From zero to audience
PublishedI am a developer with backend and frontend experience (7+ years). I was always dreaming about building my projects. All these years I kept a secret list of my startup ideas. It has grown to more than 160 positions! I worked on a few of them as a side project, but not a single one of them came to life.
About a year ago I discovered the Indie Hackers community and started reading about it in my spare time. It was very inspiring to read honest stories of people who were building real projects and shipping them. I followed indie founders and content creators on Twitter. I listened to the Indie Hackers podcast. I read some articles on bootstrapping and indie hacking.
A typical lurker 🤓
Things changed when I left my full-time job and got much more spare time and energy. I became more active on Twitter (follow me). I started to read books on the topic, got an invite to the Indie Hackers website, and passed a few courses on Twitter and building in public.
When I learned more about bootstrapping, I started to realize that the most important part is the audience. The people who will use a project. The question is will they come? I am not sure. I stopped building because of the growing fear of failure. I didn't want to spend precious time on something that is going to waste.
Then I discovered a different path. In a winter sale, I got Arvid Kahl's The Embedded Entrepreneur book and started to learn about the audience-driven approach.
The idea is simple:
- Choose the existing audience you would like to work for
- Become a significant part of it
- Help people and profit from serving them
That sounded appealing to me and I started to dig. It took a few attempts and all my imagination to brainstorm a list with 85 potential audiences. Then I made everything by the book. I rated each audience on a scale from 1 to 5 for a few parameters about my affinity to the audience. After doing this and filtering out the least interesting audiences, I managed to shrink the list down to 48 items.
The next step was the hardest. It took me two months of work. I conducted research for each audience for at least one hour. The idea was to find out if there were any interesting problems that members of this audience experience. All I needed is to write down 3 things for each audience: common problems, existing communities, and products.
How did I do this? In general, by browsing communities in all popular social networks. I was checking messages people leave in communities related to the topic. Some audiences have easy-to-find communities, but some don't have online communities at all (hi to "people who don't love cleaning"). After examining 10-20 audiences the process became smoother because I started to understand what to do. Also tools like GummyBear help very much.
When I finished this research I filtered out all audiences that doesn't have enough interesting problems. Also, I got rid of audiences that have too big or too small sizes and where people are not used to paying for products. Arvid Kahl explains this process in detail in his book.
In the end, I got a list of 7 audiences that are exciting to work with, have interesting problems, and can pay for help. But 3 of them stand out. That was:
- My favorite hobby (bicycle tourists)
- My occupation (backend developers)
- My current passion (Indie hackers)
I decided to choose bicycle tourists for now.