Day 800 - Audience !== success - https://golifelog.com/posts/audience-success-1678498699561
I woke up today and chose violence. The [replies to @dvassallo's tweet](https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1634244815012646914) got me fired up to call out bullshit. There were lots of comments that due to @tdinh_me's 76k audience, he could launch anything—even a to-do app—and it'll fly off the shelves.
That's such a cop-out. A defeatist attitude. And missing important nuance.
A [simple answer](https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1634242744016314368) to counter all that bullshit about audience size:
He launched another AI product called askcommand when he had 50k audience and it flopped. Nobody cared. If his audience size was so all-powerful, tell me, where were they when he launched askcommand? Did they suddenly miss his tweets about it?
Fuck no. They ignored it.
Because it wasn't interesting or compelling. Because it didn't solve a problem or painpoint. Because it didn't have a market. Could be one or a combination of the reasons stated.
Audience isn't some silver bullet to solve all your product problems.
Audience is an accelerant. But if the product isn't even moving at all, there's nothing to accelerate.
Audience helps speed up success if you got a compelling product to start with. If you don't have a compelling product, no amount of audience will save you. It's not a silver bullet. In fact, having a huge audience go dark on it is actually an even more reliable indicator that it didn't work and you should drop it. And even if you have zero audience, building a compelling product in public will in parallel build an audience, sooner or later. It’s tempting to brush off successes like this to someone’s audience size. That’s a defeatist cop-out. You’re missing the real lesson here:
Do interesting shit, get interested attention.
So get your fucking priorities right, people.
All this building an audience bullshit is getting into all our heads. Hindering more than it helps.
Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals.
Do the right thing > do the wrong things right
Build the right thing > build an audience
Prove me wrong. This is a hill I'm willing to die on.
Bring it mf.
That's such a cop-out. A defeatist attitude. And missing important nuance.
A [simple answer](https://twitter.com/tdinh_me/status/1634242744016314368) to counter all that bullshit about audience size:
He launched another AI product called askcommand when he had 50k audience and it flopped. Nobody cared. If his audience size was so all-powerful, tell me, where were they when he launched askcommand? Did they suddenly miss his tweets about it?
Fuck no. They ignored it.
Because it wasn't interesting or compelling. Because it didn't solve a problem or painpoint. Because it didn't have a market. Could be one or a combination of the reasons stated.
Audience isn't some silver bullet to solve all your product problems.
Audience is an accelerant. But if the product isn't even moving at all, there's nothing to accelerate.
Audience helps speed up success if you got a compelling product to start with. If you don't have a compelling product, no amount of audience will save you. It's not a silver bullet. In fact, having a huge audience go dark on it is actually an even more reliable indicator that it didn't work and you should drop it. And even if you have zero audience, building a compelling product in public will in parallel build an audience, sooner or later. It’s tempting to brush off successes like this to someone’s audience size. That’s a defeatist cop-out. You’re missing the real lesson here:
Do interesting shit, get interested attention.
So get your fucking priorities right, people.
All this building an audience bullshit is getting into all our heads. Hindering more than it helps.
Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals.
Do the right thing > do the wrong things right
Build the right thing > build an audience
Prove me wrong. This is a hill I'm willing to die on.
Bring it mf.