Communities are the new meta.

Look around at B2B and B2C startups, especially SaaS.

How do they get their customers?

Cold outreach

If you have a REAALLY good product with an existing product-market fit then cold outreach works. Why? You can only sell to people who didn't know you before IF your product is solving a huge problem for them AND your product is really good.

What you must do in this case: copy or improve existing products that solve huge problem for the customer

Usually this requires either:

• A lot of money. Via VCs or via your own money. You can't usually build a product that solves a big problem on your own and then use cold outreach to get customers. It's very time-consuming and unlikely, trust me.
• A lot of experience. But if you have experience in a specific field you wouldn't start with cold outreach and I will explain why.

Communities/connections

Something great happens when you are building a product and you have a few people to show it to who can actually be your first users:

• You don't need to spend money on paid ads or hours of cold outreach
• You can get feedback almost instantly for FREE
• You can iterate/build a lot of products and find the one that actually gains a lot of organic traction

I just realised today that when I was building Telegram chatbots I already had an audience of 200+ people on my private channel (it's like a closed Facebook group). These 200+ people were my first users and those who gave me A LOT of valuable feedback. Then the VIRALITY effect happened. People started sharing, I got more signups and more subs, eventually my blog grew into 5000+ IT-related followers who were obsessed with some of my chatbots. But how?

I was building the product WITH them and FOR them.

If you don't like/use social media and prefer something else then connections in real life works as well. But you will need somehow to contact these people in one-to-many way. It could be blog, or even a What's App group. Anything works, really.

Communities are the new META

Meta is the acronym meaning “most effective tactics available

Building an audience and THEN that building a product is MUCH easier then building a product first and then making loyal customers. So why not utilise that?

Examples

Scenario 1: You are building a B2B SaaS/product

Without audience: cold outreach, hundreds if not thousands of rejections, accounts blocked, guessing what your product-market fit would be if you have some innovate product (like I had with Hachly)

With audience: You know exactly what your customers want, you give them value by giving them valuable info, THEY ask you to be the first one to use your product

Scenario 2: You are selling a service

Without audience: cold outreach, hundreds if not thousands of rejections, accounts blocked.

With audience: clear understanding of what your clients need help with, you know exactly how to price your service, you get first customers FAST.

Get. Feedback. Fast.

Communities/audience allows you to buid fast and get the feedback even faster. That's one of the reasons, for example, why I have this blog and why I am starting to build a new English-Speaking audience.

Use that new meta. You don't need to be an influencer or even have a social media. If you prefer face-to-face interactions – that works as well. There are tens if not hudnreds of ways to build an audience in different ways that will suit introverts and extraverts. So just do it. Don't decrease your "luck" of starting something succesfull. Start with audience.

And remember, you don't need to have thousands or even hundreds of people. Even a group of 5 people would be enough to start building/helping them You can build a product for a specific person and then resell it to other people. Just make sure you know where you can find them.

This community

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