Building an audience-driven business

#116

Hey folks👋

Welcome to Wisdom Letter #116.

Continuing our discussion from side projects and entrepreneurship over the last couple of weeks.

Today we want to talk about how can you actually get started with your own side business.

What are the immediate first steps you can take?

Now, let’s go👇

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Just yesterday I got a notification from Gumroad that someone had bought one of our products -

Ayush 🙏 @ayushtweetshere

Made some "passive income" today. Looks like someone found my black friday deal a week in advance😀 Atomic Habits is a special book for me. Everything I do today stems from my morning routine - - Journaling - Walking - Meditation - Yoga These habits are sacred for me.

This is one of the most amazing feelings in the world.

You don’t have to do any sales or marketing, you build a product and people buy it.

Truly “passive income”.

But that’s highly unpredictable!

Such sales happen very infrequently and are spiky.

And they are especially low if you don’t have a large audience already. (and we don’t have a large audience😅)

Thank god that one product is not our only way of making money!

That’s why it makes sense to build an audience first and a business later.

And building side projects, serving people in a niche community help you build a loyal audience.

So before building a product, you embed yourself in an existing community and audience, find their problems, and build products to solve those problems.

That’s the gist of Arvid Kahl’s book The Embedded Entrepreneur.

Go “audience first”, instead of “idea first.”

This week we wrote a short summary and insights from that book, I think you will benefit from reading and learning from it. Do read -

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We are on our way to building an audience-driven business ourselves. For that, we are embedding ourselves in a couple of niche communities and building a tiny audience.

If you have no clue where to start, this video from Ali Abdaal might help.

He is a million-dollar single-person business. We’ve shared his videos in the past as well, there’s a lot to learn from the guy.

Here he shares how we will restart his entrepreneurship journey if he loses everything today in 2021.

I strongly feel that we are on the track that he describes in the video, though there’s a long way to go😅

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That’s it for today, if you want to look at more direct examples of Arvid Kahl’s embedded entrepreneurship approach, do read these other profiles we’ve written about before -

• Flying past $23K MRR in 2 years🦅 | Hypefury | Samy Dindane and Yannick Veys

• $8,000 in revenue without even a product 💸| Tuple | Ben Orenstein

• Freelancer's path to building a SaaS with $10K MRR 🏡| Agent Nest - Molly Wolchansky

• Rising with the No-Code Movement 🏄‍♂️| Makerpad | Ben Tossell

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📂 From the archives

This week, that year -

• Pearls Of Wisdom - 6 | Wisdom Letter #64

• Lessons on Love | Wisdom Letter #12

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Ayush & Aditi

PS: 3 months since quitting my job