Dance with the One That Brought You

Product teams can optimize their execution plan, can devise a winning strategy and secure all of the funding they'll ever need. But nothing happens without an Audience.

This week I am closing out a year-long client engagement in which I was tasked with helping shepherd a new product. For twenty years, my client had built a business for a specific type of customer and were now looking to expand into a new, larger market. Ultimately, we gained a new product. More important, we gained a massive education in Audience.

Here’s the story. About a year ago, we set out to build something new. Most of our early specs were built around our CEO’s vision, which we agreed was enough to build around (okay, possibly swayed by the fact that he was paying us all.) For a few months, we tinkered with a demoable product that included an interactive front end built on hard-coded, static data. This approach would allow us to put a seemingly functional product in front of people to garner feedback in a demo environment. This pre-sales development strategy, in hindsight, was a very good decision. It saved us engineering cycles and allowed us to change the product quickly without risk.

We also made a poor decision. When we built our new product, we made a critical decision early on. Instead of building a new product for our current customer base, we’d attack a tangential market segment in which we didn’t have a foothold. The new market segment was much larger and provided more financial upside in the longterm. I had interviewed dozens of folks from our current customer base, and many were interested in what we were building. Alas, we were more interested in the bigger market, despite the fact that we were a smaller company without the pressures of investors, public or private.

So, we ventured into the unknown and attempted to chat with target buyers/users from the new market. Despite investing in SEO and social advertising, we couldn’t attract anyone from this new segment to get on a call with us. Many of us - including myself - reached out to folks in our personal network to source interviews. In short time, the well ran dry. In this new market, we lacked an Audience.

Our friends and family demos provided us some feedback but as any Product person knows, it takes real users using the product to assess true product-market fit. We opened up a beta program in November 2024 and ran webinars to introduce the program. Our goal was ten by the start of 2025. No one came. As of this writing, we are at zero beta users. It hurts.

“Build it and they will come" they say. I truly believe that the problem we’re solving exists and there is a market for it. However, we started in the wrong place. We had an Audience of trusting customers that had done business with us for years and had a need for the solution we were building. We looked past them at a bigger market in which we hadn’t built a reputation, a brand or trust. (Okay, fine, I will queue the meme now.)

An Audience is a significantly valuable asset that can take years to nurture and build out. Hubspot was able to grow their Audience around the “inbound” movement. Wes Bush and team have built an Audience around “product led growth”. It wasn’t done overnight but was accomplished with helpful, genuine content and a firm POV.

I feel we’ll pivot and head back home, asking our current customers to assess the product. It will require some tweaks to the product to make it usable for this group, but it’ll be worth it. We’ll learn from this audience, earn social validation and can consider expanding to the larger segment down the road.

(I suppose now would be a good time to thank you for being part of this community here at Build It, Ship It. Thanks for reading, thanks for sharing, thanks for engaging.)

At each stop in my Product journey, I’ve started a user group. Most companies I’ve joined hadn’t thought to do this. Essentially, I create a program in which customers may sign up to be part of our development process. Once on the list, customers will be invited to release previews, design reviews, surveys, customer roundtables, etc. Of course, the customer can attend all, some or none of these events. For the customer, this is a huge win because it provides them the opportunity to influence our product direction. For us, we win because we get closer to our customers, collect their feedback and earn their trust. The user group, as simple as it sounds, has been my most successful tactic at building and strengthening an Audience.

I’ll leave my client engagement proud of what we built, and hopeful that the product will resonate with a small group of folks. I’ll also leave this engagement having learned a hard lesson around embracing the community that you have access to. Embrace the community that trusts you.

“Dance with the one that brought you”, I’ll say.