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Audience Building
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© 2015 Mirasee. All Rights Reserved.
This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole
or in part, without written permission from Mirasee.
It's easy to get permission. Just email
3
What’s Inside? Introduction 4
Why Most Start-ups Fail... and Why You CAN
(and Will!) Succeed 8
Why Start-ups Absolutely NEED an Audience 15
What Does a Start-up’s Audience Look Like? 19
So, How Do You Build an Audience of Fans? 25
Enjoy these Resources 43
Further Reading to Help You Grow Your Audience 44
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Introduction
As a Start-up Entrepreneur, you’re doing something
special. You innovate, solve problems, and bring fresh
and exciting products to the marketplace.
Whether you’re making an app, a gizmo,
or a comprehensive new service, you’re
doing something important that could
dramatically change the way people live.
You know your product should speak for
itself, users should see the value easily,
and investors should know it’s a killer
deal. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to
build a successful new company.
You may already have a good handle on business,
marketing, and audience building, or you may be
learning as you go. That’s okay. They’re all essential to
launching your Start-up in public, onboarding tons of
new users, pleasing your investors, charging higher
prices, and eventually living the lifestyle you’ve always
wanted.
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We can help.
We created this free report especially for Start-up
entrepreneurs. You have a passion and a specialty, if
not a killer product yet, an idea you know will take the
world by storm. And you know people want (perhaps
badly) what you can offer, whether it’s an app,
software, or game.
Knowing people need you and getting them on board,
however, are different issues, and the skills that let you
do one don’t let you achieve the other!
Your future users are out there, and they have the
money to pay, but finding and connecting with them
(not to mention getting them to pay for your product!)
isn’t always easy.
It’s fun to dream of overnight success, like those
massively-funded projects the tech blog gods are
working on, but the truth is, you’ve got to put in the
time and effort to create an audience for yourself. For
most people, Start-up success doesn’t happen
overnight, and creating an amazing product is only one
of the elements of creating a successful business.
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The film, “Field of Dreams,” was wrong. Building it
does not guarantee anyone will come.
Those who ignore the audience, focus on attracting
financing instead of wooing users, or save their
marketing for the official launch, wind up frustrated,
disheartened, and broke! This can cause a crisis in
confidence and make you wonder why you’re doing it
at all.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
You CAN build a user base of passionate
fans.
You CAN get feedback from people about
what they want and need – before and
after you release your offering.
You CAN have a thriving, income-
producing technology business that fits
your lifestyle.
You CAN make a living or get a great
buyout doing what you’re passionate
about.
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It takes a shift in focus and a few tips, tools, and
strategies.
Are you ready to take your Start-up to the next level?
Let’s go!
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Why Most Start-ups Fail... and Why You CAN (and Will!)
Succeed
The rules have changed. There’s a new way to
make a name for yourself, and it a proven
way to achieve success.
9
Can you guess the most common complaint we hear
from the CEOs of Start-ups?
“I can’t focus on building a user base until
I have the system in place! For that, I
need funding, a bigger team, and more
time!”
It makes sense, when you think about it. As a Start-up,
you’ve got a brilliant idea. It’s new, it’s fresh, it’s
useful, and it’s going to be a game-changer!
And besides, there are rules to this, a system in place
for how things work, and you understand it well.
You’re willing to do what it takes to see your company
thrive, but many obstacles stand in your way.
Getting your vision across to users and investors is
challenging, and you may not understand why people
don’t immediately realize the value of your idea.
Well, they might, but according to a study by Allmand
Law, 90% of tech Start-ups fail. Users and, even more
so, investors expect you to be one of them.
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Why do so many Start-ups fail miserably? And why
might you become one of them?
It’s because you’re building a traditional Start-up in
the traditional way, when the world and how people
use technology have changed at a meteoric pace.
In fact, these rules have changed across the board:
You come up with a great idea, and draft a beautifully comprehensive business plan.
You assemble a crack team and do extensive market research.
You chase round after round of funding so you can build a prototype.
You wait until that prototype is ready to launch to devote time and energy to building a following – which you’ll want another round of funding to do.
In our digital, connected world, the
traditional ways of building a name
for yourself just don’t work!
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But when you finally launch, it fizzles out and barely
registers as a blip on the radar. What happened?
The problem is, you were chasing financing when you
should have been courting fans, convincing people that
attention will follow design and execution.
Wouldn’t it be better to have investors coming after
you, begging to get in on the action? Wouldn’t it be
better to get dozens of emails a day asking when your
product is finally going to be
available? Asking to please, please,
please let them help you beta test?
Wouldn’t you rather act from a
position of authority, with hordes of
people backing you up when you say, “This is going to
be epic.”
You need to change, not just the actions you take, but
also how you think about your business and the Start-
up world, because what you’ve been doing (or what you
might be setting out to do) isn’t viable anymore. You
still have to be the innovator and visionary, but you
don’t have to do it alone.
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You can build an audience.
It’s going to be a lot of hard work, but if done right and
in the right order, this work can transform you from
the chaser to the chased, from the seeker to the
sought-after, from an entrepreneur with their hand out
to a CEO negotiating deals.
Here’s what you need to know that your fellow Start-
up hopefuls probably don’t:
What you sell and what people need might be different.
What people need and what they want might be different.
You’ll never know whether your target market wants something you can’t provide, or doesn’t know what they need, until you have some kind of relationship with them.
People want and need your product, but they are overwhelmed with options and can’t see where their best solution lies.
Traffic and attention can come from more places than you might imagine.
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Getting users invested in what you’re building requires more than making it available. You have to guide them through the process.
Don’t let all this overwhelm you. You don’t need to do
and learn everything today, but you do have to
understand that, without an audience, you’re going to
be chasing investors and users, and struggling to make
a name and a living for yourself for a long time. That
is, unless you spend all your money and wind up
further behind than when you started.
Let’s get back to what other Start-up entrepreneurs get
wrong.
It isn’t that they aren’t good at what they do, and it
isn’t even that they don’t want to learn new things to
effectively market themselves.
It’s that they play by the old rules, trying to run a
Start-up the way people did five, maybe 10, years ago,
Talent and skill simply aren’t enough to
attract your best customers.
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when what they need to be doing instead is building an
audience.
The audience makes the difference: successful Start-
ups have audiences, and unsuccessful ones don’t.
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Why Start-ups Absolutely NEED an Audience
Learn the real value of an engaged, loyal
audience… and how it helps you turn your
talent into a real business.
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Let’s begin with the bad news.
The old Start-up rules you knew are out. Audiences are
in.
No matter how dedicated you are, you’re one of the
hundreds of Start-ups the digital world produces every
year, and standing out isn’t easy – especially when
you’re trying to build the product before making it
popular!
You’re also unlikely to reach every
prospective user on the many
online spaces, forums,
communities, magazines, review
sites, social media platforms, and
blogs. This means reaching a
critical mass of users the
traditional way is expensive,
time-consuming, and insanely difficult.
Further, when you run a traditional Start-up and
pursue team members and investors, the burden of
proof is all on you. An audience takes that burden off
your shoulders. They help spread the word about your
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products and act as a living testimonial to your quality
and innovation.
Without an audience, your stream of users is restricted
to what you can drum up on your own or pay for out of
pocket, and if there aren’t enough of them, you’re
sunk.
You’ll constantly be playing catch-up and maybe never
see the results you want, whether financial or lifestyle
related.
That won’t do.
Hopefully you’re coming around to the idea that
building your Start-up without an audience won’t
create a profitable, sustainable business.
Knowing all this, you can’t afford to miss out on an
audience who will help you:
Test ideas and new service offerings
Validate that your offer is a desirable one
Improve your delivery and performance
Get your message out to hundreds and thousands more people than you could alone
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Send you new users on a consistent basis
Tell you exactly what they want to buy, how much they want to pay, and how they want to consume it
No matter how dedicated you are, without an audience
first, you’re unlikely to be able to launch with big-
enough numbers. Unless you have exceptionally deep
pockets to pay for marketing and advertising, that is.
An engaged audience is a group
of people who have self-selected
to be your best users, colleagues,
and even friends. They will
support you as you move
forward, comfort you when you
fall, and help you grow your
Start-up into something they
can’t imagine life without. Are
you ready to start building yours?
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What Does a Start-up’s Audience Look Like?
Building your audience doesn’t
need to be overwhelming,
especially when you know how to
do it.
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How do you generate and sustain interest in your
project before you’ve even built it?
Excellent question!
A Start-up audience isn’t a group of people hanging
out, staring at their screens with baited breath waiting
for access to your app or platform. It works differently
than that, but the results are even better.
The difference between an audience for a Start-up and
one for everyone else is the nature of the relationship.
It’s not likely that everyone in your audience will want
to do nothing but consume your product.
Instead, your audience will include people who engage
with you about your passion, provide evidence that
you’re onto something big, and help advance your
success in ways you haven’t even thought of.
This means you have a wonderful amount of freedom
in what your audience will look like and who it will be
composed of.
Remember this as you read this report and start
building your own audience:
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Relationships can be valuable even if they’re non-transactional.
The more people you have paying attention to you, the more authority you command in the market place.
You may be leaving a lot of money on the table if you refuse to consider new options as they present themselves.
An audience, once built, will bend over backwards to
help you make your Start-up a success, but you have to
put in the time first.
If you give people valuable information for free, they
will repay you by helping you improve your products
and by telling others about them.
A Start-up audience could be composed of:
Potential users
People who are curious about your products, have a problem your products solve, or crave the delight your products create
Other entrepreneurs in the same, related, or totally different spaces
People who are interested in your passion
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Each of them are valuable in their own way and bring
different qualities to your community. The more
viewpoints you can draw upon, the more insightful and
effective your products will be.
You, not your product, are the one who makes the
difference. You gather people together for a common
purpose, and you guide the community towards
success, for themselves as well for yourself. Because of
that, and because your audience gives you the precious
gifts of their time and attention, prepare to give a lot of
yourself to help them as well.
Having engaged readers and community members who
are interested, not just in what you sell, but in YOU
yourself, is a priceless resource.
As your standing in your
community grows, so
does your authority.
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If you can do this, if you can gather people with varied
needs and interests under the banner of your products
and market area, then word about you will get shared
far and wide and generate lots of great discussion,
ideas, and attention.
This leads to some of the biggest and best onboarding
you’ll ever see.
As your community grows, you will be seen as an
authority in your space, and people will ask you about
your area of expertise.
This is significant when it comes to developing new
product offerings that are so aligned with your users’
desires that they won’t bat an eye when you offer them
premium access or subscription.
Your audience will make suggestions, challenge your
assumptions, and treat you like a mentor. You will see
Your audience will challenge you,
learn from you, teach you, and buy
from you or direct others who can.
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the impact you have, not just with customers, but also
with a large, constantly evolving group.
You’ll learn from your audience, too! If you’ve
connected with people who are colleagues as well as
audience members, you’ll share tips and advice, and
even refer business with each other.
Lastly, a Start-up audience will use what you build
and direct other possible users to you. Whether
you’re seeking a one-time purchase or a lucrative
ongoing subscription, your investment of time in
building relationships will pay off in terms of
dollars.
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So, How Do You Build an Audience of Fans?
It starts with finding the link between
your areas of expertise and your
audience’s areas of interest. But that’s
only the beginning…
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Why you did you get into this business? Is it because of
An interest or passion?
The need for flexibility and freedom?
The desire to shake things up in your industry?
It could have been all three, or something else
entirely.Whatever your reasons, you began building a
business because of your intelligence, gumption, and
desire to share something with the world. Maybe it’s a
productivity program, research tool, or an addictive
new game.
Having the ability to either solve a problem or create a
delight means you understand that pain or desire. It
also means you have a wealth of ways to talk about
it and share your knowledge.
The key is to find the links between
your expertise and what interests
people. That’s the bridge between you
and your potential audience.
Whom you will attract as users is the
next most important thing.
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Here’s an overview of the process:
Let’s go into each step in more detail.
How to Build an Audience of Raving Fans
1. Identify who you want to serve and what you want to provide.
2. Provide one unique and irresistible bit of insight or delight.
3. Create that content, and put it on a landing page, connected to an auto-responder that has a series of engagement emails that will be delivered at intervals.
4. Start connecting with people on blogs, social media, and other online spaces they inhabit.
5. Contribute to communities by guest posting on blogs your ideal customers read.
6. Once you reach “critical mass” (at least 1,000 people) on your email list, launch or re-launch your blog and continue to engage people there.
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1. Who You Serveand What You Provide
First things first: Know what you offer and who wants
it most. This means identifying (in much more detail
than you’d expect at first) who your single ideal
customer is. Who is that one user you wish could be
cloned a million times to make up your pool of perfect
users?
Think about things like their age, family situation, and
income, and then delve into their hopes, fears,
opinions, and dreams.
Start by identifying
your one single
ideal customer.
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Once you have a clear idea of who you will be reaching
out to, think about your products.
What element of your product is
most important to your
prospective customers?
What do they care about most?
What causes them the greatest
pain or difficulty right now?
This will tell you how you need to approach them and
help you understand how to frame your offering so that
it speaks to your customer in terms of how it benefits
them.
Write down your answer to the questions about who
you serve and what you provide, and keep it close to
remind you who you’re trying to resonate with.
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2. Solve ONE Problem
The next thing you want to do is think of one specific
problem they have, one you can solve quickly and
thoroughly with a single piece of content.
Remember in the previous step where we talked about
benefits to your prospective customers? That’s where
your analysis begins. Pick one critical problem you can
solve or delight you can create with a piece of free
content. If you succeed, your subscribers will forever
regard you as a hero!
This giveaway could be a sample or a trial of your
product, but you should also think outside the box for
other possibilities. You want to create a relationship
outside of the Start-up environment. Also consider
giving away information that will make them a better,
more sophisticated user down the line.
We call this problem-solving or delight-creating piece
of content a First Impression Incentive, and it’s one of
the first steps to building that thriving income-
producing business you want.
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Don’t be tempted to go for the full onboarding. You’ll
make more higher-value relationships if you give a
little first.
With the First Impression Incentive, you want to prove
your credibility, and it’s easiest to do that by either
solving a small but intensely bothersome issue or
providing a small yet remarkable delight for people.
Some examples might be:
Keep it simple, applicable, and valuable.
You’ll notice that these examples appeal people and not
just your ideal customers. That’s good. While you’re
aiming to create a steady stream of reliable, pleasant
First Impression Incentives Suitable for Start-Ups
5 ways to speed up your blogging
2 weeks of free custom reports
25 free credits to play with or share
Why your SEO efforts are falling flat
32
customers, attracting other interested parties is
valuable as well.
3. Crafting the Incentive
Once you’ve decided what solution or delight you want
to gift to your new audience members, you have to
figure out how to best present the information.
You can make an eBook, a free report, a video, an audio
recording, or whatever you think will help people
absorb and use your information.
If you’re not sure which format to use, keep this in
mind: use the minimum richness to get the job done.
That means if you need a video to demonstrate a
technique, then make a video. But if a description
would work just as well, then write a report or an
eBook. You don’t want to spend more time or resources
Always use the “minimum richness” to
achieve the best possible outcome.
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than necessary, because you’ve got plenty of other
things to worry about!
Like making the giveaway available.
You’ll do this through a landing page and email
autoresponder.
A landing page is a page on your website that only has
information about the incentive and a sign-up form to
subscribe with their name and email to get it.
Anything else is a distraction, so the landing page
shouldn’t have products or links to other pages.
You want people to sign up for your First Impression
Incentive and give their permission for you to contact
them in the future, which is where your Engagement
Sequence comes in.
The Engagement Sequence is a series of emails that
does a few things:
It gets people in the habit of opening your emails.
It encourages subscribers to respond to you.
It shows you’re interested in whether or not the incentive is working for them.
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It shows you’re a real person and not a computer program.
Prepare emails to go out in the days and weeks after
they subscribe asking them how the incentive is going
and if it’s working, or sending them other resources
and asking for their opinions.
You can manage all this with an email service provider
like AWeber. It allows you to create opt-in forms and
schedule your emails in advance.
Landing pages can be tricky, but free and premium
WordPress plugins work right out of the box and don’t
take much time to learn.
4. Finding Your Tribe
Once your landing page is set up, your First Impression
Incentive created, and your Engagement Sequence
ready to go, you’ve got to start finding and connecting
with your ideal customers and others who will find
your incentive cool and interesting.
Go back to the research you did when you were
identifying them, and step into their shoes.
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If you were them, what blogs would you read? What
magazines? What forums? Where would you look for
answers to your problems? Make as long a list as
possible, and start joining conversations in those
spaces.
If your ideal customer is addicted to lifestyle blogs,
start reading them too, and leave interesting and
insightful comments on as many posts as possible.
Do this for a while, and subscribers will start trickling
in.
Do you see why the first step is so important now?
This part of building an audience is long, and
sometimes it feels like drudgery, but you’re building a
strong foundation for everything that comes after.
Your audience is the foundation for
everything else you do to build your
business.
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The readers of these other blogs and communities
aren’t the only ones who’ll notice your comments. The
blog owners will notice, too, which is absolutely critical
to your next step....
5. Contributing to Communities
Once you’ve spent time commenting (which you should
continue doing until you have about 100-300
subscribers) you’ll need to step up your game and start
leading the conversations on these other blogs, not just
participating in them.
You do this by guest posting.
Remember, the owners of those other blogs
will be reading your comments. That’s
important because when you pitch them a
guest post, you’ll be able to say, “I’ve been
happily commenting on your articles...”
and they will know it’s true.
This puts you miles ahead of other guest bloggers who
haven’t done the preliminary work.
Let’s step back for a moment…
Writing guest posts
on popular blogs
helps you move
from a participant
and follower to a
leader.
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What is a guest post?
It’s when a blogger lets a guest author write a post for
their blog that will be seen and shared by their
audience. It’s an amazing way to get attention and
build relationships with both readers and colleagues in
your field.
If you’re not sure you have anything to write about for
other blogs, think of the intersections.
Say you’ve created a product that automatically tracks
how a user spends their time online, and your ideal
user always reads self-improvement blogs. You might
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want to write about “How Most People Waste Time
Online in These Three Areas.”
If you’ve designed a new match-3 game, and your ideal
clients read cooking blogs, you might want to write
about “A Week of Meals Inspired by your Favorite
Mobile Games.”
Remember: the main goal is to impress that blog’s
readers, so they follow your byline back to your landing
page!
Ideally you’ll do all of this before you start your own
blog.
In fact, until you have close to a thousand people on
your list, we don’t recommend blogging on your own
site much at all.
But if you already have a functioning blog attached to
your Start-up site, this method can still work. Just
create a landing page and spend more energy guest
posting and building relationships than you do posting
on your own space.
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6. Finally, You Can Launch
Did you think you were never going to launch (or re-
launch) your business?
Not at all, we just want to make sure your launch is a
successful one.
Waiting until you have at least a thousand subscribers,
including healthy relationships with other bloggers and
professionals, before you launch means that when you
officially open your doors, there’ll be a crowd of people
waiting to celebrate with you, sharing the news, and
spreading your message.
To get things started with a group of users, pick a date
at least a couple of months in the future, and reach out
to all the bloggers you’ve been in contact with.
For best success, wait until you have
around 1,000 subscribers before you
launch.
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Ask them for another chance to guest post during the
week of your launch. Most of them will say yes, and
running several guest posts in one week will ensure
maximum site traffic.
That’s the basic formula for building an audience and
getting your beta group going.
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Let's recap, because we’ve covered a lot, and this is
vital:
The 6-Step Formula for Building Your Audience Business
1. Identify who you want to serve and what you want to provide.
2. Provide one unique and irresistible bit of insight or delight in the form of a First Impression Incentive.
3. Create that content, put it on a landing page, and connect it to an autoresponder that has a series of engagement emails that will be delivered at intervals.
4. Start connecting with people on blogs and other online spaces your target audience inhabits.
5. Contribute to communities by guest posting on blogs your ideal customers read.
6. Once you reach “critical mass” (at least 1,000 people) on your email list, launch or re-launch your blog and continue to engage people there.
42
This is just the beginning. There are obviously many
more details to creating a thriving audience business –
too many to fit in one eBook – but these are the basics.
If these ideas appeal to you, check out the Audience
Business Masterclass, where we take you through this
process step-by-step with all of the detailed,
customized support your entrepreneurial heart could
desire.
43
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44
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