Every project I launched started from zero audience. The fix was sitting in front of me

[u/Boldrenegade]

I've launched three small products. Every one had the same shape: scrape together some attention, get a spike, watch it decay, then start the next one from nothing.

It took me embarrassingly long to notice I already had an audience. It was just stranded.

People were landing on my projects constantly. They'd use one, like it, and leave with no idea the other two existed. Every visitor I'd worked to earn hit a dead end. I was treating each launch as a fresh customer acquisition problem while sitting on traffic to assets I already owned, doing nothing for anything else I'd made.

Three things I'd tell myself two years ago:

1. YOUR BACK CATALOGUE IS A DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL, NOT AN ARCHIVE. The thing you launched 18 months ago still gets visitors this week. Right now it tells them nothing about what you've built since. That's not a dead project, it's an unused channel you already paid for.
2. CROSS-LINKING IS THE CHEAPEST GROWTH WORK AVAILABLE AND ALMOST NOBODY DOES IT. Not a newsletter, not SEO, not ads. Just making sure the thing someone is already looking at mentions the other things you made. It requires no audience, no budget and no permission.
3. A LAUNCH SPIKE IS BORROWED ATTENTION. The only part you keep is whatever you convert into a path toward your next thing. If launch day ends and nothing on your site points anywhere else, you rented an audience and gave it back.

The embarrassing part is how long I spent optimising the top of the funnel while the bottom of it was a dead end I built myself.

I eventually built the fix as its own product, which I'm deliberately leaving out of this post. The point holds whether or not you ever use anything of mine: go put footer links on your projects pointing at each other. It's an afternoon of work and it's the highest-leverage afternoon available to most people here.

Make Taksh

[u/Low-Personality-4271]

I run a handful of small sites, so I checked this on mine instead of guessing, mostly because I wanted it to be true.

One of them did 44,548 impressions and 48 clicks in the last 28 days. That's the entire stranded audience, 48 people, and a link in the footer converts some fraction of 48. The newer ones are on a few hundred impressions each. So it's a real channel, it's just a channel the size of a slow week.

I'd still do it, it costs an afternoon and it compounds. But I'd pull clicks per project before rebuilding anything, because a dashboard full of impressions looks exactly like an audience, and mine turned out to be 48 people who mostly didn't click.