Build Your Audience Before You Launch: Why Pre-Launch Attention Is the Only Marketing That Matters
The worst launch I ever had was for a product I spent four months building.
The landing page was clean. The copy was sharp. The feature set was genuinely useful, and I had the screenshots to prove it. I submitted to Product Hunt the night before, sent two launch-day tweets, posted on Indie Hackers, and waited.
Day one: 87 visitors. Four signups. Zero conversions to paid.
Day two: 12 visitors.
I had built something real and launched it into silence. Not because the product was bad, but because I had spent four months building and approximately zero hours building an audience.
Compare that to a launch I did eight months later, for a much simpler product. I had spent six weeks talking about the problem in public before writing a single line of code. I shared the decisions I was making, asked for input on things I was stuck on, and posted a "building this for people who hate X" tweet that ended up getting more responses than anything I'd ever posted.
On launch day, I had 310 people waiting. By the end of the week, 62 of them had converted to paid. That product went on to become the most profitable thing I'd built at that point.
Same founder. Different order of operations.
The lesson is simple, but most makers don't internalize it until they've felt the silence of that first bad launch: the marketing you do before you launch matters more than anything you do on launch day.
Why Most Makers Launch to Nobody
Here's the pattern I see constantly in the indie maker community: someone has an idea, gets excited about it, starts building, and then, somewhere around the point when the product is almost done, starts thinking about marketing.
This is backwards. And it's understandable, because building feels productive in a way that posting about what you're building doesn't. Every hour of coding produces something you can see. Every hour of writing tweets, engaging in communities, and documenting your process feels uncertain, slow, and vaguely self-promotional in a way that makes most technical founders uncomfortable.
But here's what that pattern produces: a product that's ready before its audience is. And a product with no audience is invisible on launch day, no matter how good it is.
The internet is not a field of dreams. "Build it and they will come" describes almost no successful product launch in history. What actually works is building the audience alongside the product, so that by the time you're ready to ship, there are already people who know who you are, understand the problem you're solving, and are genuinely curious to see what you've built.
The founders who do this aren't doing anything magical. They're just doing it before most people think to start.
The Compounding Advantage of Pre-Launch Audiences
Pre-launch audiences have a specific quality that no amount of paid traffic or launch-day hustle can replicate: they're warm.
A warm audience is one that already knows your name, already understands the problem, and has already decided they like how you think. When you ask them to look at your product, they don't need to be convinced from scratch. They've been watching you build. They're rooting for you. They want to see it work.
The conversion rates reflect this. Cold traffic from a Product Hunt launch or a Hacker News Show HN post typically converts at somewhere between 0.5% and 3%. Pre-launch audiences, depending on how engaged they are, routinely convert at 10%, 20%, or higher. I've seen founding member offers convert at 30%+ from audiences that had been watching a build-in-public journey for two months.
That's not because the product is different. It's because the relationship is different.
A warm audience also forgives early roughness. Early customers who found you through ads or cold traffic have no patience for bugs, rough UX, or missing features. Early customers who followed your journey know what stage you're at. They signed up knowing this is version 0.1, and they're excited to be there for it. This is exactly the kind of customer you want in your first 30 days, because they'll tell you what's wrong instead of just churning silently.
Where to Build Your Audience
Before you start, you need to pick your platform. Not all platforms, one platform. Maybe two if they serve different purposes. Trying to build a presence everywhere at once before you've built it anywhere is a reliable path to burning out without results.
Here's how I think about the options:
Twitter/X is where the maker community lives. If your product is aimed at developers, designers, founders, or any flavor of tech-adjacent professional, this is where you want to be. The feedback loops are fast, the community norms reward genuine building updates, and a single good post can reach thousands of people who are exactly the kind of early adopter you need. The downside is that building an engaged following takes time, and the content half-life is about 24 hours, so you have to post consistently.
LinkedIn has gotten significantly more interesting for indie makers in the last two years. If your product serves a more professional or enterprise-adjacent audience: recruiters, marketers, sales teams, HR professionals, finance folks, LinkedIn's organic reach is still meaningfully better than Twitter's, and the audience has real purchasing power and less noise.
A newsletter is the most powerful long-term channel because you own it. Unlike social media followers, email subscribers are yours regardless of what any algorithm does. Building a newsletter around the problem you're solving is slower than social media but produces a higher-quality audience: people who actively wanted to hear from you enough to hand over their email address. If you're planning to build more than one product over your career, a newsletter is the single best investment you can make.
Niche communities are often underrated. A subreddit, a Discord server, or a Slack group of 2,000 highly targeted people can outperform a Twitter following of 20,000 general followers when it comes to actual conversions. Spend time in the communities where your future customers already hang out, contribute genuinely, and let them get to know you before you have anything to sell.
Pick the one or two that fit your product and your working style. Then go deep.
What to Share Before You Have Anything to Share
The most common question I get about pre-launch building in public is: "What am I supposed to post about? I'm just writing code."
The answer is that the code is the least interesting part of what you're building.
What's interesting is everything around the code:
The problem. Start by talking about the problem before you talk about the product. "I've been trying to solve X for years and every existing tool falls short because..." is a post that resonates with everyone who shares that frustration. You'll find your future customers in the replies.
The decision you're wrestling with. "I'm trying to decide between building X and Y for this feature. Here's the tradeoff..." This kind of post does two things: it gets you useful input, and it makes your followers feel invested in the outcome.
The thing you tried that didn't work. Failures are more interesting than wins, and they're more relatable. "I spent three days building a feature that I just deleted. Here's what I learned." People love this content because it's honest and because most founders are too insecure to share it.
The early user reaction. As soon as you have even one or two people testing the product, share what they said. Not just the positive reactions. The confused reactions, the unexpected use cases, the features they asked for that you hadn't thought of. This content builds credibility fast because it shows you're actually talking to people.
Your thinking on pricing. "I'm building this for X and I'm trying to figure out how to price it. My instinct is $Y/month but I'm not sure." Pricing posts get engagement because everyone has an opinion, and the conversation that follows is genuinely useful.
Progress updates with real numbers. Even small numbers. "Week 3: 47 people on the waitlist, 12 who said they'd pay, and I've got the core feature working but the onboarding is a mess." Real numbers build trust faster than any amount of polished launch content.
You don't need to post every day. Three to four times a week, with genuine content each time, is enough to build consistent presence and compound over 8 to 12 weeks into something real.
The Waitlist Play
The waitlist is a polarizing topic in the maker community. Some people think it's an essential credibility signal. Others think it's a vanity metric that delays real feedback.
They're both right, and the difference is in how you run it.
A bad waitlist is a form you put up, forget about, and reference vaguely in your launch copy. The people on it feel no different from anyone else when you launch. They signed up and then heard nothing.
A good waitlist is the beginning of a relationship. When someone joins, they get a personal email from you (or something that reads like one) asking why they're interested and what their current workflow looks like. You follow up every two to three weeks with an honest update: what's working, what's changed, what you're building next. By the time you launch, the people on your waitlist feel like they're part of the story, not just email addresses you collected.
The conversion rate difference between these two approaches is significant. I've seen waitlists of 200 people convert at 2% and waitlists of 80 people convert at 40%. The size isn't what matters. The relationship is.
A few practical notes: you don't need a sophisticated tool to run a waitlist. A simple form that captures email and one open-ended question is enough. What you do with those emails matters far more than how you collect them. Send personal replies to the interesting responses. Ask follow-up questions. Build a small, invested group of future users who have already helped you shape the product before it launched.
Converting Your Audience on Launch Day
Launch day for a product with an engaged pre-launch audience should feel like a celebration, not an announcement.
The people on your waitlist already know the product exists. They've seen the screenshots, heard the decisions, and read your honest assessments of what's not working yet. Launch day is when you finally invite them in. The copy doesn't need to convince them of the value. It just needs to make it easy to take the next step.
Here's what works:
Send a launch email to your list the evening before you go live. Make it personal. Tell the story of how you got here. Mention specific things you learned from their feedback during the build. Give them a first-access window, even if it's just a few hours, before you announce publicly. This exclusivity is real and meaningful when the relationship is real.
On launch day, post on your platform of choice, but make the post about the journey, not the product. "After 10 weeks of building in public, I shipped it. Here's what I learned building it, what almost killed it, and what I'm most uncertain about." A post like this outperforms "Check out my new tool" by a significant margin because it's a story, not an announcement.
Respond to every reply on launch day. Every one. The engagement signals this sends to algorithms help, but more importantly, it reinforces the community feel that made your audience want to be there in the first place.
The Mistake Most Makers Make About Audience Size
A lot of indie makers delay building in public because they tell themselves they need to be more established before their content is worth sharing. They're waiting to have a bigger following, a more impressive product, or more credibility.
This is exactly backwards. You don't build in public because you have an audience. You build in public to get one.
And the size of your audience matters far less than its quality. I would take 200 deeply engaged followers who work in my target market over 20,000 passive followers who liked a viral tweet. The 200 will give feedback, share with relevant colleagues, and convert when you launch. The 20,000 will scroll past.
The makers I've seen build the most effective pre-launch audiences are rarely the ones with the most followers. They're the ones who picked a specific problem, talked about it consistently, and built genuine relationships with the people who cared about that problem. That group doesn't need to be large. It just needs to be real.
Start sharing before you feel ready. You will never feel ready. The point isn't to have a polished presence before you build. The point is to let the building be the presence.
Your Profile as a Passive Audience Builder
One thing that doesn't get talked about enough in the building-in-public conversation: not all audience building requires active content creation.
When you list your product on Makers Page with verified revenue, real milestones, and a public view of what you're building, you create a presence that works for you without daily posts. Someone who finds you through a tweet, a community mention, or a search can click through to your profile and see a founder with real products, real revenue numbers, and a track record of shipping. That's a trust signal that no landing page copy can manufacture.
The combination works well: active presence on a social platform where people discover you, and a persistent, credible profile that converts the curious into committed followers and eventually customers. Your Makers Page profile doesn't expire when the tweet falls off the timeline. It sits there, accurate and verifiable, building trust with everyone who finds it.
The Timeline That Works
If you're starting a new product today, here's the timeline I'd use:
Weeks 1 to 2: Start talking about the problem before you build the product. Find the communities where people with this problem hang out. Start engaging genuinely. Post about the problem on your social platform of choice.
Weeks 3 to 6: Build the core product in public. Share decisions, failures, and early screenshots. Set up a waitlist. Send a personal email to everyone who joins.
Weeks 6 to 10: Onboard two to five beta testers from your waitlist. Share what you're learning. Iterate publicly. Your audience should feel like they're watching the product get better in real time.
Week 10 to 12: Prepare launch materials while continuing to post. Send a pre-launch update to your waitlist. Create genuine exclusivity for early supporters.
Launch week: Announce to your list first. Post publicly. Respond to everything. Let the relationship you built carry the conversion.
This timeline isn't rigid. Some products move faster, some slower. But the principle holds regardless of pace: the audience comes before the launch, not after.
The Long Game
Building an audience before you launch is not just a launch strategy. It's the beginning of how you work as a maker.
The founders who do this once almost always do it again, because the results are so much better than launching cold that it changes how they think about product development entirely. The building process becomes inseparable from the audience-building process. You build, you share, you learn, you adjust. The product gets better faster because more people are watching and telling you what they think. And when you eventually launch, the first day looks less like a moment of truth and more like a reunion.
That's the version of this you're working toward. Not viral. Not perfect. Just a small, genuine audience of people who have been watching you solve a real problem, who are invested in seeing it work, and who are ready to pay when you're ready to ship.
Build the audience first. The product gets easier after that.
Building something right now? List it on Makers Page, connect your revenue, and let your verified profile do the trust-building work while you focus on the product and the people. A public track record is the best head start you can give your next launch.