your audience hangs out see what problems they have everyday and build them a simple tool.

The world has enough content, unless you're a great writer or want to be :)

Build an Audience AND Build a Product
while you build, talk to users.
As you talk to users, show them what you're doing.

I launched bettersheets.co and the newsletter: bettersheets.substack.com free newsletter readers ask questions. I can answer by making videos and put some behind the paywall.

I have a newletter/podcast where I interview founders about how they grew their businesses.

Some of them built an audience first and there is no doubt this helped speed up the growth of their business and ensured they built the right product, but others have grown perfectly good businesses without it.

Several built in the open and this helped them to gain an audience rapidly.

I've been trying to bootstrap side projects for couple years now. And I just realized that audience was the missing element.
For sure you can build a product without audience but you will need luck or someone else's audience to succeed. Having the right audience will not just make it easier to lunch something but building the right things to begin with.

I was working on something last month and I detached it to focus on building audience and a way to get feedback. So built this tool:
https://github.com/moufette-tools/moufette

It seems that most, if not all, believe building audience is more important. I agree too, unless you or your team has the ability to do sales & marketing competently:-)

We're trying both with HackerStash but we are really early on. Normally I focus exclusively on the product, but actually I'm really seeing the strength of tackling both simultaneously. Biggest wins so far:

• Early validation for the idea, pre-launch
• Great feedback from the people likely to use the product, that is already informing our decision making.
• Actually iterating on our landing page pre-launch is already proving valuable, like we're refining our pitch and should be able to really hit the ground running because of that.

I can also see how this becomes 10x more useful as we complete the build and launch. We'll already have a community of enthusiastic early users, have established communication channels with them, have the right mindset to respond to their requests in the right order of importance etc 🤞

I’m on the build an audience camp. Why? The biggest reason is that you need to do it anyway, and you’re able to de-risk building the wrong product by doing it first.

I did a whole episode on this on my YouTube channel solely focus on building SaaS businesses where I outline how I’d build a SaaS business today based on my experience in starting and exiting two SaaS businesses and working on two additional ones and helping exit those 👇
How I Would Start a SaaS Business Today in 2020: https://youtu.be/Unqky1uy-AA

The thing I'm currently working on is is product-first approach and I'm sure my next project will be audience-first 😅

let me mention few things

• you can't see clearly when "it's enough", you always want too add some more features, tweaks,
• have small sample for feedback, and you're often guessing what user would want
• sometimes false impression that you're on a good way.