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independence5 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 12 claims against 4

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

17 claims · 12 articles · 4 receipts

window

2012-01-01 → 2023-01-01

5 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Assemble the audience before the product

One camp treats an owned audience as the asset that makes launch day land, arguing that reach is the only thing that does not bottleneck per person and that products should emerge from what those people ask for. The other says a first-timer should skip it: it demands patience and a long commitment before you know the business is even viable, and the objective is paying customers rather than attention.

What both sides agree on

  • The one feature never to cut is an admin screen listing your users that lets you sign in as any of them.

Where this splits

Audience first is presented as the strongest route to a launch that lands, and separately as the thing a first-time founder should skip entirely.

  1. side 01 · 12 claims

    Build the audience first, then launch to it

    Alex Hillman · Cory Zue · Justin Jackson · Paul Jarvis · Rand Fishkin · Tyler Tringas · Wit Sumathavanit

    1. 1Reverse the usual order - assemble the audience first, then launch a product at a problem that audience shares - because the founders who build first are the ones whose launches land in silence.
    2. 2Assemble the audience before the product, and do it in order to learn what they need rather than to have a launch channel ready.
    3. 3Expect audience building to take years of daily helpfulness, with products emerging from requests along the way rather than at the start.
    4. 4Build the audience before the product: reach is the only asset that does not hit a per-person bottleneck, since publishing costs you the same whether ten or ten thousand people see it.
    5. 5Have an audience before you have a product. Call it pre launch audience building or content, but the relationships need to exist first.

  2. side 02 · 4 claims

    Skip the pre-launch and go get paying customers

    Justin Jackson · Paul Jarvis · Tyler Tringas

    1. 1Audience-first is not a guarantee, so expect misses even when you follow the playbook that worked before.
    2. 2Pre-launched products probably do better, yet most founders should skip the pre-launch because it demands patience and a long commitment before you know the business is even viable.
    3. 3Your objective at this point is not staging an attention-grabbing launch but reaching paying customers and genuine feedback quickly, and a pre-launch campaign only postpones that.
    4. 4The author no longer stands behind audience-first as the rule, and now frames the starting point as building something people already want.

What it returned

  • 2002

    Hiten Shah began helping marketers in 2002; about four years in, he and his co-founder Neil Patel spotted demand for heatmaps and shipped Crazy Egg, and two years after that marketers asking for funnel help led to Kissmetrics.

  • Attributed also to Hiten Shah; an established audience means sales on the first day instead of crickets.

  • Hiten Shah made this argument on Justin's Product People podcast, noting how many products get built with no market.

  • Zue adopts the indie hacking maxim explicitly, defining influence as the number of people he can reach multiplied by how much they care what he says.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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