Part 1 – Audience First

Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,

In this Playbook is all about Audience.

Increasingly I believe that having an Audience is the difference between a successful and a failed business launch.

The framework I use to teach entrepreneurship highlights this:

BATON = Business, Audience, Tribe, Offer, Network.

After coming up with a business idea and niche the name of the game is building an Audience.

This comes before capturing details, before making sales, before any automation and systems.

It’s all about just getting the word out and telling the world what you have to offer. If you can’t do this then the rest of the business is irrelevant.

So: this will be the focus of the week. How to get attention. How to show potential customers what you have. How to build an Audience.

We’ll cover:

• Part 1: Audience first
• Part 2: Personal brand
• Part 3: Content funnel
• Part 4: Platforming
• Part 5: Stages of growth

Let’s get started!

✍️ Summary

Audience First

• don’t make the same mistake as me
• Audience is foundational to all business
• audience allows testing, mini-launches, multiple launches
• unlike advertising building an audience is free/low cost 

I’ve previously helped other people and businesses build their audiences, including managing millions in advertising budget. But didn’t build an audience for myself.

I’ve also previously launched over 30 businesses, each time from scratch. Because I hadn’t built an audience for myself.

I knew that I should. I was helping other people with their audience building and marketing and saw the immense power of being able to get a product/service in front of a pre-existing audience.

I was seeing them do really well – hell, I was making it happen.

But as a natural introvert who didn’t want to be in the limelight I neglected building an audience. I was comfortable behind the scenes.

Until the last year. Screw comfort. Comfort is dangerous.

For the last 9 months I’ve been primarily focused on building an audience. In 9 months I’ve built up 100,000 social media followers and 50,000 newsletter subscribers and, from this audience, 1000s of customers for a now 6 figure business.

I’m genuinely annoyed I left it until now to build my own audience. And instead wasted all those years doing it for other people.

Which is why I want to encourage you to not make the same mistake as me!

By doing so I hope I can save you wasted years!

Audience is foundational

The business framework I teach is BATON:

• Business – working out your niche and product-marketing, building something of value
• Audience – letting the right people know about the value you have created
• Tribe capturing the details of those who are interested in what you have created and nurturing the relationship
• Offer – making the sale
• Network – scaling up once you’ve found what works

Building up an audience is the first step once you know your niche and what you are going to be offering.

You can have the best product or service in the world but if no-one knows about it your business won’t succeed.

Distribution, being able to get the word out, is far more important.

In fact, arguably, having and audience is more important than the actual quality of your product.

Because you can use your audience to shape your offer. This happens in a number of ways:

• you can ask your audience what they want from you before creating your offer
• you can launch stripped down versions of your offer -see what resonates and what doesn’t- and adapt accordingly
• you can launch more even if one idea doesn’t work. You get more “at bats”

Let’s explore that last one.

If you follow successful solopreneurs and creators on a platform like Twitter you’ll have heard of Marc Louvion:

Marc ships a lot of projects. A lot!

Most fail. Some make a little cash. Others (like ShipFa.st) make him 6 figures per month.

A massive advantage Marc has is that he has an audience – 93,000 people on Twitter and another 20,000 in his newsletter.

That means that when Marc has a new business he automatically has distribution. He can use his audience to test whether people are interested, workshop his offer in public and then launch to thousands of people who are ready to buy from him.

The power of this is hard to underestimate. It’s a built in advantage that you lose if you start with audience building from scratch each time.

Alternatives to building an audience

Of course not all business build audiences before selling.

Most actually jump straight to selling. And you can too!

But that generally requires advertising budget which requires capital.

If your business is funded and you can invest in adverting then building an audience becomes less important. You can buy one instead by using cash.

But because Prompt Entrepreneur focuses on helping people start and grow their first business I know that this isn’t always an option. You’ll more than likely not have the $100/day budget to drop into ads required to get proper results.

Building an audience is not only a lower cost alternative to advertising. It also, once up and running, keeps generating revenue. One issue with paid advertising is that as soon as you turn it off that’s the end of revenue too!

Instead what I’ll show you over the week is how in 9 months I built an audience of 150,000+ that now nets me 6 figures of income without having to put in advertising budget.

Specifically here’s some of what we’ll cover:

• the specific type of branding I recommend
• dealing with psychological blocks to creating an audience
• the 3 levels of content
• setting up your pillars
• never running out of ideas
• the best platforms to use right now
• how to get started from 0
• strategies for different stages of growth
• what worked for me and how to adapt it to your niche.