perell.com, Audience-First Products

Audience-First Products

Metadata

• Author: perell.com
• Full Title: Audience-First Products
• Category:articles
• Document Note: The article discusses David Perell’s experience of finding a job by using Twitter instead of attending a job fair. The author also introduces the concept of “Audience-First Products,” a three-step process to create professional opportunities online. The process involves first building an audience, then building a product to solve their problem, and finally scaling the solution using software and contractors. The article emphasizes the importance of solving unique problems and avoiding competition in building successful audience-first products.
• Summary: The article discusses the author’s experience of finding a job by using Twitter instead of attending a job fair. The author also introduces the concept of “Audience-First Products,” a three-step process to create professional opportunities online. The process involves first building an audience, then building a product to solve their problem, and finally scaling the solution using software and contractors. The article emphasizes the importance of solving unique problems and avoiding competition in building successful audience-first products.
• URL: https://www.perell.com/blog/audience-first-products

Highlights

• the Internet is a better job matching tool than a job fair will ever be. Even in college, when I had less than 1,000 followers on Twitter, I could reach the kinds of decision-makers online I would have never met at a job fair. (View Highlight)
• I didn’t feel like going outside, so I skipped class to write a series of tweets about the future of online publishing. With them, I attracted the attention of Jason Stein, the CEO of Laundry Service, a New York-based advertising agency I wanted to work for. Impressed by my ideas, he replied with eight words that changed my life: “Interested in working with us when you graduate?” (View Highlight)
• My method of “Audience-First Products” is still experimental, but I believe it’s repeatable. It’s a new way to test the feasibility of a business idea. It stands in stark contrast to the “old guard” model of attending job fairs, working mindless jobs to learn professional skills, and raising money before you start a business. (View Highlight)
• Here’s the three-step process I used to capitalize on the transition to the online economy: (1) Build an audience (2) Build a product (3) Scale the solution (View Highlight)
• Step 1: Build an Audience: Before the Internet, companies built products first, audiences later. Now, they build audiences before products. People are taught to hunt down interesting people, ideas, and opportunities. But masters of the Internet attract them. (View Highlight)
• Sharing ideas attracts like-minded people who double as a feedback loop to make you smarter and more interesting. (View Highlight)
• Define your interests. Then write about them. When you find a group that resonates with your writing and you want to connect with them, write for their interests. As you do, you’ll make it easy for others obsessed with that interest to find you. When you write in-depth about an off-the-beaten-path subject, you’ll attract people at the outer edges of the personality curve. Use it to shrink the world, and surround yourself with like-minded people. (View Highlight)
• Define your own intersection of ideas by writing about topics nobody else is writing about and putting a name to your perspective. When you write about a specific topic, you’ll find you and your audience share common challenges that double as areas of entrepreneurial opportunity and topics to write about. As you write this way, you will define your unique lens on the world, share it passionately, and attract both casual friends and professional collaborators. (View Highlight)
• As you build your Audience-First Product, focus on resonance instead of scale (View Highlight)
• Step 2: Build a Product: Once you’ve built an audience, you can focus on the second step of delivering a product to them. There are problems everywhere. Nearly every service could be delivered with more joy, in a more efficient manner. Study any industry for long enough and you’ll find ways to improve it. (View Highlight)
• To build a product, you should solve a problem for your audience or yourself — ideally both. (View Highlight)
• To build for your audience, ask: “What product does my audience need to solve a problem they have?” (View Highlight)
• And to build for yourself, ask: “What product can I build to make my life easier?” (View Highlight)
• the bigger the overlap between the audience you attract and the product you sell, the more successful you’ll be (View Highlight)
• If people are continuously annoyed about something, there’s an opportunity to build a product. If an obvious customer pain point hasn’t been solved, there’s probably a reason why. But you’ll find economic opportunities in common problems people don’t know they have. (View Highlight)
• writing online is massively underrated. It’s one of the world’s biggest arbitrage opportunities. (View Highlight)
• Blogs have global reach, and the demand for quality ideas far exceeds the supply of them. But content creation is hard. Without structure or accountability, many people won’t be able to publish consistently. (View Highlight)
• Write of Passage is the online course I wish existed when I started writing. The system would have saved me hundreds of hours in setting up a website, building a note-taking system, and refining ideas before I published them (View Highlight)
  • Note: Here, David talks about his publishing process: setting up a website, building a note-taking system, and refining ideas before publishing them. I could mirror and refine this, but I need to establish the first part – structure and accountability.
• setting up a website, building a note-taking system, and refining ideas (View Highlight)
• I had experienced the benefits and challenges of writing online myself, so I didn’t have to do market research. (View Highlight)
  • Note: Market research: the action or activity of gathering information about consumers’ needs and preferences.
• I launched the course with a built-in audience of 10,000 email subscribers and 20,000 Twitter followers. Since I had organic reach, I didn’t have to pay for marketing. (View Highlight)
  • Note: David didn’t pay for marketing since what he does online – writing and providing value – is in a way a method to market himself. Write of Passage isn’t the product – he IS the product. And he attracts an audience who will buy stuff from him because he proves himself to be of value. You cannot sell something to someone without them seeing its value. In David’s case, he first proved himself to be valuable. Only then did he launch a product, because he already had a following. He is the FIRST product.
• If you have a built-in audience, you don’t need to raise money. If you write well about a common and specific problem, Google will send you lots of free traffic. (View Highlight)
  • Note: Again a little nudge for me to get a personal website and domain name… and build content.
• I thought I needed to raise money to start a successful business, because venture capitalists are too good at marketing for society’s benefit. I had spent too much time studying the loud tactics of venture-scale companies and not enough time studying the quiet successes of bootstrapped companies. (View Highlight)
  • Note: From Shopify: “A bootstrapped company is one that has been started and expanded only through the entrepreneur’s personal resources and revenue generated by the company.”
• If you define your processes, you don’t have to hire full-time employees. Depending on their complexity, you can outsource repeatable processes to personal assistants and software programs. (View Highlight)
• Automate processes with code whenever possible. If you know how to code, you can build your own software. If you don’t, you can automate repeatable processes with tools like Zapier. (View Highlight)
• Once a process has been automated, it’s hard to fight back against that inertia. In particular, make sure your systems are mature before you automate customer support and communications. (View Highlight)
• Andy McCune is one of the most talented entrepreneurs I know. He spent his teenage years growing social media handles. His most successful one, @earth, has more than 1.5 million Instagram followers. At 24 years old, Andy just sold his company Unfold to Squarespace. The company was founded in 2018, and by the time it was acquired, Unfold users had used the app to create more than 800 million Instagram stories. The app had more than 25 million users, hundreds of thousands of which paid for the subscription of $2.99/moor$19.99/yr. Best of all, they scaled the company with contractors instead of hiring full-time employees. At the time of acquisition, only three people worked full-time for Unfold, and Andy and his co-founder owned 100% of the business. (View Highlight)
  • Note: Andy McCune is an amazing entrepreneur. He was very successful with his social media handle @earth which has over 1.5 million followers. At only 24 years old, he sold his company Unfold to Squarespace. Unfold was only founded in 2018, but by the time it was sold, it had more than 25 million users and 800 million Instagram stories were created by users. Hundreds of thousands of people paid for the subscription which cost either $2.99permonthor$19.99 each year. Instead of hiring a lot of people, Andy and his co-founder chose to use contractors. When they sold Unfold, only three people were working full-time and they still owned 100% of the company.
• If you can’t automate a process with software, you can delegate it with contractors and personal assistants. They prefer well-defined projects and enjoy the repetitive tasks that drain the energy of an entrepreneur’s soul. As you work with them, ask them to refine and add detail to every process. The more granular the checklist, the better. That way, the process can be executed by any personal assistant, and eventually, by software. (View Highlight)
  • Note: Contractors are professionals who provide skills or services to companies for a fixed period. They may be contracted for a set number of hours, a specific time frame, or for a project’s duration. Contractors can be self-employed, work independently as sole traders, or run their own limited company.
• tipping point (View Highlight)
  • Note: The point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change.
• First, it’s easier than ever to build an online audience. Future customers can find you on social media, stay connected with you through email, and build a relationship with you through articles and podcasts. (View Highlight)
• Second, the number of no-code, plug-and-play software tools has exploded in the past five years. They’re almost all cheap to use at first, and the costs only rise as your business grows. (View Highlight)
• When I launched Write of Passage, there was no other school at the intersection of organizing your ideas, becoming a prolific writer, and working with a community to build an online audience. I launched Write of Passage with a built-in audience and without a lot of competition, so for the first year, I didn’t have to pay for marketing. I didn’t just have 10,000 email subscribers when I started selling the product. I had a trusted relationship with 10,000 people, many of whom saw me as an expert on writing online. Like a dam holding back water, there was a torrent of people who wanted to learn from me. (View Highlight)
• Officially, there are only two people who work full-time on Write of Passage. But in another way, there are hundreds of people who do. The software tools I use are improving their products at a compounding rate, which gives me low-cost access to a “shadow work force,” and keeps my company small so we can move fast. Thus, there are actually thousands of people working full-time to improve Write of Passage. (View Highlight)
  • Note: A product within a product! When I sell Obsidian for Students templates, I not only sell the template – I’m selling Obsidian also, along with the improvements that Obsidian will make throughout the years! Isn’t that crazy?
• Avoiding competition is the best way to build an Audience-First Product. You must solve problems other people aren’t trying to solve. Do something unique. Don’t be the 800th person to sell T-shirts on Instagram. When in doubt, don’t differentiate on branding or packaging either. The world doesn’t need another copycat product, and if you can blaze your own trail, your compensation will reflect that. (View Highlight)
  • Note: As far as I know I’ll be the only one selling Obsidian templates. Like the vaults themselves. That’s a cool business idea. I’ll look into it more this year.
• Use the Audience-First Product method to make the Internet small. By writing online, you’ll build a network around yourself and have a window into the ideas that ignite your soul. You become a magnet for like-minded people. Those people will share their best ideas, become your first customers, and help you grow your company. (View Highlight)