Opinion: Find 1k true fans first before worrying about a technical co-founder

Photo credit: Unsplash.

A few days ago, I received an email from someone who was asking for advice on how to find a technical co-founder for his startup idea.

Here’s my feedback: Build an audience yourself first.

You can do this by blogging, podcasting, starting a newsletter, and hosting meetups, among others.

One great example is Casey Neistat, the co-founder of Beme, a social media company that was acquired by CNN last year, and renowned Youtube star. He started his vlog to build an audience for his company, as he describes at 3:38 of this video:

In case you missed it, he said:

I originally started the vlog two years ago so I could share with an audience my company, Beme, what it meant to start a company, to maybe build an audience that might be excited about what I was doing […]. And that worked and it was awesome.

An audience-first strategy helps with:

1. Recruitment 💍
   When you’re pre-product + pre-traction, it’s difficult to convince anyone (technical or not) to join.
2. User acquisition 👋🏼
   Acquisition is difficult pre and post-product. The sooner you can de-risk this the better.
3. Research 🕵🏼
   Audience-building leads to customer development and a better understanding of who you’re building for.

This is the approach I took (unintentionally) building Product Hunt.

A few years before it started, I wrote a lot. I blogged about product design, marketing, and startups in general, inspired by observations and conversations while working in tech. I wrote 150 essays in 2013, guest authoring on Fast Company, Pando, The Next Web, and other tech publications. I also hosted small brunches with founders and started an email newsletter with Nathan Bashaw called Startup Edition.

These projects helped build relationships and an audience that became the seed of the Product Hunt community, and while relatively small, it established a platform. Without this, my company would have been DOA (dead on arrival).