STOP Building Your Audience (Do THIS Instead)

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 sass 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 Lou 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 levels or Mark Lou 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 going to 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 startups forther restof us.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 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 happened 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 ship fast 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 is nowhere near the best use of your time if you want to build an incredible B2B SAS 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 SAS 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

SAS 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 turning 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 B 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 connections starts even before an event so often times 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 Reuben 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 SAS network is by running microcon I'm not saying everyone should run

inperson events but that is the way I did it and me recruiting speakers getting people to the event mcing being on stage it put me in the spotlight and so pretty soon I would reach out to all the upand cominging people who I thought were going to be something in the startup space and this especially in SAS and I would bring them on stage and so years later 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 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 SAS 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 consultant 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 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 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 5 or 10 years to get to where they were I had zero Network about I 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 uh look at What I've

Done Right with micr conf 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 SAS 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 SAS 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