The Audience Explorer

Matthias Bohlen

Founders and Indie Creators: How to find the audience for whom you build your product – and what to do when you meet them! read less

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Steph Smith: How to become successful as a content creator

Steph Smith: How to become successful as a content creator

Steph Smith is a growth marketer, writer, and indie maker. She wrote “The Guide to Remote Work That’s Not Trying to Sell You Anything” and "Doing Content Right".Steph and Matthias join on The Audience Explorer for a chat. Steph shares two interesting topics here:1) How she found the audience for her first book (and how she was able to write it in parallel to her job)2) What's absolutely necessary for a content creator to become successfulGreat insights, Steph! Thanks for being my guest!Read the full transcript of the episode here.Find Steph Smith on Twitter:https://twitter.com/stephsmithioAnd here is her website:https://stephsmith.io/

Steph Smith: How to become successful as a content creator

Steph Smith: How to become successful as a content creator

Steph Smith is a growth marketer, writer, and indie maker. She wrote “The Guide to Remote Work That’s Not Trying to Sell You Anything” and "Doing Content Right".Steph and Matthias join on The Audience Explorer for a chat. Steph shares two interesting topics here:1) How she found the audience for her first book (and how she was able to write it in parallel to her job)2) What's absolutely necessary for a content creator to become successfulGreat insights, Steph! Thanks for being my guest!Read the full transcript of the episode here.Find Steph Smith on Twitter:https://twitter.com/stephsmithioAnd here is her website:https://stephsmith.io/

Coaching call with Charles-Olivier Demers, founder of Feedback Farm

Coaching call with Charles-Olivier Demers, founder of Feedback Farm

Charles-Olivier Demers joins me on The Audience Explorer for an audience modeling discussion, to figure out who it is exactly that he will be helping in his newly founded SaaS business. Read the full transcript of the episode here.Find Charles-Olivier on Twitter:https://twitter.com/co_demers

Marie Martens: Getting an audience by cold outreach and other methods

Marie Martens: Getting an audience by cold outreach and other methods

Marie co-founded Tally with her partner Filip, in the summer of 2020. Filip is into tech, she is into marketing – a magic combination! Marie shares with us the different ways and methods that she used to get the first users and customers for the Tally form builder software. That's a really interesting mix.Today, they have 15,000 users and $7000 MRR – an impressive track record after only one year in the making!Read the full transcript of this episode here: https://gettheaudience.com/e26-audience-by-cold-outreach-marie-martens/You can find her on Twitter @MarieMartensVisit Tally at https://tally.so

Coaching call with new founder Paulina Sáez

Coaching call with new founder Paulina Sáez

Paulina Sáez joins me on The Audience Explorer for an audience modeling discussion, to figure out who it is exactly that she will be helping in her newly founded business. Read the full transcript of the episode here.Find Paulina on Twitter:https://twitter.com/PSaezT

Colleen Schnettler: Finding your audience on a marketplace

Colleen Schnettler: Finding your audience on a marketplace

Colleen founded simplefileupload.com and went "product first" with it. She wrote the code, found a platform on which to publish and sell it, and has repeatable success with it. Matthias normally recommends to go "audience first", but Colleen managed to get her product off the ground with the "product first" approach, instead.Let's hear how she did that!Read the full transcript of the episode here.Meet @leenyburger on Twitter, and find her website at https://www.simplefileupload.com/

Rob Fitzpatrick: How an entrepreneur’s journey yields compound interest

Rob Fitzpatrick: How an entrepreneur’s journey yields compound interest

Matthias admires Rob's book "The Mom Test", so he decided to invite Rob to chat about all things customer and audience development.It turned out that Rob has a pretty unique system to develop products. He shares it in such a unique, easily understandable way that Matthias suddenly shouts out "Hey, why didn't I know this before?".Read the full transcript of the episode here.Meet @robfitz on Twitter, and find his websites, Youtube channel, and authors community at- https://robfitz.com/ - https://www.youtube.com/c/robfitzpatrick- https://writeusefulbooks.com/

Alex Llull: How an entrepreneur actively built his own audience for a profitable business

Alex Llull: How an entrepreneur actively built his own audience for a profitable business

Matthias knows Alex from Twitter, as someone who is creative and always stands out with his tweets, always value-packed tweets and so visually appealing. Alex lives in Spain. He lost his job in 2020 due to COVID, but he decisively founded his own business as a social media consultant, content creator and writer. Alex helps creators and entrepreneurs to leverage social media content so that they can grow their business, their brand, their audience.Alex shares tons of tips about audience building. Be prepared for an espresso: full of content, in a small half-an-hour "cup". Enjoy the episode!Read the full transcript of the episode here.Meet @AlexLlullTW on Twitter, and find his website and newsletter at https://alexllull.com and https://thestealclub.com.

Kevon Cheung: How to develop an audience for (and by) building in public

Kevon Cheung: How to develop an audience for (and by) building in public

Matthias meets with Kevon on video. They know each other from Twitter, and Matthias admires Kevon for his talent to communicate as a real human. They take a deep dive on how to do audience development, to become the go-to person for a topic and offer courses on it.In Kevon's case, the topic is "Building in Public". He is a prolific creator on this, and he offers a brand-new cohort-based course for entrepreneurs on it. Enjoy the episode!Read the full transcript of the episode here.@MeetKevon on Twitter, and find his resources at (https://buildinpublicmastery.com) & (https://makingtwitterfriends.com).Update April 2022: Kevon is growing! He now gathers articles, courses, coaching etc. under one roof: Public Labs. Check it out at https://publiclab.co/ .

Nesha Mutuku: Customer conversations, why not at the dentist or at a baby shower?

Nesha Mutuku: Customer conversations, why not at the dentist or at a baby shower?

Matthias encounters the most enthusiastic young startup founder he ever met before.Nesha co-founded Swally, a habit-building app that will make you spend wisely. It analyzes your financial behaviour, helps you create a budget, and it informs you right on the spot about how much you can spend there. Imagine: You are at Starbucks, and Swally says "You can spend $15 here".Matthias is amazed when Nesha tells about all the unusual locations where you can encounter your audience. Their conversation ends up in the rabbit hole of philosophy. Enjoy this long episode!Read the full transcript of the episode here.Meet @NeshaMutuku and @SwallyInc on Twitter.

Sharath Kuruganty: The beauty of having an audience for your product

Sharath Kuruganty: The beauty of having an audience for your product

Sharath and Matthias have known each other for a long time, only from Twitter. Today, they got a chance to meet "in person", i.e. in a video call for a podcast recording.Sharath co-founded shoutout.so, a startup that makes it possible for founders to collect positive shoutouts and display them anywhere – a solution to the well-known problem of social proof that is very important for any business, and for startups in particular.Matthias takes the chance to ask Sharath about how his co-founder Curtis and Sharath himself built the audience for their product, and what they do to keep their audience growing.Read the full transcript of the episode here.Meet @5harath and @shoutoutso_ on Twitter.

Ramli John: Product-led onboarding

Ramli John: Product-led onboarding

Ramli has written a great book called "Product-led onboarding". Matthias has to onboard new users to his SaaS called "GetTheAudience", and so he read Ramli's book and thought it would be a great idea to have him on the podcast.It turned out to be a great chat! Ramli talked about- an interesting approach that got them the first audience for their company- why sales-led firms should now make the move to become a product-led organization- and what makes a great onboarding experience for new usersRead the transcript here:- https://gettheaudience.com/e18-ramli-john-product-led-onboarding/Find Ramli on Twitter @RamliJohn and on the web at ProductLed

Rosie Sherry: Community building – nowadays!

Rosie Sherry: Community building – nowadays!

Rosie and Matthias had a deep and enjoyable conversation about community building. Rosie reveals her latest thoughts on...- what community building is,- what it really takes to be a good community builder,- and why community building seems to be easy and hard and the same time!Read the transcript here:- https://gettheaudience.com/e17-rosie-sherry-community-building-nowadays/Find Rose on Twitter @rosiesherry and on the web at rosie.landYou can find Orbit at https://www.orbitapp.io/

Justin Jackson: Audiences, Death Wish, and White Dudes

Justin Jackson: Audiences, Death Wish, and White Dudes

Justin and Matthias went deep down into the rabbit hole of audience building. The ride became philosophical and also touches social and societal aspects at the end. What an amazing journey!Learn more about how Justin Jackson, co-founder of transistor.fm and active podcaster by himself, thinks about today's world and about the interesting "sailboat in the wind" approach that he and his co-founder use to keep their podcast hosting business successful.Read the transcript here:- https://gettheaudience.com/e16-justin-jackson-audiences-death-wish-white-dudes/Find Justin on Twitter @mijustin

Michele Hansen: Learning from your audience

Michele Hansen: Learning from your audience

Michele and Matthias talk about how audience development has changed over the years, on the way from a totally new SaaS startup to a mature business with many customers, today.They discover that finding the first members of an audience can be really easy, but that it can also be quite time-consuming to stay current with them. Michele tells us how she runs customer interviews frequently and how she always discovers new use cases and exciting things to learn from different customers, because geocod.io is a horizontal SaaS based on an API.Read the transcript here:- https://gettheaudience.com/e15-michele-hansen-learning-from-your-audience/

Boris Tane: Turning bookmarks into tangible value

Boris Tane: Turning bookmarks into tangible value

Boris and Matthias, both indie hackers, talk about getting your first audience and having conversations with them. Boris tells us how he got started with bkmark.io, his online bookmarking service, and how he discovered through conversations that this service could be used in an unexpected way so that he might get totally new customers right now.Read the transcript here:- https://gettheaudience.com/e14-boris-tane-turning-bookmarks-into-tangible-value/

Corey Haines: Developing a diverse community of marketers

Corey Haines: Developing a diverse community of marketers

Corey and Matthias talk about a lot of interesting topics:- Marketing is earning trust at scale- Consistently building an audience/community has a compounding effect- Marketing as a service to help other people find and receive your product- Keeping your thoughts organized using the Zettelkasten methodRead the transcript of the podcast here, and see what was mentioned in the episode: https://gettheaudience.com/e13-corey-haines-develop-community-marketers/ Links mentioned in the podcast: Swipe Files – the community for marketersHow to reach Corey:Twitter – @coreyhainesco Website and blog – https://www.coreyhaines.co/

How an Indie Hacker achieves a sustainable workload

How an Indie Hacker achieves a sustainable workload

As an indie hacker, you're a single-person company. You work in all roles at the same time: Programmer, CEO, marketing team, blogger, web designer, etc. etc. How on earth can you stay sane in your mind, and get all this stuff done at the same time, without overloading yourself?See the corner that Matthias painted himself into, and what solution he found: It's a combination of changes in mindset and in practical organization – changes that you make, too, to get "down to earth" again and have fun!People and things mentioned in this episode:- The Balsamiq newsletter about the "whole product" concept- Michele Hsu, the growth marketer- The public roadmap for GetTheAudienceRead the transcript of this podcast here:- Transcript of episode 12 on the GetTheAudience blog

Does your indie software have enough quality?

Does your indie software have enough quality?

What is software quality, and what does it mean for an indie hacker?Can you find out what qualities (yes, it's a plural!) you need for your own product? Yes, you can! Matthias shows what happens if you take an existing quality standard (like ISO 25010) and check your situation as an indie product against it.This is a great shopping list for software quality categories and attributes that YOU will want to have in your own indie product, too:- ISO 25000 – the standard about software qualityRead the transcript of this podcast here:- Transcript of episode 11 on the GetTheAudience blog

Dev lab news: Hunters and Gatherers (the new browser extension)

Dev lab news: Hunters and Gatherers (the new browser extension)

What is better: Hunting for an audience or gathering it?From his development lab, Matthias tells a story about a totally new browser extension that he's currently building. Users of GetTheAudience will be able to automatically gather an audience while surfing Twitter, instead of hunting (i.e. deliberately searching) for it.Read the transcript of the podcast here, and see which ancient philosophers were mentioned in the episode:https://gettheaudience.com/e10-dev-lab-news-audience-hunters-gatherers/Links mentioned in the podcast: Seneca The Younger (roman philosopher)

Arvid Kahl: Your audience is already out there!

Arvid Kahl: Your audience is already out there!

Two Germans having a conversation in English: Enjoy listening to the interview!Read the transcript of the podcast here, and see what was mentioned in the episode: https://gettheaudience.com/e09-arvid-kahl-your-audience-is-already-out-there/ Links mentioned in the podcast: The Embedded Entrepreneur (Arvid's new, upcoming book about building an audience-driven business) Rosieland (Rosie Sherry's fantastic newsletter about community building) Indie Hackers (The best community I've ever been part of)How to reach Arvid:Twitter - @arvidkahl Website and blog - The Bootstrapped Founder