Arvid Kahl - The Embedded Entrepreneur: How to Build an Audience-Driven Business

This is not an idea book. This is a book for people who need actionable advice.

Instead of trying to convince you to build an audience, let me share the stories of those who have done it well and then equip you with the tools and strategies to build an audience-driven business.

You will learn how to discover your future audience, how to embed yourself in your audience's communities, how to extract business opportunities through observation, and how to build a following that will grow your personal and professional brand.

Here is some inspiration.

When Paul Jarvis had the idea for a simple and privacy-focused analytics software, he tweeted a mockup image of the product to his Twitter audience. While the tweet has since been deleted, here is what it contained:

That initial sketch got retweeted over 500 times, which gave him the confidence to start his journey building focus on building only features that benefit the majority of their customers. They make sure their vision of a privacy-first product reflects the needs and priorities of their audience.

Rosie Sherry was a software tester, ensuring that freshly created software products were delivering what they promised. Rosie co-founded a software testing agency. She was part of the software testing community. Looking at how engineers and marketers had all those fancy conferences and communities to learn from, Rosie felt that her fellow testers didn't get the same level of attention. She listened to what her community members needed and created a testing-centric community with The Ministry of Testing, organizing multiple conferences every year into a multi-million-dollar business. Rosie became an expert in both testing and community-building, which led her to build Rosieland, a community for community-builders.

After Slack acquired and shut down the popular screen-sharing software ScreenHero, an outcry went through the software engineering community. Ben Orenstein was there to listen. He knew exactly why people mourned the loss of that particular feature: he'd been doing pair programming that way for years. Ben and his co-founders started working on the remote pair programming product Tuple to allow engineers to continue working together as they had done in the past. Since then, Tuple has grown into a successful and sustainable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business.

A common thread between these founders is their dedication to their audience. They put their audiences first: they listened to the people in communities they were members of, found problems they were excited to solve, and built a following while creating successful services and products. Instead of assuming they knew exactly what their future customers would need, they put their audience first, at all times. Whenever it came to a decision, they gathered feedback from their audiences their peers and ensured that the results would benefit their growing following of customers, prospects, and supporters. Paul, Rosie, and Ben are Embedded Entrepreneurs.

The working title for this book was "Audience First." You might have heard that term before. Quite likely, someone explained it as "build a following on social media, then sell them something." To me, this is too narrow a definition of something that could be so much more. I believe "audience-first" starts long before you build an audience: from being part of a community to observing, interacting, and being embedded among the people you want to serve, there are many things to do before you start building a following.

In fact, this focus on people, where they congregate, and what they need deserves a better name altogether. I call it the "Audience-Driven approach" to building a business. A lot of this process takes place inside of communities; as places of exchange, learning, and teaching, they allow their members to build a reputation as valued contributors.

A community can be an audience eventually.

At first, communities are hunting grounds for great opportunities, then they turn into places to build meaningful relationships, and later they'll be the fertile soil in which you will grow your business. At all points, the community members are a potential audience for what you have to say and what you offer.

Focusing on your audience from day one has several advantages over the common product-first strategy, where founders come up with a product idea before they do any market research or audience discovery. Founders that go "idea-first" often build businesses that are "solutions looking for a problem." The idea-first approach results in products that are lacking validation and are built without a clear audience in mind.

The Audience-Driven approach turns all these uncertainties into advantages:

• Validation is built-in: you're constantly interacting with the people you want to serve and empower, which leads to much faster feedback loops. You get to experience their problems first-hand, you have access to real people with real struggles, and you can collaborate with your audience to build a solution that works for them.
• You aren't leaving much to chance: you know that there are real people out there feeling a painful problem, and you can check if they are already spending money attempting to solve it, thus increasing your chances of building something people are willing to pay for.
• You create a personal brand that transcends the business you're currently working on: even if your startup fails, you continue to be a domain expert in that field.

This is the path of the Embedded Entrepreneur. This book will expand the meaning and the process of building an audience-driven business into a full strategy for creating an abundance of value while paving the way to your financial independence.

This book will help you with actionable guidance on your entrepreneurial journey.

If you're an aspiring entrepreneur, you should read this book cover to cover. The chapters are mostly self-contained, and you can skip any amount of chapters depending on your immediate needs. But beware: too many entrepreneurs have thought they didnt need to learn more about their audience before building their product and ultimately have failed. If you want to make sure you validate your business efforts from day one, try resisting the urge to skip to a later chapter. Your future self will thank you.