Up until this point I’ve grown Agile Docs to over $4000 MRR without a personal audience. My main marketing channel has been the Atlassian Community Forum. The Atlassian Marketplace App Store brings a little traffic, I get some from posting on Jira feature requests, but the bulk comes from posts to the Atlassian’s community forum.
But over that time I’ve noticed it’s become increasingly difficult to post on the forum suggesting my product as a solution. There are now restrictions on where you can post. For example, now I’m unable to post on the forum to suggest my product as a solution when the thread is over 6 months old. This includes most threads where my app might be helpful and most threads which generate lots of search traffic through google.
I’ve grown traffic and revenue consistently over time by starting with a forum I could post on and working backwards to the product or feature. This worked well. I’d find a forum where people were complaining about the absence of a feature in Jira, add the feature to my app and write about the feature in the forum.
Now many of my posts go directly to spam filters and I have to speak to the community managers to be able to continue posting. Product suggestions are seen as spammy, even if they solve the user’s problem. This is nothing against Atlassian’s approach to community management. They have to run their forum in a way which makes sense for them.
But this has caused me to rethink my approach to marketing. When your main acquisition channel changes, you become hyper aware of how vulnerable your business is. Sure, you can find other acquisition channels, but this breaks your model. You built the product because you identified you had an acquisition channel. You built a feature because you knew it expanded that channel to get more traffic. When this breaks it makes you question whether you should be in the market at all.
This makes the alternative of having a personal audience look enticing. A group of people who want to hear from you. No gate keepers guarding access to forums or posts. A channel which increases in size over time organically. Sure, if you build an audience on Twitter in a way it’s Twitter’s audience. But the key point is your audience genuinely wants to hear from you. If Twitter bans you, a large segment of your audience will follow you to another platform in a way which won’t happen if you’ve hacked a channel like SEO or forum posts.
There are downsides to marketing your app through your personal audience. It’s been suggested a personal audience is great to sell infoproducts, but not as good for selling SaaS apps. When you sell a SaaS app, users care more whether they have the problem your app solves and that your app solves it well. Other founders have noted that a personal audience isn’t necessary to grow a SaaS app. That you ultimately need to rely on other channels eventually to continue growing. I find this isn’t a real problem until you want to scale. Many people who talk about a personal audience not being necessary to grow a SaaS app are often talking from the perspective of having gotten to 2k-10k MRR and reached the limit of how helpful their personal audience is in growing further.
Then there’s the problem of whether your personal audience overlaps with the market for your product. This is a subtle, but makes a big difference as to whether your personal audience is an effective acquisition channel. In my case, Agile Docs helps solve the problem of rolling up estimates and tracking estimate progress for product managers in larger companies using Jira, but when I tweet and write articles it’s often targeted at other indie hackers. This disconnect can be a problem.
But even with my bespoke audience of 70 followers I’ve averaged 1-2 views a day to Agile Doc’s sales page since I started posting. Even without advertising it directly. A bigger following and a product with greater overlap with your personal audience could amount to something substantial.
Ultimately the appeal of a personal audience is not that it’s the most effective way to grow your SaaS app from 10 to 100 users. It’s that having an audience is a distribution moat. You can lose your number one spot on Google to a competitor, get banned from posting on a forum but your audience will still want to hear from you. This is the big appeal.
Going forward I’m going to build on what I have and expand into other channels to market Agile Docs such as content marketing for SEO. But I’m also going to endeavour to grow my personal audience. It may not be the most efficient way to market Agile Docs, but I see now what a massive advantage it is for marketing future products.