Single-speaker advice arguing entrepreneurs should build an audience before creating products. The speaker contrasts the “old” product-first approach with an “audience-first” workflow: attract an audience, interview them to discover real problems, launch multiple MVPs (minimum viable products) until one resonates, then double down and scale the business around that offering.
Chapters
There's a right way and a wrong way to build a business. Basically, the old way is you build your products first and foremost. You then go and market it. You build an audience, and you sell. The problem with this method, the thing that most people do, is that you do not know if what you're building is actually going to be valuable for the people you're building it for. So the better way is you first build an audience and then you talk to that audience so you can understand what their actual problems are. Once you know their problems, you can start to build offers, products and services that solve their problems. You start with an mvp. That's a minimum viability product. Basically the most basic, simple, fundamental version of your offer. You put out a bunch of MVPs, you put out 5, 10, however many it takes until you find something that hits that. Your audience says, yes, yeah, we want more of this. Then you double down and you build that, and you build your business around it. Too many people are following the old method of first building a product without actually asking anybody, do you want this? So you've got to change how you do it. You've got to build an audience first and then build for them.