Create an audience as a distribution strategy for your startup

What is it:

It's a free no-code learning program for youth in Rwanda.

Maker Insight:

That no-code should be accessible to all, even minorities.

What did I learn:

1. Product Strategy: What is your mission? No-code campus has a mission to "Our goal is to empower all young people in Rwanda with no-code or visual programming tools."

Everyone has seen the infamous TedEx talk by Simon Sinek about starting with "why". A central part of the framework with The Lean Side Project is focusing on a central thesis or problem you want to solve or an itch that you have to scratch. The reason why this is so important is because this will act as your north star thesis.

The problem I see with many folks who build with no-code is that they launch several random no-code projects that are not related to each other. Now more than ever, it is not about what you can build. It is about building an audience and then making products along your journey to help solve one central problem or thing. That becomes your mission statement, your goal, your north star thesis.

This principle is one of the most important ones when building because of what I have observed from 150+ no-code projects. This is one of the single biggest reasons for determing success:

1. What is your distribution strategy? Distribution is defined as how will how will your users/customers become aware of your product and how will they get it to activate/try it.

For The Lean Side Project, that is primarily through Twitter, Google search and Word of Mouth.

2. Now that you have a distribution strategy, do you have a captive audience along one of those channels that are already actively looking for the solution that you are creating to some problem or desire that they have?

3. If you do not, you'll need to create an audience. And you'll need to start building an audience before you built a product. (More on this in the book).

4. Once you start building an audience, then once you start building a product you will notice that rarely, if ever does your first product you launch get you all the way to your personal or financial goals.

5. Pieter Levels the author of Make and prolific Maker of many products that generate > 1M dollars ARR states in his book that the strategy to making requires building 10-30 products.

6. How will you as a Maker be able to do that building side projects while you balance a full time job, familiy and numerous other commitments?

7. Even if you have unrelenting passion or commitment it will take you years of working on the side to realize your goals.

8. To increase your odds of success you must pick one central thesis, problem, itch you want to scratch and brainstorm all the things you could make to help solve that problem.

9. The Lean Side Project helps give you the framework to do this in the most efficient way possible so that you can maximize your time and confidently go down a path. Because it is based around one thing:

That you MUST launch products that are strongly tangentially related to the problem or interest space of the audience that you are building.

The reason why, is because you do not know which product, your 3rd, 5th, 10th or 20th that you will break through.

Because your goal is to create a system for generating a compounding effect. Where each product builds off the other. Each product stands on the shoulders of the previous and it all works together to solve your north star thesis.

This gives you flexibility to experiment and try many different things until you achieve breakthrough success.

2. Making your site ADA compliant. I have never seen this feature before, and I'll have to do more research as to what it is but in the bottom right hand corner of the website is a button that you can push to see how else the website is available. This was really interesting because if you are seeing impaired, you can push the button and a new website generates that makes the text much larger to see.

Further, this widget allowed you to do the following:
1. PDF publication
2. Flip book
3. Social media sharing graphic
4. Website for the visually impaired
5. Text-to-speech
6. BB code for online forms
7. Markdown
8. QR barcode
9. Virtual Reality experience

3. Product Strategy - Having a site that is an aggregator - A great way to insert you into an area is to help others be successful. No-code campus does this by providing free distribution and awareness to others by having a showcase section on their website.

Everyone likes to recognized. If you help others first achieve their goals, that will come back to you in helping yours. Having a give first mechanism is a great product strategy.