The Audience Explorer
Founders and Indie Creators: How to find the audience for whom you build your product – and what to do when you meet them!
Episodes
Steph Smith is a growth marketer, writer, and indie maker. She wrote “The Guide to Remote Work That’s Not Trying to Sell You Anything” and "Doing Content Right".
Steph and Matthias join on The Audience Explorer for a chat. Steph shares two interesting topics here:
1) How she found the audience for her first book (and how she was able to write it in parallel to her job)
2) What's absolutely necessary for a content creator to become...
Charles-Olivier Demers joins me on The Audience Explorer for an audience modeling discussion, to figure out who it is exactly that he will be helping in his newly founded SaaS business.
Read the full transcript of the episode here.
Find Charles-Olivier on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/co_demers
Marie co-founded Tally with her partner Filip, in the summer of 2020. Filip is into tech, she is into marketing – a magic combination! Marie shares with us the different ways and methods that she used to get the first users and customers for the Tally form builder software. That's a really interesting mix.
Today, they have 15,000 users and $7000 MRR – an impressive track record after only one year in the making!
Paulina Sáez joins me on The Audience Explorer for an audience modeling discussion, to figure out who it is exactly that she will be helping in her newly founded business.
Read the full transcript of the episode here.
Find Paulina on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/PSaezT
Colleen founded simplefileupload.com and went "product first" with it. She wrote the code, found a platform on which to publish and sell it, and has repeatable success with it. Matthias normally recommends to go "audience first", but Colleen managed to get her product off the ground with the "product first" approach, instead.
Let's hear how she did that!
Read the full transcript of the episode here.
Meet @leenyburger on Twitter, and f...
Matthias admires Rob's book "The Mom Test", so he decided to invite Rob to chat about all things customer and audience development.
It turned out that Rob has a pretty unique system to develop products. He shares it in such a unique, easily understandable way that Matthias suddenly shouts out "Hey, why didn't I know this before?".
Read the full transcript of the episode here.
Meet @robfitz on Twitter, and find his websites, Youtube ch...
Matthias knows Alex from Twitter, as someone who is creative and always stands out with his tweets, always value-packed tweets and so visually appealing.
Alex lives in Spain. He lost his job in 2020 due to COVID, but he decisively founded his own business as a social media consultant, content creator and writer. Alex helps creators and entrepreneurs to leverage social media content so that they can grow their business, their brand,...
Matthias meets with Kevon on video. They know each other from Twitter, and Matthias admires Kevon for his talent to communicate as a real human. They take a deep dive on how to do audience development, to become the go-to person for a topic and offer courses on it.
In Kevon's case, the topic is "Building in Public". He is a prolific creator on this, and he offers a brand-new cohort-based course for entrepreneurs on it. Enjoy the epi...
Matthias encounters the most enthusiastic young startup founder he ever met before.
Nesha co-founded Swally, a habit-building app that will make you spend wisely. It analyzes your financial behaviour, helps you create a budget, and it informs you right on the spot about how much you can spend there. Imagine: You are at Starbucks, and Swally says "You can spend $15 here".
Matthias is amazed when Nesha tells about all the unusual locat...
Sharath and Matthias have known each other for a long time, only from Twitter. Today, they got a chance to meet "in person", i.e. in a video call for a podcast recording.
Sharath co-founded shoutout.so, a startup that makes it possible for founders to collect positive shoutouts and display them anywhere – a solution to the well-known problem of social proof that is very important for any business, and for startups in particular.
Matt...
Ramli has written a great book called "Product-led onboarding". Matthias has to onboard new users to his SaaS called "GetTheAudience", and so he read Ramli's book and thought it would be a great idea to have him on the podcast.
It turned out to be a great chat! Ramli talked about
- an interesting approach that got them the first audience for their company
- why sales-led firms should now make the move to become a product-led organ...
Rosie and Matthias had a deep and enjoyable conversation about community building. Rosie reveals her latest thoughts on...
- what community building is,
- what it really takes to be a good community builder,
- and why community building seems to be easy and hard and the same time!
Read the transcript here:
- https://gettheaudience.com/e17-rosie-sherry-community-building-nowadays/
Find Rose on Twitter @rosiesherry and on the w...
Justin and Matthias went deep down into the rabbit hole of audience building. The ride became philosophical and also touches social and societal aspects at the end. What an amazing journey!
Learn more about how Justin Jackson, co-founder of transistor.fm and active podcaster by himself, thinks about today's world and about the interesting "sailboat in the wind" approach that he and his co-founder use to keep their podcast hosting bu...
Michele and Matthias talk about how audience development has changed over the years, on the way from a totally new SaaS startup to a mature business with many customers, today.
They discover that finding the first members of an audience can be really easy, but that it can also be quite time-consuming to stay current with them. Michele tells us how she runs customer interviews frequently and how she always discovers new use cases and...
Boris and Matthias, both indie hackers, talk about getting your first audience and having conversations with them. Boris tells us how he got started with bkmark.io, his online bookmarking service, and how he discovered through conversations that this service could be used in an unexpected way so that he might get totally new customers right now.
Read the transcript here:
- https://gettheaudience.com/e14-boris-tane-turning-bookmar...
Corey and Matthias talk about a lot of interesting topics:
- Marketing is earning trust at scale
- Consistently building an audience/community has a compounding effect
- Marketing as a service to help other people find and receive your product
- Keeping your thoughts organized using the Zettelkasten method
Read the transcript of the podcast here, and see what was mentioned in the episode:
As an indie hacker, you're a single-person company. You work in all roles at the same time: Programmer, CEO, marketing team, blogger, web designer, etc. etc. How on earth can you stay sane in your mind, and get all this stuff done at the same time, without overloading yourself?
See the corner that Matthias painted himself into, and what solution he found: It's a combination of changes in mindset and in practical organization – chang...
What is software quality, and what does it mean for an indie hacker?
Can you find out what qualities (yes, it's a plural!) you need for your own product? Yes, you can! Matthias shows what happens if you take an existing quality standard (like ISO 25010) and check your situation as an indie product against it.
This is a great shopping list for software quality categories and attributes that YOU will want to have in your own indie prod...
What is better: Hunting for an audience or gathering it?
From his development lab, Matthias tells a story about a totally new browser extension that he's currently building. Users of GetTheAudience will be able to automatically gather an audience while surfing Twitter, instead of hunting (i.e. deliberately searching) for it.
Read the transcript of the podcast here, and see which ancient philosophers were mentioned in the episode:
Two Germans having a conversation in English: Enjoy listening to the interview!
Read the transcript of the podcast here, and see what was mentioned in the episode:
Links mentioned in the podcast:
- The Embedded Entrepreneur (Arvid's new, upcoming book about building an audience-driven business)
- Rosieland (Rosie Sherry's fantastic newsletter abo...
Popular Podcasts
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.