Audience-Building Playbooks
Building an audience before, during, and after launch — the platforms that compounded, the posting cadences that worked, and how founders turned followers into first customers.
198 tactics · page 7 of 7
“any feed on the internet from the first day of the internet until I'm sure the last day of the internet... is you know it's damage control like if anyone can show up... it's going to either be a ghost town or it's going to be a bit of a cesspool... we have algorithms that make sure that things that the community votes on or the things that typically get seen there's a lot of stuff that's unsavory beneath the surface we have human moderators”
Moderate a community like a spam team
Every open forum trends toward ghost town or cesspool without active damage control. Run your community like a spam team: algorithmic ranking on community votes, PLUS human moderators catching what slips through. Assume the most motivated members will game any system you build — high-initiative people are inherently rule-benders.
“we cannot be the person for everybody we can be the person for the people that are just have affinity for us in the way we are”
Scale relationships only along aligned vectors
Think of every audience member as a vector with a direction and intensity; authentic reach only scales where those vectors align with yours. Stop trying to be the person for everyone. Be sharply yourself so the aligned vectors snap into place and the misaligned ones self-select out without you having to chase or convert them.
“when you're chasing your first few customers you have very little to show for but if you're known to contribute to an existing Community or known for having left faes of your ambition and curiosity before where people can find them they will be much more willing to listen”
Show up in the target community before you sell to it
Pre-sale credibility is built by leaving a public trail inside the community you eventually want to sell to — comments, replies, side projects, half-finished experiments. When you finally pitch your product, the audience is not deciding whether to trust a stranger; they are deciding whether to support someone they have already watched do the work for months.
“I ran the numbers and it was like 4% or 4 and a half% had any kind of audience I mean any type of social podcast YouTube anything before they built their businesses... it's a fuck ton of work it's way more work way more work for the reward than SEO or cold Outreach”
For B2B SaaS, audience building is overrated as a customer acquisition channel
Only ~4.5% of Tiny Seed's 150+ funded companies had any meaningful audience (social/podcast/YouTube/newsletter) before launching. The rest used SEO, cold outreach, integrations, in-person events, and affiliate programs — all hour-for-hour more efficient than building a personal brand. If you're selling to indie hackers, audience works because that's where they hang out. Outside that niche, lean on the boring marketing channels and stop tweeting to crickets.
“when you go to hire or when you need to build when you need to find people who can um uh promote you like uh let's say affiliate let's say I start an affiliate program and I need Affiliates who are influencers in this space uh or I need investors like that's when an audience suddenly comes in like when we started Tiny Seed the fact that I had an audience was a huge advantage”
Where an audience pays off: hiring, affiliates, and investors — not customers
Even though audience is a weak customer-acquisition channel for most SaaS, it pays off massively for adjacent activities. When you start hiring, an audience pre-fills your inbound applicant pool with people who already understand and trust you. When you launch an affiliate program, it gives you influencers to recruit. When you raise money or start a fund, it gives you a warm investor base. Build audience for the adjacent value, not the customer count.
“scroll social media find all these big content creators online and what are they all talking about is there something you've never heard of that they're all talking about cuz if there is there's a chance that it's something new and no one has done anything with it”
Spot trends on TikTok by what multiple creators mention that you've never heard of
Treat TikTok and Instagram as your daily idea-mining feed. The signal is not "creator X is excited about Y" — that's normal product placement. The signal is "three creators in different niches are all talking about something I had never heard of two weeks ago" (peptides, looksmaxxing, etc.). That convergence means a real wave is forming and the App Store hasn't caught up yet.
“the reason why I can't stand the word personal brand is because when I think of brand I feel like I'm productizing myself and when I think of productizing myself I think of the Bros... they all use the same hooks they're all selling the same thing... what you're really building is a platform in itself that stands maybe slightly on top but at least with many different legs on all these other platforms”
Replace "personal brand" with "personal platform" — brand productizes you
"Personal brand" frames you as a product — same hooks, same templated personality, same Drop Shipping aesthetic. Reframe what you're building as a personal platform: a thing with its own substance that has multiple legs into Twitter, LinkedIn, newsletter, podcast, cohort — and that survives any one channel going dark. The brand metaphor pulls you toward the Bro template; the platform metaphor pulls you toward durable substance you actually own.
“I'm not going to meet somebody at a party for the first time and just like ramble at them with like a diary of what I did that day... however you're authentic in your relationships in the real world you should be that way online as well... like getting to know people you know you have to have the conversations there's a lot of talking there's a lot of listening”
Treat social like a party — don't diary at strangers
Authenticity is not "share whatever you're feeling" — that's mistaking diary entries for connection. The party analogy: at a real-life party with new people, you don't open with "I had a really good cry last night." You introduce yourself, listen, contribute, and only get personal after relationships develop. Apply the same gradient online: lead with how you help, who you help, and why you're worth following before sharing the personal layer.
“nobody would have would have cared when I first started that I have nine month old twins... but now that people know that about me and I say something you know like my wife got sick last week and I'm having a hard week you know working and also doing Child Care over 100 people liked that post because they know me and they give a shit”
Authenticity is layered — earn the right to share by stacking trust first
Your first personal disclosure to 200 followers will land flat — they're strangers. The same disclosure to 5K followers who've watched you for a year lands as something they care about. Stack reasons-to-trust first (useful posts, replies, helpful threads), then layer in the personal context that turns followers into fans. Don't reverse the order; nobody opts in to a stranger's diary.
“the only way that I started to build attraction in my advice to beginners is go reply on people's posts like everything in your first few weeks online even your first few months is about replying... your peer so someone in your industry... your ideal audience... your ideal audience's audience right so who are they like go to their followers list see who's following them”
Beginners win by replying on other people's posts, not by posting their own
If you have 20 followers, your posts reach 0-5 people. Stop posting into the void. For the first months, your only job is replying — on three targeted lists: (1) industry peers, (2) your ideal customer, (3) your ideal customer's audience. A useful, contrarian, or specific reply on someone with 50K followers reaches more humans than your own post for the first 6 months. Comment > post, until your follower count makes it the other way around.
“I checked your profile earlier on Twitter and 93 of the things that you do on Twitter are replies like which is really good... when people start to see you know success and and people are seeing their stuff they're like oh I don't need to comment anymore no that's a killer like you always comment”
Keep replying at scale — 93% replies is the maintenance ratio
The classic mid-stage creator mistake: "I made it; I only need to post now." Erica at ~50K followers still spends ~93% of her Twitter activity replying. Algorithms reward it, and more importantly the audience reads silence as you having outgrown them. Replies are the proof that the relationship is still ongoing. Once you stop, retention degrades whether followers numerically leave or not.
“everything else in their career they would never Just Wing something they would have a plan they would know what they were doing they would have goals and so they don't have that and it's not surprising that they struggle to see results... narrow the scope yes have a have a plan like be like hey I'm going to talk about these few things that I really know about”
Bring the same strategic discipline to content that you bring to business
Seasoned founders quietly throw out everything they know about business strategy the moment they touch social. They'd never ship a product without a target customer, but they post without knowing who they're writing for. Before you post again, write down 3 things: (1) the specific audience you want to attract, (2) the 3-5 topics you'll commit to, (3) the outcome you want each post to drive. Then publish only inside those rails.
“the easiest one to start with is younger you you a couple years ago what would like you three to five years ago what what would that younger you like just kill to know and to find out and start creating content there and over time you'll start to be like oh God it feels really good when I write about this stuff”
Write to yourself 3-5 years ago — that's your easiest target reader
If you can't name your target audience yet, name yourself 3-5 years ago. You already know exactly what that person was struggling with, what they didn't know, what would have saved them six months. Write to that person specifically. After 50-100 posts you'll notice which topics resonate most and your real target audience will sharpen from there — but younger-you is the unfailing starting point.
“I really do believe it is relationship building at scale and it's strange and I will always sort of warn people of this when they're going down this path I was like it will be super weird when someone you have never met acts like you are old friends and it's kind of a one-way thing because you don't you don't read their content right like but they read yours”
Social media is relationship-building at scale — get used to the parasocial
Expect strangers who've consumed your work to greet you like old friends — sometimes with full hugs at events. That asymmetry feels strange at first because you don't know them, but it's the proof your work is doing what you wanted it to. Don't try to flatten it; lean into it. Many of those one-way relationships convert into real two-way friendships, clients, partners, and collaborators over time. The weirdness is the price of building a platform that actually reaches people.
“I think people really get fixated in you have to talk about what is done but I teach them to talk about what is coming so like oh I think about why do people care so much about follower account I don't know so you want to write about that but you don't know okay now you ask the community... if you take their feedback you improve your product and then you tell people I use your feedback this is the newer version that is building in public because it creates a loop of conversations”
Build in public means sharing what's coming, not just what's done
Default "build in public" content is recapping work already shipped — boring, low-signal, no relationship. Real building-in-public is the loop: share what's coming next → ask the community a real question → publicly use a piece of their feedback → ship the better version. Each loop converts followers into invested co-creators. Posting MRR charts doesn't do this; asking "should v2 have feature X or Y?" does.
“I banned self-promotion... almost every Community I'm in has a self-promotion channel and in my opinion they're completely useless no one actually goes to look at it unless you're just going there to self-promote and then you never really look at it again”
Ban the self-promotion channel — every community has one and nobody uses it
Self-promotion channels in communities are dead weight — endless link drops nobody reads. Replace them with one canonical place for the member's introduction (with links allowed) and an explicit rule: no "vote me on Product Hunt" / "read my blog" posts elsewhere. The signal:noise ratio of the community improves immediately, and helpful behavior (real answers to real questions) is what gets noticed instead.
“I am a female founder building from this island with 178 people and loads of sheep and I've built this Global like profitable business from here hello that's a story to tell and the more I lean into that instead of and it's it's the generalist thing if I just tried to be like everyone else my God you just how do you stand out”
Lean into your weird identity — it's the story moat that lukewarm founders don't have
The intersection of where-you-live + what-you-are + what-you-build is rare exactly because it's yours. Milly's "female founder building from a 178-person Scottish island for generalists worldwide" is differentiation no competitor can copy. Catalog your own three or four unusual identity facets and weave them explicitly into your platform messaging. Vanilla "SaaS founder in SF" loses to specific-and-weird every time.
“you could you could say that an even easier place to start writing on a platform like X or LinkedIn or whatever is not you broadcasting but you just replying to other people's exactly yeah right and I yeah I I am a big believer in what is the simplest action Simplicity is velocity”
Start by replying to others, not posting from a blank page
The blank-page trigger paralyzes most beginners. Replace it with the lowest-barrier action: reply on someone else's post. There's already a topic, a context, and an audience watching the thread. You don't have to invent anything — you just have to add one specific thought. After 100-200 high-quality replies on the same handful of accounts, you'll have followers, a voice, and natural compounding into your own posts. Simplicity is velocity.