Step 2: Plan & Build Your Minimum Viable Audience

This content is for Fizzle members only.

Now that you have chosen a primary audience channel, it’s time to plan and build. How you execute on your audience channel strategy depends on which channel you chose.

First, you need to decide when to build your audience channel, vs. when to build your product. In some cases, you’ll start with the audience. In other cases, you’ll start with the product.

If you chose content marketing, you should start building your audience first, then work on your product once you’ve started to get some audience feedback. Audience feedback is one of the most valuable aspects of using content marketing as your primary audience channel.

If you chose established sales platforms or advertising & sponsorships, you should start building your product first, then work on your audience channel second.

If you chose hustle & sell or partnerships & affiliates, you will start with your product, but you should check in with potential customers and partners before you finish, to see if your product can be shaped with their input.

Plan & Build Your Primary Audience Channel

1. Explore

Regardless of which channel you chose, you should spend some time planning now before starting on your product or revenue channel.

The first step in planning is getting to know your channel inside and out. If blogging is your thing, get to know blogging. If affiliate marketing was your choice, dive in and start gaining expertise.

We have several courses in the Fizzle Library that address many of the most common audience channels:

Hustle & Sell:

General Content Marketing:

Blogging:

Email:

Video:

Social Media:

Podcasting:

Affiliate Marketing:

If you see a course or group of courses above that cover your primary audience channel, please consider using these courses to plan and build your audience accordingly.

If you don’t see a course listed above to address your specific audience channel, it’s probably in Fizzle’s curriculum pipeline. For now, search around the forums, ask some questions of your own and research your audience channel to dive in deep enough to develop a plan.

2. Make a plan

After you have a good grasp on how your audience channel can be used to reach your initial customers, please create a short plan that outlines how exactly you will use your audience channel. It doesn’t need to be long.

For example, if blogging is your channel, a plan might look something like this:

I will reach my initial customers by building a blog about fly fishing in Alaska. I will publish content 2 times per week, and I will cover topics that people traveling to Alaska for fly fishing would find helpful.

In addition, I will offer a giveaway PDF guide on “10 tips to make your first fly fishing adventure in Alaska fun and fruitful.” I will advertise the giveaway from several places on my blog, including at the end of posts.

I will attract people to my blog by being active on fly fishing forums as well as social media (and hopefully search engines will provide traffic over time).

After six months of blogging, I intend to have 500 people subscribed to my email list, which I will sell my first product to.

Please complete your written audience channel plan before continuing with this step.

  • What channel will you use?
  • What work will you commit to?
  • What results do you expect in what time frame?
  • Answer these questions and any others you may have in your audience channel plan.

3. Build

Once you have a plan in place, it’s time to build! Building your audience channel will likely take many weeks or months, and you’ll be doing it alongside building your product.

This begs a great question: how do I know when I’m done?

How much is enough?

Building your audience is never truly done. For the purposes of this phase of the Fizzle Roadmap, your audience channel is ready when it is developed enough to sell your products or services to.

Remember, the point of building a pool of potential customers at this point is to prove your hypothesis about the people and problem that make up your business idea.

Now it’s time for you to do that work. This step is complete when you have developed your Minimum Viable Audience enough to sell your products or services. You get to be the judge of when that’s accomplished!

Note: This is a great time to bring both your plan and your questions to the forum.

You’re done! 👏👏👏

Congrats on finishing this course. Questions about what to do next? Here are some ways to get help and keep making progress:

Stage 5: Audience