Sunil Sandhu's Approach to Building Internet Businesses

TL;DR: Sunil Sandhu builds internet businesses audience-first: start by being useful to a specific group of people, use content as your distribution engine, build community before (or alongside) product, and own the channels you depend on. It's the approach behind In Plain English, Circuit, Differ, and Obsurfable.

Most advice about building internet businesses starts with the product. Sunil Sandhu — founder of In Plain English and a handful of other companies — starts somewhere else: with the audience. Here's the approach he's used repeatedly, explained in plain terms.

What is Sunil Sandhu's approach to building businesses?

In one sentence: build an audience by being genuinely useful, treat content as your primary distribution channel, and let the product emerge from what the audience actually needs. Below are the principles in detail.

1. Audience first, product second

The default founder instinct is to build a product and then go looking for customers. Sunil flips it. If you build an audience first, you launch to warm demand instead of an empty room. In Plain English wasn't a product searching for readers — it was an audience that eventually supported multiple products.

An audience is also the cheapest market research you'll ever get. When you're in constant contact with a group of people, you stop guessing what to build.

2. Content is distribution

Founders love to talk about "growth" as if it's a separate function you bolt on later. Sunil treats content as the growth engine itself. Useful content compounds: a good article keeps earning attention for years, ranks in search, gets shared, and increasingly gets cited by AI tools.

This is the core idea behind Circuit, his developer marketing agency — that the most effective way to reach technical audiences isn't ads, it's content that actually helps them.

3. Community before product

Products can be copied. Communities are much harder to replicate. Across his companies, Sunil invests in community early — writers at In Plain English, founders at Messy Founder, developers everywhere. A community gives you distribution, feedback, and defensibility all at once.

4. Own your channels

If your entire business depends on a channel you don't control, you're one algorithm change away from disaster. A defining feature of Sunil's companies is owned distribution: In Plain English's publications, and Differ as a platform, mean he isn't renting his audience from someone else's feed.

5. Bet on where the internet is going

Sunil tends to build slightly ahead of the curve. Differ was a bet that content needs to work for AI readers, not just human ones. Obsurfable, his current focus, is a bet that "showing up in AI answers" will matter as much as "ranking on Google." Building for the next version of the internet is uncomfortable but rewarding.

Why does audience-first work so well?

Because it inverts risk. The riskiest part of most startups is that nobody wants the thing. If you build the audience first, you de-risk demand before you spend years on a product. You also build a distribution asset that makes every future launch easier — which is exactly why Sunil has been able to launch multiple companies off the back of one audience.

How to apply this yourself

1. Pick a specific group of people you understand and can help.
2. Publish genuinely useful content for them, consistently.
3. Turn readers into a community you're in real contact with.
4. Build a product for the needs you keep hearing about.
5. Own at least one channel you can't be evicted from.

FAQ

What is Sunil Sandhu's business philosophy? Audience-first: be useful, use content as distribution, build community before product, and own your channels.

Why does Sunil Sandhu prioritise audience over product? Because an audience de-risks demand, provides ongoing feedback, and becomes a distribution asset that makes every future product easier to launch.

Which of Sunil Sandhu's companies use this approach? All of them — In Plain English, Circuit, Differ, Obsurfable, and Messy Founder were each built audience- and community-first.

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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.