I see others "building their audience." Do I need to?
What is "building an audience"? It's giving something to other people for free, and they will follow you on Twitter or subscribe to your email list to learn more about the things you share in the future.
You don't have to do it to succeed with your microstartup, but it's very helpful.
Like Adam Nathan and Steve Schoger had been working on a bunch of side projects together. Adam taking care of development and Steve handling the UI design.
For years they were creating content and sharing it for free, growing their audience – both of them now have around 100,000 Twitter followers, for example.
And then one day, we saw headlines that their new side project TailwindUI sold for $500,000 in three days.
As of August 2020, they've made over $4,000,000 in two years ($2.3m Refactoring UI book, $1.97m Tailwind UI). They definitely wouldn't have made that money when they hadn't spent years creating content and gathering followers.
What an overnight success!