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OBJECTIVE: Connect with your audience to find more people sharing the same problem, identify your evangelists and start to separate your audience into smaller groups, because successful products rely on continuous communication with their audiences.

If you're ready, you can use this chapter's practical tasks. Or you can read about the theory below.

Theory

We've made some really strong progress now. But it’s not enough to know a few people who experience the problem. You want as much as possible, to be plugged into where your users are discussing their issues, or even better, own the platform they're using. This is a short chapter, but vitally important to your success.

If you take anything from this guide, let it be the emphasis of building and connecting with your audience, before you create your product.

How to develop your audience(s)

I strongly believe in providing a platform for your users, to share content, answer questions, encourage engagement. This could take the form of a Facebook page, a WhatsApp thread, in-app feedback, or even your own forum. Being strongly connected to your audience provides some seriously strong benefits. Once we start building a community under our product, we'll never stop.

Our audience is the inspiration for our work, our source of revenue, and the most effective way to market our product.

I've fallen foul of not connecting with my audience before I got too deep into making something. I see it all the time in new and old companies, but yet it's easy to do and pays enormous dividends. Being constantly connected to your audience, learning more about them every day, catching big problems before they arise, should be, in my view, as exciting a prospect to a product team, as building the product.

Additionally, from a competitive standpoint, engaging users with your service, and showing value beyond your product, is a deft approach to building a unique compelling brand, as well as loyalty.

Seth Godin has a great podcast series which goes in-depth on how to connect with your audience; finding your tribes. Seth Godin's Startup School 101

If the problem you're solving involves more than one audience, you would have analysed them in more detail, and their respective markets in the Market Analysis chapter.

As you work through this chapter and its tasks, remember to consider each audience, and connect with each of them in turn, in whichever ways are most fitting to that audience. To clarify, just because one audience can be reached via Facebook groups, it doesn’t mean another can; each requires its own thought.

Building a community

It's very likely your audience uses different platforms and methods to communicate. From more publicly accessible places like a Facebook group, to encrypted hidden spaces like a WhatsApp group. Our aim is to find members of our audience and bring them together with others who share the same problem, to create a community; people with common interests interacting (in our case, a common problem).

You want to find the place the audience is most engaged, with the largest diversity of opinions within the wider community. This is hard, and might not be entirely possible, but the mere fact you're trying will very likely mean you're already more connected with your audience than the many people currently also building products.

Approach it like a detective. You're unlikely to stumble upon a great conversation that you're welcomed into, immediately. Instead you'll probably need to get a foothold with a few individuals, maybe by inviting people to contact you, on Facebook or Twitter. These people who may know others who share the same problem, and via a few questions, help you uncover a seam of (audience) gold; like a closed group you can request to join. But don't stop there. We should do what we can to offer the audience value. As you start to build expertise in the problem space, you may be able to offer help, which builds a huge amount of trust. If you can begin to offer thought leadership in your problem space, encouraging interaction, offer real value, you'll nurture your audience into an active community.

It may feel like a lot of work, but it's really a shortcut to building something people want.

Here are a few ways you can engage the audience:

• Talk to people, ask about their experiences
• Invite them to complete survey and share the results
• Find an expert in the field, interview them, share the conversation
• Research the problem and post an insightful blog
• Test and review the current solutions
• Try solving the problem manually for someone (with their consent)

This is what I was able to do, and found my way into several online groups, including forums, where I answered questions posed by individuals in the audience, and in turn was able to dig into their experience, views and feedback.

Being close to your community means you're first to hear about important developments that affect your product, share great ideas, find new ways to find new customers and set yourself apart from the competition.

Finding your evangelists

As your community develops, you'll hopefully start to find people who really care. These may be the leaders in the community, who create events, or offer their own solutions, maybe admins of a forum. These people are likely to try something new and tell everyone else about it, which makes them perfect candidates for early-adopters of your product. You can incentivise them for their time, or it may be enough to be at the forefront of solving their problem. If you can invite these people onto the journey with you, you should find a new shiny energy source to power your next steps.

More than one audience?

Are you talking to people who have same high-level problem, but have quite different needs when you dig into things deeper? You may have more than one audience if so.

A clear example of two audiences would be buyers and sellers on Etsy. They both want to buy and sell handmade items, but the needs of a seller are very different to those of a buyer, and the causes of their problems are also different.

It’s often the case that a user of a product can be in one audience, and then switches to become a user of another audience. Just a reminder that an audience are people who share the problem, whereas users are people from that audience who go on to use the product. For example you could buy something on Etsy, realise its potential to sell your own handmade items, and then sign up to sell items on the marketplace. You’re the same person, but your underlying problems are different, and they lead to different behaviours, emotions, objectives, and therefore different needs on a product.

Appreciating these differences is key because a product developed to handle these differing needs, will undoubtedly be more successful than one which assumes everyone is the same. Imagine having buying and selling features all in one screen, with each stage of the journey being for both buyers and sellers. It would be too confusing, and mean I’m constantly seeing features which I might never use. That’s a poor user experience.

Not only that, as we progress and begin thinking about how to grow the number of users for our product, marketing, sales etc, deeply understanding the people who need our product means we’re more likely to be successful in getting them to try it. Our tone, language, the channels in which we find them, their onboarding process and so on, are dictated (or should be if we’re doing it correctly) by who these people are. You might target craft suppliers with adverts, if you’re Etsy, as that’s where sellers are likely to go for their supplies, for instance.

As another example, let's imagine our problem is that people are finding difficulty/annoyance in repaying each other.

Starling, Monzo, Revolut, are all examples of ‘challenger’ or ‘neo’ banks, who sought to solve this problem (amongst many others). Needing to pay someone, or needing to be paid, are two very different needs, with different motives and emotions attached. Yet I might need to pay someone back for a meal they bought, and then five minutes later, need to be paid for some money I’d lent someone, therefore existing in both audiences.

The journey a user goes through to pay someone, should be optimised for that task. By designing only for that task, the experience is simple, very effective and can be embellished with moments which delight the user, because the experience is shaped completely around them.

How do you know if you have more than one audience? Look at the problems they’re trying to solve.

What Next?

If you're working on a product right now, try completing the tasks for this chapter. Alternatively you can read the theory of the next chapter.