Evelina Radoycheva

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

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Hi, makers! I'd love to hear about your experience with the audience-led approach and what are the best practices that you've discovered? Did you build an audience before launching your product/s? Which platform/s have you focused on to build an audience? And what kind of content have you created? Thanks!
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Hussain Shah
If you have an audience before the launch, you can create a buzz around the launch.
Debajit Sarkar
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.
Evelina Radoycheva
@dsarkar that's an interesting point of view. Thanks for sharing!
Goutham
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
Galia
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
Samuel
Hello! For startup business, produkt, or service i advice safely promoting because it was a good strategy in the beginning…And i will share professional website for organic promotion… The more people see your site or social networks, the more potential customers you will have. This professional site for safely promoting can be helpful. You can just look https://likigram.com/
Misha Krunic
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!
Ste
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.
Aurelian Spodarec
@stelian_dobrescu1 So why not attract an audience around the product meanwhile you solve the problem?
Oualid Gamer
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.
Aurelian Spodarec
@oualid_gamer You gonna get yourself banned for plagiarism.
Kolton
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.
Mukul Gupta
Yes, we always do competitor research first. Then create a buyer persona accordingly. We focus on social media platforms for the activities.
Evelina Radoycheva
@mukul_gupta_cn which platform/s do you focus on?