By the time you need an audience, it’s too late to build one.
This is especially true for digital services businesses — software, media, online tools. The reason those companies become so valuable is that the cost of serving one more customer, anywhere in the world, is close to zero. That economics makes global scale possible. It also makes the sequence you follow at the start more important than most founders realise.
The standard sequence goes like this: build a product, acquire some early customers, raise capital, hire a sales team, chase revenue. Those first customers almost always come from the founder’s personal network and local businesses nearby — logical starting points, but not scalable ones. What gets mistaken for product-market fit is often something simpler: proximity and goodwill.
By the time the sales team is hired, the clock is running. Investors want revenue. Runway is shortening. The sales team tries to build relationships and convert them into revenue as quickly as possible. The problem is that a relationship built under commercial pressure doesn’t feel like a relationship to the person on the receiving end. The gap between when the connection was made and when the ask arrived is too short. It feels transactional, because it is.
The consequence is that growth becomes expensive. Customer acquisition costs are high when you’re starting from a standing start with no existing trust. High acquisition costs mean you need more capital, which means more dilution for founders and staff. More capital raised means higher expectations from investors, and longer timelines to hit the milestones that justify them. Longer timelines mean competitors have more time to find you and disrupt you.
This problem is most acute in B2B. Consumer products can sometimes get away with the broken sequence — the price is low enough that a stranger will try something without needing to trust the company behind it. But business buyers are different. Trust between businesses takes months, sometimes years, to establish. A realistic B2B sales cycle — from first contact to first invoice — can easily span twelve months. Which means if you need revenue in twelve months, you needed to start building your audience twelve months ago. Most companies don’t start until they need the money.
The alternative is less legible to investors but more likely to work. Dan Shipper started writing a newsletter in 2019 before he had a product to sell — deliberately, as a way to build an audience while he figured out what to build. By 2025, Every.to had over 100,000 subscribers. Only then did the products come: AI tools, consulting, courses. Each one launched into an audience that already existed and already trusted the work. Shipper put it plainly: “I was thinking about ways to increase revenue from the valuable subscribers we already had.”
The subscribers came first. The products followed.
Most companies do it the other way around, and are unknowingly paying for that mistake.