IHers who built a successful product WITHOUT an audience - share your story!
There's too much advice online that focuses on building an audience.
There's an imbalance. People who are building an audience are sharing the way they built a successful company, which is by building an audience.
So when you go to learn about how to build a business, who do you find giving advice? The people who build audiences.
Don't get me wrong, building an audience is a very solid and successful strategy for many. My favorite example is Daniel Vassallo, who started building his twitter following in February of 2019, and has crossed $100k in sales in just over a year from that point.
But building an audience isn't the only way. Right?
If you've built a product with ZERO audience, through some other means, share how you did it below!
I think it's important that people like you speak up. The audience strategy is constantly being shared by people building one. The non-audience strategies are busy doing other things, so they don't get shared nearly as much.
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Great post! To build an audience, you need to do something valuable online and get it into people's hands. But that sounds a lot like building a business, so why not just do that with your business itself instead of as a precursor?
I didn't have an audience when I started Indie Hackers, so I piggy-backed off of audiences built by other people and platforms. For example:
I had maybe 300 Twitter followers before any of those, and no mailing list to speak of. Indie Hackers itself built the audience that continues to power Indie Hackers.
Thanks for the response Courtland :)
If I have one big takeaway from this thread, it's that "linking" your product to other audiences is the key if you don't have your own.
Sounds like that's what you did with launches on HN and PH, and of course it's a natural result of doing interviews with impactful people like Pieter Levels.
Another takeaway is that cold outreach is often how get your first customers (interviews in your case), even if it won't scale. A lot of people have talked about being active in forums and social groups, just like you did with HN.
I hope this thread is helpful to people! I know I've gotten a lot out of it.
I have a very meager audience (~2,000 followers on Twitter), and Buttondown is certainly successful by my definitions (~4K MRR as a side project after two years.)
This is a boring answer, but: compounding interest over time works. Community and large audiences are very helpful for quick and explosive growth, but... it doesn't preclude other ways of growing large.
Buttondown launched to my twitter followers and that's it. It never 'went viral'; I've spent less than a hundred dollars on advertising and marketing.
It grows through word of mouth and recommendations, slowly and steadily.
Is your Twitter following of the same niche or is it broad? And how did you go about acquiring the first few customers excluding your friends and colleagues?
It’s very broad; mostly friends and random tech folks.
And the one nice thing about Buttondown is that it was self-marketing in a way; if you send out a newsletter with it, everyone who gets it sees that the email is powered by Buttondown.
Thanks for sharing! Did you have that twitter following prior to launching, or has it built up because of Buttondown?
Word of mouth is great, but how did you get your first 100 customers? Have you done anything to maximize the amount of word of mouth?
The former. I think I’ve grown slightly larger of an audience post-Buttondown, but it’s still relatively small.
The biggest thing I’ve done is be very transparent (I blog and tweet about Buttondown a decent amount, and publish my running costs and roadmap, and Buttondown has some decent self-marketing built in (as mentioned above, emails sent out with Buttondown link back to the main page, as do permalinks.)
Nice! Do you have metrics on what % of new customers are coming from email links vs things like the blog/twitter?
We launched EmailOctopus without an audience, and even now, with the business pretty successful from an IH point of view (millions of revenue) we still don't have an audience as individuals.
I've got 700 followers, and I mainly talk about British public policy. Jonathan has 200 and last used Twitter 3 months ago to raise a customer service question with his gym.
Our business is our brand and voice, but even then we focus very much on tangible metrics. Revenue and customers.
So, how did we do it? I don't really know exactly! What we did do is built a very simple, yet solid product which served a small area of a massive market. We launched it as a completely free product on Reddit, iterated on the product, introduced pricing, then over time we've increased that pricing as the product has improved.
If you launch a good product, which serves a need, in the right place (we launched initially on /r/marketing then with future launches on Product Hunt) then it'll pick-up traction. These platforms, much like Indie Hackers, don't rely on followers or nepotism to reach the top and even an initial 50 active users can mature into a successful business as word grows and spreads.
Free products are amazing for building an audience!
Thomas, thanks for responding!
I'm definitely seeing a theme with everyone who has posted here. Seems to go like this:
Do you feel that the above matches how EmailOctopus grew?
Yep, very well summarised.
And again, content marketing you probably won't have your own audience for. So post sensibly on Reddit/IH/wherever is relevant for your business.
I built userTrack as a side project for the past 7 years and sold it through CodeCanyon. I don't consider it to be extremely successful, but it can be thought of as being somewhat successful considering that it sold copies of around $70k, most of which can be considered to be passive income.
So although I never had an audience, I posted my product on a marketplace that already had one. I never really did any proper marketing or advertising as all my attempts resulted only in wasted money.
Since 6 months ago I started working full-time on userTrack (after the gaming company I was working at went bakrupt), and I am trying to see if I can actually make it successful, that is, earn enough money out of it to sustain myself. The path I'm planning to take does not really involve building an audience, but creating an awesome product and initiating a broader movement towards self-hosted software, which userTrack will be a part of.
I built a community, which is very different from an audience. Does that count? 😍
If you built a community without an audience, that's definitely a feat!
And, if so, this guy would probably love to hear from you!
pssssssssssssssst
https://www.indiehackers.com/rosiesherry
Define successful?
NameRobot was built completely without audience. Exists now for almost ~10 years. From this, a number of services have developed, such as Namefruits or NameScore.
The Toolbox now has over 100000 registered users. I think we are now at 130k. Is this successful?
But it's hard to call us successful. We have built up the whole thing on the side.
I often find it hard to say, hey, we're successful. We haven't quite reached our goals yet but others would say "wow, you've built something up there".
But we're proud of it :-) ... so maybe you can call it a success after all. :D
That’s definitely the founder’s curse! 130k is a fantastic number. What strategies did you use to grow?
I am responsible for the tech stack, my business partners are more into marketing. But I can still tell you about a few things, anyway.
What worked:
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What didn't work:
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I think you mean AdWords, not Adsense?
OMG yes. Thank you.
hey, that post is 2 years old but I do have a question;)
How did you do partnership with other businesses without having an audience? and basically not much to give them in return
sorry for the late reply. our site was/is old and backlinks from old sites to the own is just a return.
I only have 1,400 followers, and am closing in on $5K in sales on my newly released eBook. I went through a phase being discouraged seeing the success of other authors, but I think the key is to have realistic expectations.
Growing an audience isn't for everyone. Not everyone is destined to have 50K followers. You have to be OK with that, and just focus on forming connections with a smaller audience, and doing what you can to help others
Actually, this is one of the more impressive feats in this thread I think.
I can see how someone could build a SaaS product without an audience. But content, to me, feels like it's all about who follows you. $5k is quite a feat in that case!
Do you have any insight into who is buying your product? Is it 100% coming from followers, is there some decent amount of traffic from IH and other forums?
Thanks!
My book is on Ruby on Rails, so it's hardly a popular topic. Mostly new developers are my audience, because I teach simplicity over popularity (utilizing simple, mature tooling instead of the JS flavor of the week).
Twitter is the main source of traffic. I do a lot of posting here on IH, but too many IH"s want to just "use the same tech that everyone else does" , instead of using something mature and proven.
It's been really hard, but I spent a lot of time on the book, and on the design.
When you are a nobody, you have to go the extra mile.
Hi @Kevcon80 great article!
Don't take me wrong but I'm with @csallen here. Rather do it before than after.
The problem we all face nowadays is no longer how to build great products, not even how to build great businesses. Thanks to YC, FirstRound, a16z, StartupGrind, Greylock Partners, and many many other great companies, groups, and individuals, there's tons of content on how to build great products and businesses on the internet.
The REAL DIFFICULTY NOWADAYS is how to get distribution right. How to find your niche and explode from there. How to grab attention from those who are always jumping from page to page.
Like Peter Thiel puts on his YC Stanford class: "you want to go after a monopoly in a small market" - talking about how Facebook managed to grow from College campuses due to the strength of the network effects they had built there and by ruling the "College world", even when everyone else was competing on the "World wild market"
Building an audience, even a small one, is way better than to be the next Enzo Ferrari. Just because you may well have the best product in town, if people don't know it, you won't sell. And people will only know about it if you put it in front of their eyes.
Even though the problems with this audience-first-strategy are:
I think Courtland was saying to do it during, not before.
I'm curious if you worry about taking advice that was aimed at companies who are trying to be the next facebook. Is it possible that the advice isn't the same for a YC company vs a bootstrapped one?
One big difference I’ve seen is YC says NO to founders who only use no code, but Courtland promotes it.
It makes sense, too. Writing Stripe or Coinbase or Airbnb or GitHub with no code would be a disaster. But it’s fast to get something smaller or less critical built with.
During is perfect but starting even a little earlier is way better. Courtland started to talk about it even before he started to build it. And that's what I want to say here, start to spread the word and reach people you think may want to hear, even before you start to build the product. Most often than not the first versions of our ideas are all sent to the trash, with all our long hours of hard work.
But why can't be a bootstrapped business the next facebook? There are dozens of huge companies that started with bootstrapping (but yeah I know none of those have the Facebook size obviously).
If a bootstrapped business means a lifestyle business, then we are talking about something different obviously.
Even though what I take from the Thiel's lesson is not necessarily the "how to be the next facebook kind of company" but rather the "focus on a little market/niche where no one is watching, then scale from there", which was what I intended to say.
This!
You said it, man. Whenever I read any good how-to articles or inspirational stories/interviews, it's about people who already have an audience. Yes, building an audience first is a great precursor to any ventures but for those who have no prior audience, there aren't much else out there except run-of-the-mill advice about paid acquisition or heck, even "build an audience " type of advice.
I see your point but I honestly think that the real problem is people have misconceptions about what it really means to build an audience.
A lot of people think that the only way to build an audience is to have a YouTube channel, podcast, blog or the latest fad. The reality is that you're already building an audience simply by being active on the internet.
For example, you made this post here on indie hackers and I hovered over your name to see that you're the founder of CoderNotes. I am now part of your audience.
One of my favourite ways to build an audience is to help people by answering their questions :) A few years ago I did this by actively answering questions on StackOverflow on a topic that I have a lot of experience with. Sometimes I would slip a link to my project into the answer (as long at it was relevant and non-spammy) and other times people would just find my profile.
This is not particularly hard stuff. Just pick a strategy and do it consistently.
I have 62 followers on Twitter (pretty much everyone I know IRL) and launched Trunk without an audience. Instead, I grinded on forums and talked to lots of customers, learned about the problem space really well, and focused on building something that did one thing best-in-class.
Thanks for posting!
So it sounds like the way you primarily gather customers is through a few forums where your audience hangs out, is that right? Can you talk a bit about the specifics around how you sell in those forums? Are people often asking questions around how to sync their inventory, or are you generally just responding to posts with hopes that someone sees your company in their signature, etc?
Would love to hear more, or metrics on conversion, if you have them!
Initially yep, how I actually got the initial idea was just spending time on those forums and being very engaged with those who seemed to be looking for a solution to their problem. I also built crawlers on a multitude of forums so I can always be alerted and respond right away to anything related. I still have lots of customers find me from my posts.
In terms of selling, it's more and less some people asking for it but in various ways (you start to notice patterns) and then reaching out to them directly. The amount of people asking for it actually wasn't that many. The most important thing is finding that core of 5-10 users to develop with since they can be very engaged. And if you can find those, there are bound to be a lot more just like them since most people are lurkers.
Sorry, I don't track conversation metrics but I really should :(
Literally posted something about this a minute ago since it was bugging me. Commenting here so I have a bookmark :-)
Great minds think alike :)
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100%
This is great! Can you talk a bit about how you got your first customers? Did you do a lot of cold outreach, or did you just let them come in from Google, like they do now?
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Cold outreach and google is a recurring theme in this thread :)
How did you go about interacting on the niche forums? How did you balance mentioning SongBox vs just being an active member? Were you already a part of the niche?
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