Why building an audience is better than building a product -

I recently got off a call with a startup founder who was going for a second round of funding.

At the time of the call he had…

• Active daily users in the low 4-figures
• Email subscribers in low 5 figures
• Past funding of low-mid 6-figures
• Decided a new funding round was needed of 7-figures plus

Wanna know the craziest thing?

He had exactly $0 in revenue.

And yet the entire call was focused on the features he wanted to implement in his tool.

My best efforts to turn the conversation to engaging the unengaged email subs to see what he could build to get them to use the tool daily (or better yet, pay for it) were constantly ignored.

Needless to say, we didn’t end up working together.

The problem here is one that I’ve seen time and time again across 10-years of helping brands with marketing and growth.

There’s too heavy a focus on the tool rather than the audience it servces.

And that stifles growth.

Audience > product