Is there value in having an audience? Absolutely. As a bootstrapper with limited resources and time, should your primary focus be building an audience? I wouldn’t advise it. At least not when you’re getting started.
I would start with figuring out whether the product you’re planning on building can deliver enough value.
Will people pay for it and will they get value? This step is obvious but it’s often tougher than it sounds. I see lots of people either skip past this step or invest way too much time here (months of interviews and tests). It’s important to keep in mind that your product will change over time as you learn from your early customers, and the best learning comes when people are using and paying for the product.
Anyway, if you’re past that initial step, investing some time in building an email list is probably a good idea. You don’t need thousands, just enough people that you can learn from. Like Ian said, he Launched with just 80 people. I had just under 300 people on my list and it was more than enough for me to get really good early feedback, have a few paying customers right away, and learn a bit about how to reach my target audience. There’s lots of value in doing some marketing before you even start building a product, just make sure you balance both.
You asked how to get readers for your content, but you might want to take a step back first. Maybe content marketing isn’t the best approach for you.
Where are your customers? What are all the places that you can reach them? (think blogs, forums, newsletters, search, social, influencers, podcasts, video, etc.)
Now think about what personal advantages you have. Are you a great writer? Do you give great presentations? Do you do your best work through relationships?
Match up what you’re good at with channels that have potential and start there. Remember, there are no rules. Just keep in mind that you might have a tough time at first but you’ll get better. It’ll likely take more work (and action) than you think it will, but you’ll learn a lot in the process.
If it is blogging that you’ve decided to invest time in, make sure you’re doing enough to get your content in front of the right audiences.
Some ways to do that:
- Guest posting (it takes a lot more posts than most people think but can be very effective)
- Interviews of people with the right audience
- Getting on places like HN (not my favorite, but see if it works for you)
- Ads to your content (mainly FB infeed and Twitter)
- Target keywords that have search volume (relatively easy but takes time and
you need a higher number of posts)
There’s more you can try but you get the idea. Hope this helps! 