From Audience to Product: A New Approach to Early-Stage Go-To-Market Strategies

5 min readJun 27, 2025

Most early-stage founders I meet nowadays tend to make the same mistake I’ve made in the past: they build the product first, then think about marketing, assuming customers will follow.

But more often than not, this approach falls flat on its face, with even the best products struggling to gain momentum in the absence of a defined user base. With markets more saturated than ever before, customers need to be able to find you amongst the noise!

So, as I reflect on my past experiences building and launching early-stage products, especially with startups, I would have done it the exact opposite way:

Build an audience first, then the product.

To best understand why, let’s look at what building a product entails first.

Building a product

You have limited time and money, so you need to move fast. You have identified a specific problem your target customers have, and you are quickly building a product to solve it.

You will start with a minimum viable product (MVP), which is the simplest version of your product that still effectively solves your target customer’s core problem.

As you progress through product development, you go through several cycles of validation with early users. To do that well, you need easy and continuous access to people who fit your target customer profile.

And that’s where things get tricky.

Your ideal customer profile (ICP) will likely shift as you learn more and refine the problem. But how do you consistently find, reach, and engage with those users, especially when you don’t have much to show yet?

At first, you’ll rely on your personal network, friends of friends, and warm introductions. But that approach is hard to scale and even harder to repeat.

So what’s the alternative?

Build an audience

We will define an audience as follows: an interest group aligned to the problem space you are targeting.

Think of it as a virtual community of people who care about the same issue you’re trying to solve. Building this community is foundational to modern go-to-market, and it requires deliberate effort across a few key areas:

1. Attract the Right People

Your first job is to “recruit” members of this community. They need to be able to find you and you need to find them. That means showing up where they already are, including social media platforms, forums, events, workplaces, and niche websites. Visibility and consistent engagement are non-negotiable.

2. Give Them a Reason to Join

Why should they care? What’s in it for them? Maybe it’s valuable content that keeps them sharp in their role. Maybe it’s a space to network with peers in the same function or industry. Make the value obvious and relevant.

3. Keep Them Engaged

Communities aren’t static, with engagement levels varying across members. People will come and go, so your job is to maintain momentum by sharing insights, encouraging insightful conversations, and making people feel seen.

4. Encourage Organic Growth

The best communities grow through referrals. If people find value, they’ll invite others. Make it easy (and rewarding) for them to do so.

Now here’s where things get interesting: once you’ve built this kind of audience, you’re no longer cold-starting product development. In fact, you have direct access to your ICP!

You already know where your target users gather and how they communicate. And most importantly, you’ve built trust, which means you can involve them early in validation, testing, and feedback.

That’s a go-to-market advantage most teams only wish they had.

The Go-To-Market (GTM)

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy defines a set of repeatable activities you will conduct to get your products in the hands of your ideal customer profile (ICP) and close sales.

If you’ve already built a community around your problem space, you’re ahead of the game. You already know:

Who your ICP is
Where they spend time
How to engage them
And when they’re most receptive

Now, as you prepare to sell, your focus shifts to two key variables: how much and how many.

1. How Much: Pricing Shapes Your Funnel

You don’t need a perfectly precise price point, but you do need a working hypothesis. That number will shape how many prospects you need to target.

Selling a $1M product? You may only need 10 customers a year to hit $10M in revenue.
Selling a $10/month subscription? You’ll need over 8,000 active customers to get to the same place.

2. How Many: Understanding Funnel Economics

Once you know your price point, the next question is: how many prospects do you need to reach to hit your goal?

Here’s a classic B2B SaaS benchmark:

Reach out to 100 prospects → Get 10 meetings → Deliver 5 proposals → Win 1 customer

Let’s apply that logic here:

If you’re targeting 10 customers at $1M / year, you’ll need to reach at least 1,000 target prospects.
If you’re after 8,000+ customers at $10 / month, you’re looking at reaching out to at 800,000+ prospects.

As a result, a successful GTM approach must align with your product’s price point and market size.

3. Two Very Different GTM Models

Here’s how GTM looks across two ends of the spectrum:

Enterprise ($1M Customers)

Small but high-value market
Requires a very hands-on approach to sales
12+ month sales cycles
Account executives, C-suite buy-in
Often supported by partners or solution integrators
Think: SAP, Salesforce

Self-Serve SaaS ($10 Customers)

Mass-market volume
Automated acquisition and onboarding
Scalable CRM, email journeys, growth loops
Product-led growth and freemium models
Think: Slack, Shopify, Monday.com

4. Refining Your ICP Within the Community

Finally, you will need to refine the exact ideal customer profile amongst your community members. In particular, focus your efforts on the early adopters who will show some leniency towards an imperfect product and provide constructive feedback.

Bottom Line

Building an MVP can take some time, but creating an audience for your GTM also takes time. And time is money. If you do these sequentially, you may lose precious time that could cost you some serious runway.

So, my advice is to build an audience as you build your product.

How about you? What GTM strategies have you used? Did it succeed? Did it flop? Care to share?

Who is Damien?

Damien is a Fractional technology leader and innovator at MISSION+. With over 22 years of experience in digital innovation, product strategy, and technology consulting across Europe, North America, and Asia, Damien understands what it takes to drive meaningful change by making the most of technology and talent. Reach out at hello@mission.plus to learn how you can make your products land with your target audience.

Originally published at https:/www.koncentrik.co/p/from-audience-to-product-a-new-approach on 22nd May 2024.