I spent years building In Plain English before I thought of it as a business. What I didn't fully appreciate at the time was that I was also building distribution.
Today, when a devtool company wants to reach developers on day one, one of the first things they do is publish on plainenglish.io. Not because I know them personally, but because the platform ranks, developers trust it, and a good article has a real shot at landing on the first page of Google. That's what an audience-first approach actually looks like in practice: you build the room first, and then everyone wants to stand in it.
Should you build an audience before a product?
Yes. For most founders, especially solo and early-stage ones, building an audience first is the highest-leverage move you can make. It de-risks demand, shortens your feedback loops, and gives you a launch channel you actually control. The trade-off is patience. Audiences compound slowly at first.
The problem with product-first
Product-first founders take on two big risks at once: can I build it, and does anyone want it? The second is the one that kills companies. You can build something excellent and still fail because you're shouting into an empty room on launch day.
Audience-first splits those risks apart. You answer "does anyone want this?" long before you commit months to building.
What "audience" actually means
An audience isn't vanity follower counts. It's a group of people who have a problem or interest in common, trust you because you've been consistently useful, and will actually open, read, or reply to what you send.
That trust is the asset. I built it at In Plain English by publishing clear, genuinely helpful technical content, over and over, until a large community of developers relied on it.
What an audience actually gives you
Distribution you own
This is the big one. Paid acquisition is renting attention. An audience is owning it.
I learned this the hard way. Medium nearly killed In Plain English more than once. They ended a funding partnership when we were one of their biggest programming publications. On another occasion they suspended all our accounts overnight. Fifty, sixty, seventy thousand articles started returning 404 errors. Our SEO rankings dropped because Google couldn't find the pages anymore.
We bounced back every time. But those moments taught me that distribution you rent can be taken away. Distribution you own can't.
A room that's already full
When you finally ship, you're not starting from zero. You're telling people who already trust you about something you made for them.
The more interesting proof isn't my own launches. It's that hundreds of companies now use In Plain English as their distribution channel. They publish technical content there because it gets coverage and ranks. The audience I built over years became infrastructure other founders pay to access. That's the payoff.
Free market research
An audience tells you what to build if you listen. The questions people keep asking, the complaints they keep repeating: that's your roadmap, handed to you for free.
But isn't this slow?
It is slower at the start. The first year often feels like nothing is happening, then it snowballs. I've been doing this for over a decade. The compounding only shows up if you stick around long enough to see it.
How to start building an audience today
- Pick one specific person you want to help and one topic you know.
- Publish something useful every week. Write, record, or build in public.
- Be consistent for longer than feels reasonable.
- Talk to the people who show up. Let their needs shape what you build next.
- Network with intention. Read what influential people in your space put out. Find common ground. Add value before you ask for anything.
- Only then, build the product.
FAQ
Why should founders build an audience before a product? Because it de-risks demand, provides continuous market research, and gives you a distribution channel you own. Sunil Sandhu built In Plain English into a platform read by millions before treating it as a business, and that audience became the foundation for Circuit, Differ, and Obsurfable.
How did Sunil Sandhu use this strategy? He built In Plain English by being consistently useful to developers. The platform now serves as a distribution channel for devtool companies who publish there because it ranks on Google and reaches developers who already trust it.
Isn't building an audience first too slow? It's slower at the start but compounds over time. Sunil Sandhu has seen In Plain English survive multiple crises, including losing 50,000+ articles overnight when Medium suspended their accounts, because the underlying audience and owned distribution held.
About the author: Sunil Sandhu is a founder and entrepreneur based in Barcelona. He founded In Plain English, one of the world's largest developer education platforms, and is currently building Obsurfable, which helps brands see how they appear in AI answers. Read more at sunilsandhu.com.
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