MBA1297 Build an Audience First or Product First? + Free Ride Friday!

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers, and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to Save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings.

Visit Dell.com deals. Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to EZcourse, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but somebody will win it for free this Friday and every Friday. All you gotta do is leave us an itunes rating and review to enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us some love on itunes.

Thanks.

Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Heyo. Welcome to the $100 NBA show where no time is wasted. We just get straight to the business lessons every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA I a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn should you build an audience first or your product? This is a question I get asked a lot because I've done both. I built a product first, launched it and tried to build an audience to sell it. And I also have built an audience first. And once I had a reasonable audience, I started to build a product for them. In today's lesson, I'll be sharing with you what I recommend, depending on your circumstances. There has been success stories on both sides of the argument, but you got to choose what's best for your situation and that's what we get into in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So should you build your product and then build your audience or build your audience first, then your product? Let me just clarify what I mean here. Your audience is the number of people you can directly reach out to and speak to, whether it's to give them information about what you're working on or make them an offer. And this could be in many forms. It could be like an email list is probably the purest form. How many people on your email list, this could be how many people are subscribed to your podcast or viewers of your YouTube channel. The point is that you could reach out to these people at any time. You may want to reach out to them because, hey, you want to learn more about what their needs are, their pain points, what kind of product you want to build for them, how to improve your product, that kind of thing. So many people will build a product first and, and then build the audience around the product. I've tried this before and it actually wasn't as successful as the other way around. I actually had more success by building audience first, learning about them, understanding their needs are, and then building a product for them. But having a product before your audience is not something that is unheard of. There's plenty of businesses that do that. But the difference is I recommend that if you're going to go product first in audience, that you have some sort of funding. It's going to cost you some money to find out if your product is a fit for an audience or to cultivate an audience to sell to, whether it's through Facebook ads or Instagram ads, Google AdWords, that type of thing. So if you don't have a bunch of money where you can invest in building your audience after your product, then this is probably going to be a very challenging way to run your business. You're a venture backed. If you have investors, this is how they operate. You know, they create a mvp, a minimal viable product and, and then they start trying to get users for that product by building an audience. And usually they get that audience by, you know, paying for it, really just getting ads and driving traffic. Now if you're just getting started, and you don't have a lot of cash, you don't have investors. And if you're even looking to build your business on the side, I highly recommend you start with your audience first. Whether you're blogging and you're building an email list through your blog or a video channel or videos on your blog or a podcast like this one, it's a good way to learn about the market you're trying to serve, whether it's health and fitness, finance, business, whatever it is. Being a part of the market, being a part of that audience really helps you have credibility. And number two, learn about what they need so you can build something without wasting unnecessary time and money. And this is something you can easily do on the side. Building an audience is one of the easiest things. You're not selling anything, you're not building a product, you're not really investing a lot of money. It's actually gonna cost you very to do this. All it's gonna cost you is time and effort, you know, sweat equity. Cause if you're gonna be blogging, writing once a week is gonna take time and effort. If you're gonna be podcasting, same thing. You're building content, you're building an audience, you're answering comments, you're getting social on social media. All that kind of stuff takes time. So if you're looking to launch a product in a market, a good idea is to say, my first year, I'm gonna build this audience and try to get my email list to like 10,000 people. You're going to find a medium of content that you like to do, whether it's writing through blogging or videos or podcasting, and try to drive traffic to your site so that way you can get emails on your email list and so you can reach out to that audience, asking them questions like, hey, I'm thinking about building a product that looks like this. This is the function, this is the problem. It's solved. Would you be interested in getting beta access, that type of thing? It's a whole lot easier to sell to people that you've built a relationship with, built trust with. People are willing to entertain a sales email from time to time. If they're getting great content from throughout the year. And those that aren't willing to entertain it, you don't want them on their list anyway, because at the end of the day, you want to build a business of buyers, or more importantly, in this case, build a list on your email list of buyers. Remember, it costs you money to have people on your email list. You know your email marketing provider is going to charge you per number of emails. Yes, there'll be a range like 5 to 10,000, but you know, you should want to prune your list of people that actually are interested in what you have to offer in the future or now. I have to say, building a product and running a business when you have an existing audience is so much easier because you could just focus on building a great product for that audience. You can reach out to them, ask them questions, and you know they're going to love it and you know they're going to want to buy it because you've already done all your homework, you have an audience that you can ask. It makes things so much simpler. Think about the reverse. Imagine building something without knowing if people actually like you. You're going to have to spend a lot of money and time, you know, getting some focus groups together, learning from people instead of having a audience at your disposal because you've took the time to build it beforehand. So if you're tight on cash, if you're not funded, if you have some time on your hands because you're going to be building something on the side for a bit before you transition to full time entrepreneurship, then I highly recommend you put in the work now, today to start building your audience, launch a website, build your email list, start blogging, start doing YouTube, choose something that you like, the medium you like, you like being in front of the camera, that's great. You like podcasting, you like writing, maybe you love putting together infographics. Whatever it is, you gotta start building content of great, valuable information that will attract people via Google search, via word of mouth, so that they can get on your newsletter, get on your email list, build a free course on your site on whatever your area of expertise is in exchange for their email. Start building that audience today. That's my number one regret. I wish I built my audience earlier. Let's say, for example, it takes you a year to get 5,000 emails on your email list. Every year you delay it, you're losing out, and probably a lot more than just 5,000 a year because it gets exponential as you grow. So if you're not funded, if you don't have a whole bunch of cash lying around that you could spend to build your audience after your product, which will cost you money. Then go audience first, then product.

Dear McDonald's, your breakfast menu. Fire tens across the board. I could be happy with anything, even though I ordered the same thing every time. Thanks for not judging me. I'll try something new. Next time.

Maybe score a two for five dollar deal on a sausage McMuffin with egg and more. Limited time only. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Single item at regular price.

Ba da ba ba ba.

What do the steam engine, electricity and AI have in common? They don't just change how we work, they transform entire economies. Where the Internet Lives is an award winning podcast from Google about the unseen world of data centers. This season we're going inside the AI revolution. From farmers using AI to analyze soil data to researchers discovering new medicines, a new era of AI innovation is here. Listen to where the Internet lives wherever you get your podcasts.

To wrap up today's lesson. Your audience is crucial to the growth of your business and the product you're going to sell. They're going to help you craft the best product for them. The people that are willing to pay. I always say it's not enough to have your friends and family buy your product. You need strangers. You need an audience. So build that audience while you're transitioning from your day job to your full time entrepreneurship through your product. It's going to allow you to have more insight on what kind of business to build. That wraps up today's lesson. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. I got to give away a lifetime membership to one of our listeners. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is Vanilla Bien. Vanilla Bien says great daily tips. Five stars. Great short show. Jam packed with useful information daily. Can't recommend it enough. Thank you Vanilla Bien. You are a winner. Your mission is to email me over at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the Free Ride, the Free Access lifetime access to easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. If you want to win Easy Course, all you gotta do is leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw for every Friday. Just listen on Friday to see if you want that simple our way to say thanks for leaving us love on itunes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Building an audience can take time. It can be slow at the start. But you got to keep at it. You got to keep being consistent with your content. You got to keep being dedicated to it. This is essential to having a great business. Look at anybody who's successful in business and they have a great audience. So stick at it. Be consistent. So no matter what you do, whatever product you build, you're going to get that audience. So don't give up. Stay with it. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the course room to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella, Eduardo.