STOP Building Your Audience (Do THIS Instead)

- Rob tells his audience that building an audience takes a lot of time, attention and energy, and it's often a distraction that's masquerading itself as productivity. He advises them to build a network of people who are in the industry that they want to serve with their product. - Speaker A tells the audience that having a network makes it easy to get feedback from early customers or early potential customers. The second way is by finding influencers in a space. - Speaker A talks about how to build an incredible network. He tells people that the network will not build itself and the best way to build the network is in person. - Speaker A tells John how she built her network by running microconf. Then she introduces how to bring people together, whether in person or online, and how to build an industry report. - Speaker A tells people to be realistic about where they are in their entrepreneurial journey and to build clout and experience at each stage of the journey. Think about it like learning a new language. - Speaker A advises entrepreneurs to think about the watering holes and where people hang out online before diving into businesses that probably could use an audience. Building a network not only helps to grow the business, but it can also be helpful in the early days of finding a great SaaS idea.

Building an audience almost killed my startup. I had tens of thousands of followers and tens of millions of podcast downloads that I leveraged to build a SaaS that sold for many millions of dollars. But I would never recommend that you try to do the same. In a minute, I'll talk about why and what I think you should do instead. But first, I know what you're probably thinking, Rob, you're wrong. Guys like Peter Levels and Mark Liu are building solid businesses off their ex Twitter audiences, so that must be the way. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. For every 10,000 person who attempts to be Peter Lovells or Mark Liu, one succeeds. And those two are actually following the method I'm about to lay out. But it'll take me a few minutes to explain. Let's say that by building in public, you could get 50,000 subscribers on YouTube or X Twitter. How many of them are in the need of that CRM for real estate developers you're working on? Yeah, you might find a few, but it's unlikely that 10% of that audience is gonna sign up for easy access. And actually, if they do, it can be even worse. In the early days of building my last startup, Drip, which was an email service provider, I had a really large audience because of my podcast and my blog and my books. I created a landing page to collect early interest. And of course, using every tool at my disposal, I started talking about Drip on my podcast. By the way, 14 years later, I'm still shipping every week at startupsfortherestofus.com. you should check it out. The issue was, I had hundreds upon hundreds of signups from folks who just wanted to follow along on my journey. When I started reaching out to the list, I would find a lot of the folks just didn't have a use for what I was building, but they signed up in an effort to support me and to see what I was up to. I've seen this happen over and over with founders so many times now that I've come up with a name for it. I call it the Curse of the Audience. The reality is that building an audience takes a lot of time, a lot more time than you think. And it's often a distraction that's masquerading itself as productivity. It's something you do when you want to procrastinate from doing the real work of marketing, sales and building a product. And as a founder, time is probably your most precious resource. So what should you do instead? You should build your network, not your audience. A lot of people misunderstand What I mean here, but it's actually pretty simple. Your goal should be to build a network of people who are in the industry that you want to serve with your product. That's about it. If the only lawyer you know is your Aunt Jane and you're thinking of building a project management system for lawyers, what's more useful? 5,000 followers on Twitter or 500 connections on LinkedIn who work in the legal field? Back to Peter and Mark. They actually are building a network as much as they're building an audience. Since their audience is largely indie hackers and software developers who might use their products like Mark's shipfast framework, you might be thinking to yourself, are there any other arguments for building an audience? The fact is, if you have an existing audience, of course that's an asset and you should use it. But what I'm saying is the amount of time, attention and energy it takes to build and then maintain an audience is nowhere near the best use of your time. If you want to build an incredible B2B SaaS product, your time is so much better spent getting down to the nitty gritty of doing marketing, sales, and building the product. There are 20 B2B SaaS marketing approaches. One of them is building an audience. Of the other 19, there's probably five or 10 that are far more effective than the amount of time that you're going to spend to get people paying attention to you on social media and build the email list and do all that. It's just a lot of work. Again, that masquerades itself as productivity. And it's something you can easily use as a distraction that will just never pay off. You see it all the time on Twitter. Someone says, I have 10,000 followers. I tried to sell a product. I sold three licenses and got a chargeback. You know, it just doesn't work the way people want you to believe. Now, if you're not building SaaS and you're building other types of products, like, say, information products or courses, I can make a case for building an audience. And I'll actually do that a little later in this video. Towards the end, you might also be wondering, once you have a network, how does that help you grow your business? So I know 500 people in the legal field and I'm going to be building legal CRM. How does that help me? Well, there's a couple things. The first thing is that it makes it really easy to get feedback from early customers or early potential customers. You'll often hear an entrepreneur who launches something. They get a bunch of users and they reach out to those users saying, why are you churning? Why aren't you using it? And no one will respond. Well, if you have a network of people that you can text or DM or email who will actually respond to you and give you feedback, honest feedback, of like, just don't need the product or it doesn't look great, or you miss this feature, or you know, actually give you constructive, thoughtful feedback, it's a huge win. It's one of the reasons that Drip succeeded was in the early days when I was kind of floundering, flailing, trying to find product market fit. I had a bunch of people who I had known through the startup space who had spoken at my event or attended my event, who were experts on email marketing and marketing automation. And they would come in and say, here's the gap, here's where I think the gap is that if you want to go there, you could potentially build a really successful product. So that's the first way you can use a network. The second way is by finding influencers in a space. So these days for me, if I'm going to launch a new book or a new product of any kind, I think, who are the end customers and who do I know that I can reach out to with a text that has an audience? Who do I know that has a popular podcast or a YouTube channel or a lot of followers on x, Twitter or LinkedIn? Someone who has influence and reach and I might reach out to them and say, hey, can I come on your podcast? Or hey, would you mind co promoting this? Or I'd love it if you would give me a testimonial, can you read the book and give me some feedback? So the idea here is I'm not trying to sell, in this case directly to the people in my network, but I am trying to leverage their audiences or their reach in an effort to help me promote what I'm doing. And similarly, people in my network reach out to me to do the same and I often reciprocate. So now let's talk about how to build an incredible network. It can be intimidating to try to build a network, especially if you're starting from scratch. So first off, know that your network will not build itself. So this often means going outside your comfort zone and being pretty deliberate about it. I'm an introvert. I don't love networking. I don't even use that term right. That's the only time you're going to hear that word in this video because I just think it's a Misnomer. Realistically, what's my network? It's friends and casual acquaintances who I can text or email, who will respond and do me favors, and I would do the same for them. By all of this, I don't mean be calculating. You're not a chess master, you're not here to manipulate people, but you do have to initiate things with other humans in order to build a relationship. And personally, I think the best way to build your network is in person. Often though, the connection starts even before an event. So oftentimes, if I'm going to be headed to a startup event, for me, that's my world, obviously I will go on X Twitter, see who's going to be there, and I will start responding to their stuff to get on their radar. The idea is don't crash the party. You want to ease into this, right? You want to share actually helpful information, not spam. You want to be interesting and memorable. Those two things are the wedge that get other people to remember you and that get other people to pay attention. So how do you do this? Let's take a look at a couple examples. If you reach out to someone who's ahead of you and they give you advice on something, do something with it and report back. So the way that Ruben Gomez, who you've seen many times on the podcast and on this channel, the way he got on my Radar back in 2009, is he reached out to me and a few other influencers, frankly, he was an unknown and he would ask for my advice and then he would come back and say, I did this and this was the result. No one does that. I don't know why, but no one does that. So it was super noticeable early on and I was like, who is this guy? He's interesting. He's actually shipping stuff. He's like, I have a website now. Look, I have a thing that I tried and I was like, this is pretty notable and memorable. And so over time, pretty quickly, Ruben became someone who in the early days I was mentoring and then later on just became a friend. And he was someone who absolutely built his network through this and through in person events. The second example is, is there any way for you to become a connector? So one of the ways I built my network, which is pretty incredible, B2B SaaS network, is by running microconf. I'm not saying everyone should run in person events, but that is the way I did it. And me recruiting speakers, getting people to the event, emceeing, being on stage, it put me in the spotlight. And so pretty soon I would reach out to all the up and coming people who I thought were going to be something in the startup space, and this especially in SaaS, and I would bring them on stage. And so years when someone is wildly successful, when I kind of, I'll say maybe not discovered them, but I definitely helped elevate them early in their career when other people wouldn't give them a chance, they are very grateful for that. And so now my network is extremely large and it's pretty tight, to be honest. So can you bring people together, whether in person or online? Can you host a meetup? Can you host a meal at an event? There's a great group in London hosted by Charlie Ward and Charlie has made a name for himself just by gathering people together. He doesn't even run. It's not a huge conference. It's more like a meetup or a hackathon. And this is something, I think it is, what, once a month, once a quarter. And it's notable. And now I see him on Twitter and a bunch of people know him like he has built an incredible network. Another way to do it is to start a podcast, start a YouTube channel, start a newsletter about the industry you want to serve. And it's not to build the audience, but it's to be able to bring guests on that you want to have conversations with that you want to build a relationship with. And a third example is can you build an industry report? Can you do a research project like we do with the State of Independent SaaS report? And even if you don't have a huge audience that you can use to build a report. Producer Ron made a note in the outline that when he was first starting his video production consulting company, he scraped the websites of a bunch of outdoor brands and compiled a 15 page report on how they were using product videos. He used it as a lead magnet on the website, but he also used the findings as talking points when he approached brand marketing managers so he would approach a prospect. Hey John, I was doing some research. I found that Patagonia is including a product video on 87% of their new products. Have you guys experimented with anything like that? In this case, he used it to start sales conversations. But realistically, he could have also used this to build his network. I can already hear the YouTube comments coming in. Well, this all sounds hard. This sounds like a lot of work. I just want to tweet and build a great business. And it's like, you know what else is hard? Working out and eating spinach, you know, what is easy eating ice cream. So if you want success, you do sometimes have to do some stuff that's going to get you out of your comfort zone. A couple more points about building your network so in the early days, you have to be realistic about where you are in your entrepreneurial journey or really in the industry. It's pretty hard to start rubbing elbows with industry big shots right out of the gate. And it's not about being better or worse than anyone else. It's just about building clout and experience and finding your tribe at each stage of your journey. Think about it like learning a new language. When you're just starting out, you're not going to jump into advanced literature discussions. You're going to hang out with other beginners, practice basic conversations, and maybe chat with a few folks who are a chapter or two ahead in the textbook. And then as you level up your skills, your circle naturally expands. You start engaging with more fluent speakers, picking up nuances, and before you know it, you're the one helping newcomers. And here's the key. Everyone, and I mean everyone, starts at square one. Even those quote unquote overnight successes you hear about probably took them five or 10 years to get to where they were. I had zero network about how was about 20 years ago, and I built it from scratch over many years of being deliberate. So if you focus on making real connections where you are now, and you bring your unique perspective to the table, you stay curious and you're always ready to learn. As you grow, your network will grow with you. It does take time. One of the last things I'll cover before diving into businesses that probably could use an audience is to think about the watering holes and where people hang out online. Because it's not just X Twitter. I've referenced that website several times in this video. But realistically, that's where what is it the tech press and entrepreneurs hang out. Vc, Twitter. But realistically, there are a lot of other places where people in your niche, the niche that you want to build a network, will hang out. Examples of those can be an online forum specific to that industry. Reddit in person events, Facebook groups, private Slack channels. Maybe it is X Twitter. Maybe it is LinkedIn. If you don't know where they're hanging out, ask. Make an educated guess, join a few groups and figure it out. This is the hard work of being an entrepreneur. You have to do some stuff with incomplete information and just figure it out. So in terms of the types of businesses that I probably would build an audience if I wanted to launch is if I was building info products or courses. If I'm going to be a maker, a content creator, an educator if I'm going to build a community, look at what I've done right with microconf, tiny seed startups for the rest of us and my books. Part of the reason you see me here building an audience on YouTube is because I've built a community and I sell content right? I write books and I create courses and I do things to help entrepreneurs. And so for what I'm doing having an audience is a real win. But if you're bootstrapping a SaaS company it's not the right call. Building your network not only helps you grow your business, it can also be super helpful in the early days of finding a great SaaS idea. You'll want to watch this video to see how. Make sure you subscribe to the channel and give this video a thumbs up if you found it helpful. See you next time.