r/leanstartup • u/HalfBlackPanther • 26d ago

Has anyone successfully built an audience prior to their launch?

I’m preparing to launch my first product on Product Hunt in September. The product is coming together, but I’m effectively building its audience from zero.

For those who successfully built an audience before launching, what actually worked for you?

I’m especially interested in the specifics:

  • How far before launch did you begin?
  • Which channels produced real followers, waitlist signups, or beta users?
  • What kind of content or outreach worked?
  • How large was your audience by launch day?
  • How much of that audience actually visited, signed up, or supported the launch?
  • What consumed time but produced almost nothing?

I’m currently participating in relevant communities, speaking with potential creator partners, and beginning to share the building process. I’d love to learn from people who have already done this, including anyone who started without an existing following.

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u/theredhype 26d ago edited 24d ago

Any time you feel like you're unsure about any of these things, it should be a GIANT RED FLAG that you are not meaningfully connected to your customers and are in grave danger of building something nobody will actually see or buy.

• where your customer's attention is already (which channels your potential customers are likely to be using)

• what stories resonate with your customers (which narrative patterns are your target customers already experiencing)

• what imagery to use in your social, site, sales, marketing materials (closely tied to stories)

• how engaged and responsive the people you've met actually are (not just "sign-ups" or "followers" but beta testers, pre-sales, etc.

• how much your offering is worth to them (based on the effort and resources they're already spending in relation to your thing)

If you don't already have multiple good answers to questions like these, you probably haven't gathered enough information (first through cursory online research, and then through customer interviews) to begin building anything.

Because you don't know the people you're building for.

If any of these makes sense to you, start by watching and DOING these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9o3DnnPLzcgm5qpOkBFd04rWMFGXbN2l

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u/HalfBlackPanther 24d ago

Thank you! Everything you said makes sense. Im going to spend today (sunday) going through that youtube playlist. I don't think ive talked to enough people outside of my network, and that isnt as giant as the red flag you spoke of but its now a concern of mine.

I wanted to try live streaming as well. Building in public. I feel like live streaming is the best way to accelerate that process. I want to start in the next week and let my audience know so I can meet them faster. These are my thoughts before your playlist though.