What to build first: Audience or Product?

Why audience building is overrated and what's the right way to approach it in edition 35th

Sep 16, 2023

You can ignore the Audience building.

Like many others, I was lured into increasing my followers when I joined Twitter.

This person has 100k followers; yep, that's why they are successful; that's the sole reason they get clients or sell their product online.

Once I build my audience, you are all gone. Sound familiar?

This is the biggest internet lie. Building an audience is helpful but not a magic wand to make you successful in your domain.

What has always worked is - Making something useful that solves a problem for a specific group of people.

Sure, if I have 10k followers, it will be easy for me to sell my product/service. But the problem comes when all the focus is on building an audience. You lose your originality when you make 'content' to get more likes/comments from people on social media. Remember, likes don't pay rent and only sometimes translate into sales.

Sahil believes we shouldn't create content just for the sake of posting. We should approach the process more smartly. Sahil believes we shouldn't create content just for the sake of posting. We should approach the process more smartly. (source)

Exactly, that was Aha moment! I should focus on working on projects and share bits & pieces from them on social networks. That way, I naturally document them and get feedback from people. Accountability also comes up, and most importantly, content creation becomes a by-product of my projects.

The main reason for building an audience is that it becomes a marketing channel for your products. But many people only start creating once they have some audience. That's the wrong approach. One should build; first, that's the more substantial muscle to develop. There are other ways to market your product besides having a huge social media following.

Focus on shipping fast, talking to your target audience, and iterating based on feedback. And document the process on social media, communities, etc. Not the other way around. This took me a few years to learn. The likes and comments on social media also provide instant gratification, but it's useless. On the other hand, working on long-term projects has delayed gratification.

I love meeting people— and I've now met quite a few— who earn a ton of money working as creators without having a huge audience.
What they all have in common is demonstrated domain-specific expertise and a high degree of trust from their audience.
I'm convinced this is one of the most misunderstood aspects of the "creator economy." Everyone is chasing a high follower count because it's our publicly visible metric.
But it maps very poorly to that audience's trust, whether they care about what that person does and their willingness to pay them for something.
And now it's easier than ever to build a huge audience with hacky growth tactics. There are literally productized agencies that will do this for you. I just don't think they'll be that successful— an audience that's a mile wide and an inch deep isn't very valuable.
More and more, I'm convinced that the people who understand this dynamic and act on it will be the ones who build successful businesses in this space.
(source)

Peter Levels, a super successful indie maker, wrote an insightful thread on why starting with zero following as an entrepreneur/indie maker can be a huge leverage. Read below 👇🏽