- Building an audience before you launch.
That's what I want to share with you guys today.
It's something that I've done for every one of my companies
and I get asked all the time.
There's this misconception that a lot of people feel like
you can launch a product, you're gonna have success.
If you're familiar with Basecamp, a product from 37Signals,
when they launched it they went from no traction
to $5,000, $10,000 a month in reoccurring revenue.
But what people don't remember or don't realize
is they had a blog with 50 thousand to 100 thousand
unique visitors every month visiting it,
called Signal vs. Noise.
So that blog was actually the community or the audience
they created way before they ever built the product.
So I think that that's a really important idea
to understand, and how to do it.
So what I'm gonna teach you guys is this framework
called People Content and Events.
So the people part, how do you start getting
the right people engaged?
Well there's a bunch of ways to do that.
The first one is forums.
Think about all the different places that your
potential customers might be engaging with,
asking questions, sites like Kora, you can actually
search on Google, forums colon, and search key words
and find different sites.
There's all these amazing forums on these weird niches
all over the internet that you can start participating in,
talking to customers, asking them questions,
and building those relationships to really guide things.
Twitter is an amazing resource, another one that I've
always used where you can actually just ask a question.
When I was building Flowtown, one of the things I did
is I went on Twitter and I said hey, have you ever
searched for a person's email address,
plus LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook?
Cause what we had was this tool that allowed you
to give an email address and get all the social data.
So then people started replying, they're like,
yeah I've done that, yeah I've done that.
And I started saying, hey, can we get on a quick call?
And really my motivation was to obviously learn
why they were doing that, what was the circumstance
of the situation, but also to build those relationships.
I think the people part is one of the most important,
and there's just so many ways for you to engage people
online to start building those relationships
way before you ever launch your product.
The second one is content.
There's this great quote that says
teaching sells, and I think that that is
the essence of a great blog.
Teaching information, sharing resources, doing round-ups
of products in your industry to build an audience
of an ideal customer that you can then eventually
introduce a product to, very much like Signal vs. Noise did,
37Signals and Basecamp.
I've done personally, every company,
if you think about it every company I've ever worked on
for the most part were solutions for entrepreneurs.
So I've been blogging at DanMartell.com about business
and entrepreneurial challenges forever, because it gives me
an unfair advantage every time I launch a new company,
I have that audience built.
And I think if you don't have that, it's something
that you can start doing now.
So you can start teaching your audience what things you know
about that industry, and build that group of people
that are interested in eventually getting the product
that you launch.
Now the third one is events, right
so people, content, and events.
Events is where you go and you attend and you
meet people in the audience.
Because what you're doing is you're meeting people
that have the same affinity or interest or passion
around that topic, and it's probably gonna be that kind
of person that's gonna buy your product.
The ideal, if you can do this, if you feel confident
and you really want to build an audience before,
is to get onstage.
Recently I was interviewed for a book called Traction,
I think it's chapter 19, check it out.
And I talked about how I use speaking engagements
to really growth hack my growth at Flowtown and Clarity.
Events are just this really amazing opportunity for you
to get face time with your potential customers.
And it can be as simple as attending, you can even
organize your own event.
There's a lot of great products that have been
spun out of large events that were created,
and you can even just go to other events,
either paid events or meetups.
Go to MeetUp.com and check all the different
meetups in your location or around your city
that bring together your potential customers.
Go there, talk to them.
Guys, I'm really passionate about building that audience
before you launch your product.
It'll help you not only validate the idea
but also build real momentum so that when you launch,
you get some sales, hopefully enough to quit your day job
and really go full force.
People, content and events.
That's my story,
that's what I wanted to share with you guys today.
I really appreciate you guys watching these videos.
I want to ask you guys to leave a comment below
if you've done any of these.
How did that work for you,
what was the strategy?
Share with the community that we're building below.
I'm really excited, I want to challenge you guys
to live a bigger life and a business,
and I will see you guys next Monday.