[HN Gopher] Build a Business, Not an Audience
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Build a Business, Not an Audience
Author : jakobgreenfeld
Score : 199 points
Date : 2021-03-01 09:31 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jakobgreenfeld.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jakobgreenfeld.com)
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I came to a similar conclusion earlier this year.
|
| I previously had a lot of success audience building by
| chronicling a project I was actually on. My content was shared
| everywhere and the follower counts and attention grew quickly but
| organically.
|
| Since that project finished, I fell into the trap of finding
| stuff to write about and share out of habit. I realised it was a
| waste of time at best.
|
| Since getting back into a new project and going back to my old
| mode of just sharing experiences, attention and opportunities
| seem to be flowing again.
|
| My takeaway is that authenticity is key for content marketing.
| People crave it and identify the lack of it immediately.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Oh man, does this resonate. I was invited to participate in a
| panel on doing business as a person making and selling stuff. I
| build furniture. Early on, while I was still a student, somebody
| told me that I have to get on Instagram, because "that's where
| all the woodworkers are" [0].
|
| Also I this panel was a person who makes things that sell at a
| more impulse purchase price level [1]. One question was about
| social media strategy. And they were all over how to get the most
| exposure on Instagram: when to post, how to interact with the app
| to get ranked higher, how to get your friends to save your posts
| instead of liking them, how buying stuff from other makers on
| Instagram and posting it shows how you support the community and
| helps your brand, etc.
|
| I had so many questions I didn't ask: how much time does all this
| gramming take? How much money do you actually make? Do you
| actually sell anything via Instagram?
|
| Of the woodworkers I know personally, exactly one has gotten any
| business via Instagram. I'm sure some of the really instafamous
| ones get work, but it's a long way to the top. I think my time is
| better spent building furniture and selling via other avenues. I
| post what I'm doing, but I don't worry too much about it.
|
| I'll be honest: I'm not making software money building furniture.
| But the business is growing (in revenue and profit terms, I have
| no desire to manage employees). And I see a path for it being a
| truly meaningful contributor to our household income in the next
| year or so [2]. To clarify: it has been modestly profitable the
| whole way, just not hugely so. A move to a new area in a year
| with limited opportunities for in-person sales probably set
| things back a year, but it's still going OK. Picking up some
| contract jobs has helped with the cash flow immensely.
|
| I don't mean to make any assumptions about anybody else's
| business, but you've got to be selling a lot of impulse purchase
| priced items daily to make ends meet. That's a lot of time doing
| fulfillment and everything else that gets product in the
| customer's hands and money in your pocket and less time making
| things. Maybe they've found a way to make it work, but I had to
| wonder if they have more audience than business.
|
| I'm not asserting that this is case for that business. It's not,
| however, a way I see a profit in. Thinking this way probably
| ensures I'll never be big time, but that's OK. Meaningfully
| profitable is my goal with this.
|
| [0] Yeah, I know. Fuck that: I need to be where the people with
| _money_ are. Still I 've learned a lot from other people's posts,
| gotten good feedback, and if we're honest, the imaginary internet
| points are nice when you don't see another soul in the shop for
| days at a stretch. It's good to know other people are enjoying my
| work.
|
| [1] Details elided for reasons that will soon be obvious.
|
| [2] I'm the meantime, there's that old joke: What do you call a
| drummer without a girlfriend? Homeless.
| 0wis wrote:
| This piece deserve front page just for its potential noise
| reduction effect. By the way, maybe there are too many <<
| curators >>, but at least they provide a filtering function. It
| make me thinking about the alternatives and opportunities to
| create a filter as a product.
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| I've caught myself in recent weeks nearly going into this so
| called "Bullshit Industrial Complex". I've got a few projects I'd
| like to build in the year, but wasn't planning on starting
| immediately due to other obligations. Hence I thought to myself
| sure, let me build a following in the meantime!
|
| After following a few people on twitter and participating in a
| few threads, I quickly saw this as just not for me. I don't want
| to be selling the image of myself, because:
|
| 1) It's a lot of effort not actually related to the product (as
| the article mentions)
|
| 2) Honestly, it makes me feel narcissistic.
|
| 3) I've been trying to get _away_ from attention grabbing social
| media to get work done and have some more quiet in my life. Is
| having a following the only way to get the work visible? Surely
| not!
|
| So definitely, I'm out to build usable things and not an
| audience.
| rajatsx wrote:
| I used to create Android apps and had quite a few apps listed on
| Google Play. I never made any money.
|
| I was disheartened and started teaching coding on YouTube.
|
| I have more subscribers than the number of downloads my apps have
| ever got and made almost $3K from teaching coding.
| snird wrote:
| People learn in different ways and underlying truths are passed
| better with more relevant examples for specific audience.
|
| Many might not create something completely new and original, but
| creating something new just for it to be new is bullsh*t too.
|
| If the fundamental truths are already there, and one can mix it
| for a new platform, add some commentary and find new ways to make
| it accesible for new audiences - he is creating something
| valuable nonetheless.
| rchaud wrote:
| The Twitter summaries of courses, books, interviews etc can be
| useful, even if it's second- or third-hand. That's because the
| original material tends to be heavy on fluff. Every
| business/productivity book has about 50 pages of useful content,
| wrapped in 250 pages of useless padding.
| brtkdotse wrote:
| " Hence, the primary value of your much larger audience is that
| you're able to sell them a "How to grow your Twitter following"
| Gumroad course for $47. A high-quality audience is an endless
| source of opportunities. A low quality one is at most a Ponzi
| scheme."
|
| Haha, hot damn, shots were fired! I'm guessing this was aimed at
| dvassallo.
| kossTKR wrote:
| What business has this "Jacob" built that makes him an authority
| on the subject and not just another dream-seller without any
| successful companies behind him?
|
| Isn't this article _exactly_ what he's arguing against - this is
| 100% audience building and i can't even se any "business"
| whatsoever on his website?
|
| Reminds me of the hold Bill Hicks "Anti Marketing Dollar" joke
| about selling the same things rebranded as opposing views.
| alangibson wrote:
| I can mostly second this advice from the perspective of someone
| creating a physical product. Effort that doesn't directly go to
| toward delivering to customers something they're willing to pay
| money for is active procrastination.
|
| It's much more effective to just get on with creating the thing
| and let the audience build up as you start delivering. This has
| the advantage of making sure that your audience is only people
| that are really in to that thing.
|
| Just as an example, one dumb thing I did was to build up an
| Instagram following that is > 90% Americans, while my intention
| is to only ship to Europe and the UK. Time well spent...
| jxf wrote:
| Top of page: "Build a Business, Not an Audience".
|
| Bottom of page: "Powered by ConvertKit".
|
| (I do think the author is genuine in his point; I just found that
| juxtaposition funny.)
| armandososa wrote:
| I have created side project products which I thought were pretty
| good but got to absolutely nowhere because I didn't have an
| audience. But I got no time to build an audience and built
| products. I have a full-time job and a family I love to spend
| time with. And I'm an introvert on top of that.
|
| So I guess I'm wired to fail in this whole product thing.
| saimiam wrote:
| If you're able to, I'd look into outsourcing some of the
| audience building and cold contact to someone else.
|
| Hire an intern to manage your social media. Find a VA to send
| out your cold emails.
|
| Your projects don't have to flounder because you don't have the
| time to build an audience.
| armandososa wrote:
| That's great advice. Thank you very much!
| alangibson wrote:
| > outsourcing some of the audience building and cold contact
| to someone else.
|
| All due respect, this is maximally wrong advice. You need to
| talk to people to figure out their pains and if your product
| alleviates them. You'd be better off doing the cold contact
| and paying someone else to build the product.
|
| I never had an ounce of success until repeated failures
| forced me out of my shell and in to actually talking to
| potential customers.
| klodolph wrote:
| > Save yourself thousands of dollars. Here's all the writing
| advice you need:
|
| The essay is good but this one sentence at the end reeks of the
| "bullshit industrial complex" that it's trying to warn against.
|
| If that is the only writing advice you need, then you're in a
| good position. For everyone else, I recommend "Style: Lessons in
| Clarity and Grace" which is a low-bullshit guide to fixing your
| writing.
|
| I'm not trying to be pithy here; otherwise intelligent people
| sometimes _suck_ at putting words down, even when they have
| something valuable to write.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| Doubly so if they have had significant exposure to academia. By
| her own admission, my wife wrote better back in high school
| than she did coming out of her doctorate. She's not trying to
| be impenetrable, but those neural circuits are just too well-
| worn at this point.
| rchaud wrote:
| The biggest bait-and-switch of college education IMO was
| spending the first two years learning how to write. Everybody
| knows full well that the next two years are spent writing
| papers and theses in the same impenetrable, verbose style as
| used in the published journal articles. After all, those make
| up the majority of the reading list for intermediate and
| advanced-level courses.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation. Just placed an order.
| pembrook wrote:
| Ironically, this post is a masterclass in audience-building.
|
| I question whether the author believes what he's preaching, since
| he's taken the time to write this post, create a newsletter, add
| a sign up form and follow me on twitter plea, and then post it to
| Hacker News.
|
| I've found that, generally, people who think audience-building is
| a waste of time _don 't spend their time audience-building._
|
| What's so clever about this article in particular? It fits into
| the proven, "pessimistic take on a new trend" form of clickbait,
| published to an audience that loves pessimistic takes.
|
| Hacker News is the perfect venue for this piece of content, since
| people here all wish they could just build something amazing and
| people would flock to it by default. The author is telling the
| crowd exactly what they want to hear, while ironically, building
| his own audience.
|
| I would take this post with a grain of salt.
| drsim wrote:
| I can see why you'd think that, but knowing Jakob,
| respectfully, you're wrong.
|
| Jakob shares authentically. Not with the primary goal of
| building an audience to sell stuff to, but because it's natural
| for him.
|
| His particular brand of learning in public and making
| connections with others on similar journeys is appealing to me.
| I worked very privately in my last business as a solo founder.
| It wasn't sustainable.
|
| I've learnt a lot from how Jakob works. Am I the audience? What
| is an audience? Is your best friend? Your parents? Your team?
| What I take out of it is how to make genuine connections
| instead of inauthentic re-hashed tweets.
| tchalla wrote:
| > Your main priority always should be to do meaningful things,
| to solve real-world problems, to be the man in the arena. And
| if you share what you learn along the way, people will start to
| listen. Write when you have something meaningful to say, and
| not to stick to some self-imposed writing schedule.
|
| The way I read the author's article was : solve real-world
| problems and then write about your learnings from it. Do you
| disagree with the author?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| What real-world problems has he solved and what has he
| learned by solving them?
|
| Curiously, the article fails to mention either.
|
| Although it does have a "Follow my Twitter feed and sign up
| for my newsletter" call to action at the end. Perhaps that
| counts?
| ccortes wrote:
| Nowhere in the post the author says or even recommends not to
| build and audience. All he is saying is that it souldn't be
| your main focus.
|
| > Hacker News is the perfect venue for this piece of content,
| since people here all wish they could just build something
| amazing and people would flock to it by default. The author is
| telling the crowd exactly what they want to hear, while
| ironically, building his own audience.
|
| What I got from the article is: building an audienc should not
| be the top priority, the quality of the audience matters more
| than the size of it and focus on creating valuable content.
| Again, it never discourages doing it.
| pfiwxruxta wrote:
| >> Nowhere in the post the author says or even recommends not
| to build and audience
|
| Title: Build a Business, Not an Audience
| oblio wrote:
| A sort of reverse-Reddit, if you will (everyone reads just
| the title, not the article, well, in this case, OP read the
| article but skipped the title :-)) ).
| Mikushi wrote:
| > pessimistic take on a new trend
|
| I don't see how describing reality is a pessimistic take.
| jakobgreenfeld wrote:
| I'm the author and wondering if you read the post beyond the
| headline.
|
| Quotes from the text:
|
| > "But don't get me wrong. Having an audience is awesome and I
| love great content."
|
| > "Publishing content online is the best way to become visible
| so that opportunities can find you."
|
| My point is that churning out content by remixing other
| people's work for the sake of building an audience is a common
| procrastination trap. I love when people share first-hand
| learnings and with my most recent posts, including this one,
| I'm trying to do just that.
|
| Another quote:
|
| > "Your main priority always should be to do meaningful things,
| to solve real-world problems, to be the man in the arena. And
| if you share what you learn along the way, people will start to
| listen. Write when you have something meaningful to say, and
| not to stick to some self-imposed writing schedule."
| mattmanser wrote:
| _My point is that churning out content by remixing other
| people 's work for the sake of building an audience is a
| common procrastination trap_
|
| If that's your point, it doesn't support your headline.
| What's that got to do with warning against building an
| audience?
|
| If you want to see the advantages of building an audience,
| just go read some indie hacker interviews:
|
| https://www.indiehackers.com/interviews/page/1
|
| Half of those businesses seem to be built on the back of
| audiences built up over years.
| [deleted]
| zepto wrote:
| > wondering if you read the post beyond the headline.
|
| Asking if people read the post is against HN guidelines:
|
| 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
| "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be
| shortened to "The article mentions that."'
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > But this doesn't bring them one inch closer to their goal.
| It's just a form of procrastination.
|
| Well, being at the right place at the right time really is
| how 19/20 people get rich ("become entrepreneurs").
| geswit2x wrote:
| Omg, this comment is so brilliant. Thanks for open my eyes.
| This is more elaborated and intrincated than Nolan's movies.
|
| All we want hear why we are failing. Most of us are going to
| the chase and adventure of get the quick-buck-overnight success
| borepop wrote:
| >this comment is so brilliant.
|
| Eh, this is the tone of virtually every top-level comment on
| HN. "Actually, ... blah blah blah."
| nitramm wrote:
| From my perspective I am always surprised when I see such
| article on the HP. When I check articles in the newest section
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/newest - most of them do not get
| upvotes and dies. So there is for sure some skill involved in
| getting here. :)
| Hitton wrote:
| Skill, luck or sockpuppet accounts.
| funkisjazz wrote:
| Yeap, this seems like marketing 101.
|
| Also, looking at the profile, the author seems to be peddling
| various cookie-cutter "products" he's trying to sell to
| "entrepreneurs"... I wonder if he read his first link.
| jhunter1016 wrote:
| For better or worse, I think Basecamp started this trend. Not
| necessarily with the content they have created and sold, but with
| the ideas that get misunderstood. I think it was Jason Fried who
| said people should be selling their byproducts, which amounts to
| remixing content, selling what you've learned to others. This
| works and is good practice for some things, but it gets extended
| into so many other things that we get an "information product"
| economy where the information is the only product instead of the
| information being a byproduct of the experience you gained by
| building something else.
| [deleted]
| herval wrote:
| > If you're reading this, I'm pretty sure you've seen the
| following pattern over and over again
|
| I don't think I've ever seen the pattern described there, so I
| guess I'm completely out of the loop here? Is that a common
| pattern others here see too?
| MrAlmostWrong wrote:
| I'm of the opinion that you should focus on building an audience
| but it depends on the type of audience.
|
| Whenever I'm working on a new brand I think about the problem
| that the audience has and that's what I want to create an
| audience around.
|
| When you create an audience around a problem then when you have
| the solution (your business) the audience fuels it.
|
| However, too many people take the advice of building an audience
| before a business to mean that they need to build an audience
| around their personal brand/persona and that's why you end up
| with the things in the author's post.
|
| While building a personal brand can be very helpful for clout and
| opportunities, it's never a surefire way to generate success for
| a business because who is your audience at that point?
| MrPowers wrote:
| The author argues against this strategy of audience building:
|
| * remixing feel good content of others
|
| * trying to find a product fit by audience building
|
| * You know you're creating valuable content if you're scared
| before hitting the publish button (?)
|
| Hard to respond to the article because it's making a lot of
| unrelated points. Here's a rephrasing of some of the author's
| points and some of my thoughts on audience building:
|
| * building an audience of potential customers is powerful
|
| * vanity metrics (# of followers) are less important than
| engagement metrics
|
| * The building a Twitter audience course referenced in the blog
| post made $200,000
| (https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1365962052469018626). It's
| a 90 minute powerpoint presentation with no editing. Shows how
| powerful building an audience and then selling to them is.
|
| Almost all the content I create is highly technical distributed
| data blogs and it's allowed me to find open source collaborators
| and get help on difficult bugs. Having the right audience is
| awesome.
| eggbrain wrote:
| On a high level, the author makes some good points -- a lot of
| remixed content is bad, the quality of the audience matters more
| than the quantity, a lot of entrepreneurs are just creating
| courses to help other entrepreneurs pay for classes or create
| their own courses vs creating an actual more helpful business.
|
| But I feel the author needs to take a few things into account:
|
| 1. "Ok" content opens up the door to "good" content which can
| help you create "great" content
|
| A lot of reporting is not in-depth investigative journalism, it's
| basically regurgitating what other newspapers have already said.
| But in a sense, every reporter "pays their dues" by writing on
| these type of stories, in the hope that doing a good enough job
| with that will let them tackle harder stories, and maybe one day
| the investigative journalism stories that they are actually
| passionate about.
|
| Really it's about building "street cred". By showing you can talk
| about soft topics in an effective way, many people will be open
| for you to talk with them about harder topics, which will further
| cement your credibility, and then slowly move you up to be a
| subject knowledge expert.
|
| 2. A ton of "meh" content can many times beat out "great"
| infrequent content
|
| Ideally, you would put out great content, all the time. But since
| many entrepreneurs can't budget for that (takes too much time /
| energy / money), putting out any content at all can still be
| beneficial, and can be another entry point for people to find
| you, discover you, help elevate your product, and give you more
| of the time / energy / money needed to make better content.
|
| 3. It's easier to get Elon Musk/Paul Graham in your followers
| with a large network than a small one.
|
| In the example in the blog post, the author compares 2000
| followers of mostly beginner entrepreneurs to one with just Elon
| Musk/Paul Graham in their followers, the latter of which is
| obviously more beneficial.
|
| But to take a step back, how would that have happened? For Elon
| Musk/Paul Graham to be a follower, they would need to know about
| you, and recognize you as someone worth following. The most
| common scenarios might be that they worked with you in the past,
| or grew up with you. But outside of that, they'd most likely know
| about you because you were recommended to them from someone else,
| or they stumbled across you. And for that, you'd most likely need
| to have a large audience of people that knew about you, so you
| could eventually get recommended by someone in that audience.
|
| That's not to say that Elon would follow you or you'd get
| recommended just because you wrote a bunch of articles like "3
| ways the Electric car is going to take off", but you might have a
| better chance than if you wrote just 1 very long form piece of
| content.
|
| 4. Sometimes, people need content "remixed" Sometimes, content
| only sticks with someone when they are hearing it from the right
| person, under the right context, under the right conditions.
|
| If I heard a professor explain Artificial Neural Networks, I
| might not "grep" it, or maybe it only partially sinks in. But
| when a Youtube video from someone I follow presents the same
| information to me "remixed" in a way that I am more comfortable
| with, it sinks in immediately.
|
| The right person saying the right thing at the right time can
| make a lot of difference.
| CR007 wrote:
| There's also a degrade in quality as knowledge is summarized over
| and over. But is not that bad as you wrote, how you pretend
| people to learn anyway?
|
| Last time I checked there are thousand options for Math books,
| wonder why they need to be remixing that over and over.
| carmen_sandiego wrote:
| I don't think they really are remixing it that much. They
| change problem numberings and the attached online software code
| for the yearly new edition to prevent students selling their
| second hand books to each other. Brand new titles about old
| Math are either trying to solve that problem or join in on it,
| depending on who is offering it up.
| jameshart wrote:
| > "In recent years one of the most common pieces of advice for
| aspiring entrepreneurs has become that you should focus on
| building an audience. Everyone is screaming it from the
| rooftops."
|
| No, one of the most common pieces of advice _you have heard_
| might be that, but by definition, you are only hearing advice
| from _people who have an audience_. You're in the audience.
| They're the people you're listening to.
|
| People who have prioritized other things than _building an
| audience_ don't have much of an audience, so you don't hear so
| much from them.
|
| The same thing happens in all tech communities, not just
| entrepreneurship, by the way. Many of the voices in dev Twitter
| are actually voices in DevRel Twitter, because DevRel requires
| you to build an audience - while merely being a dev _doesn't_.
| Same is true of the online security community, or game dev
| YouTube. The voices you _hear_ , the ones who are telling you
| 'here's how to get noticed! Make content! Stream on Twitch!' -
| those people are visible, but not necessarily the right people to
| emulate unless your goal is... mere visibility.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Amazing essay.
|
| I found this quote particularly enlightening. It really sums up
| the feeling I have about a lot of self-proclaimed experts with a
| social audience. Clubhouse has been the quintessence of it.
|
| "With feel-good platitudes and remixed content you'll only
| attract fellow beginners. Everyone else recognizes the content
| immediately for what it is. Hence, the primary value of your much
| larger audience is that you're able to sell them a "How to grow
| your Twitter following" Gumroad course for $47."
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