Audience first, product second

An excerpt from this week’s issue:

Hey folks!

Another week, another issue of My First $500/month 🙌🏾.

Firstly, we have a new home! Check out @MF5MO for regular updates. If you’d like to share your story on how you made your first $500/month, reach out via a DM or a tweet 🐥.

Secondly, hello to the new 15 subscribers! Welcome aboard, I hope you’re excited as I am 🚀. You can read the first post for an informal introduction.

Finally, a word or two before today’s issue. I set out to scratch my own itch with this weekly newsletter - build new connections, learn new skills, and ultimately increase my surface area for luck. It is truly inspiring to meet new people and learn about their experiences, and I hope you will leave with something too. Maybe after reading this you’ll start that podcast, or build that business on the side? Hey, you might even end up being a special guest on this newsletter. The sky is the limit 🌅.

Okay, enough talking - let’s dive! Last week, I caught up with Dagobert Renouf, a 🇫🇷 France 🇫🇷 based software engineer and UX designer turned startup founder, building online products with his wife!

Do I hear a cup of tea calling? ☕️

How about a quick introduction? What do you do and where you are in the world?

I’m Dagobert, a software engineer from France turned startup founder. I’ve been building an online product with my wife for the past 4 years.

How did you earn your first $500/month online?

We built Logology selling automated brand designs to indie startups.

What was the timeline to reach $500 from $0?

It took about 2.5 years. We made a lot of mistakes and spent most of our time building instead of learning how to get customers. So it took a while 😅.

How did you find opportunities to earn $500/month?

I followed tips from the book Traction and built a network on Indie Hackers for connecting with other startup founders.

What were the most helpful tools (e.g. Twitter, YouTube)?

Twitter is most helpful since it allows me to get sales of my product by simply talking about my journey and connecting with other founders. It was a game changer for me!

What were your biggest challenges?

The biggest challenge was finding a marketing channel that worked. Before having success with Twitter we tried Google Ads, writing blog posts and sponsoring newsletters….but nothing worked.

If you could start again with your current knowledge, what would you do differently?

I would build an audience around topics I’m interested in BEFORE building the product. This allows me to tailor my product according to the problems my audience experience.

Do you have any advice, ideas, books/articles to read, resources you recommend?

My main advice is to stop focusing so much on your product, and focus on the people you’re trying to help. Listen to their problems and struggles and find ways to reach them even before you build the product. The challenge isn’t to build the product as much as it is to find a way to make lots of relevant people know about it. So make sure you work on that from day 1.

I would also recommend reading the book Rework as it has everything an indie startup founder needs to build a startup.

You can also checkout my course on Twitter as a marketing strategy where I’ll help you understand the Twitter algorithm for prioritising tweets, boosting engagement, and building an audience.

New week, new learnings

Building an audience before building the product is the piece of advice that hit home for me.

Being a software engineer, this is often difficult to contend with. Hacking away and building projects is fun and exciting, but can quickly turn into investing time, energy and emotions into something that people don’t want. I have my fair share of experience with this - I was in a small team building a collaborative tool for creating interactive courses (think Udemy + Figma). Focusing on the audience first before building the product would have helped us identify two things:

• the space was already congested with tools such as Figma and Miro, and so the odds were very much stacked against us

• we didn’t truly understand who our customer would be: is this for content creators? Online tutors? Students?

A big thank you to Dagobert for sharing his story and lessons learned from his experience! You can find him on Twitter and you can check out his Twitter engagement course!

You did a good thing today by reading this post. Pat yourself on the back, and see you next week! 👋🏾

As always, if you have any feedback to share, or you’d like to tell your story, you can reach out on Twitter.