How To Get Started With Building An Audience in 2022

Like, simple, simple, not easy, right? It could be simple what the answer is, but not necessarily easy. Like we did this like getaway, like this getaway where we would play basketball with a bunch of interesting people. And one of the people that came was MrBeast, the number one YouTuber in the world. So he, you know, he knows a thing or two about audience building. And it's like if you talk to him, you're like, hey, you know, awesome. What's the, what's the secret? What's the trick for getting huge on YouTube? And he's like, he's like, I just want to make the best YouTube videos possible, make great videos. And we're like, Okay. Yeah. But like, how'd you do it? How'd you become number one? He's like, I just try to make great videos every day. I just wake up and I'm like, all right, what's a great video? How do I make that? And it's like simple, not easy in the sense that like he didn't overcomplicate. Okay, well, what makes a great video? Something that gets your attention, something that holds your attention, something that makes you feel something at the end, laughter or feel-good moment or outrage, whatever it is you could choose. And you could break it down from there and add a little more detail, but fundamentally you're not going to get some answer that's like, Damn, I never thought of that. Right? Wow. They had this insight that's just not— it wasn't available to me. And now that I have this insight, now I too can go succeed. It's like the best— the people who are the best do the simple thing just better than everybody else.

Yeah. What's the YC motto, right? YC, the greatest startup accelerator in the world, bar none, has the greatest track record, created almost half a trillion dollars of value of the companies that went through it. What's the secret? Make something people want is their motto. Just try to— hey, startup, don't get distracted by fundraising and press and all these other things that you could try to— growth hacks. Are you making something people want? Of course. Really? Uh, you know, tell me, uh, how do you know? What gives you that feeling? And then they're sort of like, uh, I don't know. I just sort of assumed I was. It sounds so simple that I just sort of assumed I was already doing that. Same thing with content or audience building. Are you making content that people want? Right? That's the, that's the thing. It's not just make great content, it's make content that people want. That's what great content is. When he talked about picking niches and then figuring out how to serve that niche, that's what he's doing. Making content that people want in that category and then doing it better than, than others and doing it consistently so they build a habit, etc., etc.

I completely agree. Yeah, I mean, I get approached by a lot of people, hey, will this light do it for me? Will this camera? My camera's not your problem, bro. I'm like, your content's the problem. I'm like, make content good. Everything follows from that. You know, I recently spent $60,000 on cameras, and that's after 3 years of doing this. But needing 4K cameras was an added benefit for my existing audience, not what I needed for a requisite to start. Like, sure, there's the baseline level of production. I think a pop filter, like a Yeti USB mic, and a basic webcam. And that is not a high startup cost. And everybody's like, what about my thumbnails? What about my— listen, thumbnails matter, headlines matter, all that other stuff matters, et cetera. But what Sean is talking about, which is that all MrBeast does is he knows exactly how to rank retention, thumbnail, all of that, stack it all on top of each other, iterate it a million times and then come up with the quote unquote secret sauce. He has the exact same YouTube dashboard that I have, that all of us have, that you have access to. He just figured out how to read it better than anybody else. So I always say, is the content good? That's my number one concern. Is it good? Is it compelling? And that, as he said, it's simple, it's not easy. At a certain point, it is strange. Like it is really one of those, like, you know it when you see it. I can listen to something and be like, that's compelling. And I can listen to something and just like, I don't know what it is, man, but this needs work. And it's tough to exactly explain what that is.

Now I understand. Now I understand. Yeah. The question really is like, what am I doing wrong here with Demand Curve? But more generally speaking, like, I don't know the, it's, I haven't cracked this nut. What's the difference? I've noticed personal brands are easier to grow, but I also, I want my company thing to grow, blah, blah, blah. I think that here's my like very simple slash controversial take on this, which is I think if you're a company, you should be using individual faces to grow. You'll go, you'll grow faster that way. If you're an individual trying to grow like a media property, you should put it under a brand umbrella, mostly because you can't ever sell you. Um, so like if you want this to be an asset and not a job, You need it to grow its own brand. Like you need breaking points or like in our case, like I had a personal newsletter and a personal Twitter that grew really fast. I grew my personal Twitter from like 10 or 20,000 followers to it's at 300,000 in like a year, basically a year and a half. In a year we got to 200,000 and then it just trickled up. Um, but like, great. What am I going to do with that? I'm, uh, I don't really want to be some influencer and, um, And great, like, you know, I can't hand this off to anybody. It's my voice, it's my name, it's my face. So it's a job now. I need to maintain this thing. And it's cool because like, I just don't get like, I'm like, I just don't care. So I'll go 6 weeks without tweeting because I'm not trying to maintain some schedule. It's not a business of mine. But when I created the Milk Road, it's intentionally not called Sean's Crypto Newsletter, which actually would have been easier at the start to get subscribers for because people already had bought into the Sean franchise. So going for, oh, Sean's going to talk about crypto and do crypto analysis and crypto opinions. Great. I want to know about that. But instead I called it the Milk Road because I thought one day I'd like to not be the guy writing this thing. One day I'd like to not be the person maybe even owning this thing. I'd like to sell this someday. Um, I want this to be an independent asset. And so for that, again, me as an independent media content creator, I created a brand umbrella for those reasons. But let's say it was my startup. I would be saying, hey, I'm Sean, the growth guy from Bebo. Uh, and I'm gonna talk about growth over here, not the Bibo account doing it because it's going to get less play, uh, because people would rather follow people than, uh, than companies. And so you got to use— you make that trade-off. When you're already a company, then use the fact that people would rather follow people. If you're an individual, you take a little hit by putting it under a brand umbrella, but you get this big benefit of it's not tied to your name and face forever that way. So it's a strategic bet. That's my, my opinion on this.

Um, well, I'll tell you kind of like, okay, I'll tell you my point in a second, but like, I guess that's a little less interesting even than just the what made this work. So this thing reached, I think, I don't know the exact stats, I think it's like sort of like somewhere between 10 and 20 million people in the US. But then it also was, it got shared like crazy on Instagram and it got shared in China, like some big Chinese, like social media influencers were posting it, I guess. So it got like millions of views there. Logan Paul was talking about it on his podcast. Mark Zuckerberg referenced this in an Alex Friedman interview. So it like went really far and I was like, why did this go so far? And I think it was, because it basically had 3 things. Number 1, it was timely. So this was right when Facebook had rebranded to Meta. People were talking about the metaverse, and I think everybody had this, like, sixth sense, this little sort of like, you know, sneaking suspicion that everybody's bullshitting about this. But like, nobody knew. It was all smart people and big names that were saying how the metaverse is the future, but nobody was saying what the hell the metaverse is or why it's the future. And so, like, I think everybody kind of smelled bullshit but didn't know how to call it. Um, so it was timely. I was calling bullshit, which generally is like something people are going to want to click into and read. And the last thing was, I think I backed it up. I think I had a good point that could get you to agree with my, my conspiracy theory, if so to speak, was not so far-fetched. And basically what all I was saying was like, when people hear the word metaverse, they think about this like virtual reality shit, like, oh, I'm living in some thing, I'm an avatar now. And I said, actually, I think it's more like this concept called the singularity, which is in artificial intelligence, which is like this moment in time, this tipping point where computers, you know, have reached the superintelligence and they're so vastly smarter than, than, than humans. And they, they are so smart, they just program themselves to become— it's like runaway intelligence. They program themselves to become smarter. And so, um, I thought, oh, the metaverse is kind of like that. It's basically this tipping point where, um, well, a lot of my friends are online now. I think I have this experience. Many of you guys do. Look at this, like, experience we're having now. A lot of my work is now digital. Um, my social identity, like my profiles, my followers are all digital. Um, you know, my, if I buy NFTs, cool. Some of my art is now digital. More and more things, more important, more things that are important to you are now like, they live on the internet. And so at some point, all of your digital stuff matters to you more and you spend more time and energy and focus there than you do in your physical. It doesn't mean you'll never go eat or walk or exercise or anything like that. That's not what it means. But it just means there's a tipping point where before— rewind 20 years— it didn't matter. I had a computer room in my house that was like— there was a computer room and everything else was non-computer. And now the computer is attached to my body, basically. Right? So it's like, you've seen this transition already. It's just going to continue. And so, hey, don't think it's this crazy virtual world. It's just this tipping point where at some point we've been creeping towards it, creeping towards it. At some point we're just going to value our digital stuff more than we do our physical, in the sense that we're going to spend more time and energy and effort and money on, on the internet than we do offline. Um, that was the idea. So that's, that's my explain this tweet.

Yeah, I'm actually— it's interesting, I kind of pivoted to becoming the gas guy politically. This really is really just purely a function of what I talked about earlier, which is that if you were to ask me why I think my show is successful, I think because I cover things in a way that most people feel are not being covered by existing sources of information. That's a very basic, like, thesis statement. That's why I think it does well. I've always noticed that coverage of gas is skewed in a particularly partisan way. So one of the things that I like to do is just highlight basic contextualize them. I think that every American has to put into their car on average a couple of times a week, or at the very least, like once a week, a couple of times a month. So what did I do there? I said the average American nets X amount of money after taxes at $5 a gallon. That means that they're spending approximately 10% of their take-home pay on gas. When you include food and housing, it gives you a picture of how bad things are. That's not a political statement. That's just like a statement about where things are. That got shared, as Sean was saying. I mean, people screenshotted it. It was shared on Instagram both ways. It's like, why do oil companies need to stop profiteering? Here's why Biden needs to start drilling. I mean, you can put it any particular way you want. I mean, in general, my most viral content actually, although, just speaks to more putting out like facts and then contextualizing them in a way where people feel like they can be used to something that is very meaningful to their life. I'll give you another example. One of my most viral posts recently has been about mortgages. And it really was just a basic take about like, hey, in 2021, you could buy X house, price house for this monthly payment. Mortgages price has now gone up. So now you get less house. Once again, like you can read that whichever way you want. Like you could be like, congratulations, Jerome Powell, or you could say screw you, Jerome Powell. Like you could put it any particular way. So I think to I piggyback on what Sean is saying. I think timeliness is everything, everything. Timeliness is number 1, it has to be timely. Number 2, it has to be— the most viral stuff, I believe, has to be able to resonate with somebody and not tell them how to think, just give them the ability to then form something. Then 3, I think it's also concise, which is why Twitter is very, very helpful.

Yeah, that, that's great. By the way, this, um, it's like you handed them like a hammer and you're like, go beat up whoever you want to beat up with this information. Exactly. And this can be used on any, anybody, you know, just bingo, use it to serve your agenda, which is like kind of the, like, I don't know, cynical take on content creation, which is like, you will blow up faster if you sort of gas up an audience around something that they already have a bias or belief system of and you feed that. This happens. For example, it doesn't have to be political. With crypto, this happens all the time, which is like, oh, just be anti-the-dollar, anti-Fed, anti-Warren Buffett, anti-whomever. And you just keep feeding information that like riles up this zealous crowd that already believes. And all they're looking for is like, they're not looking for real information. They're looking for information that just fits their worldview only. And I don't mean that to pick on them because pretty much everybody does this. And so, you know, everybody's looking for information that feeds their worldview. So one useful way of thinking about it is What worldview do I like and respect and maybe share? What worldview do I understand? And then that's the worldview that I can serve by producing good packaged nuggets because I know what will hit with that audience. And then I'm focused on that versus just generically producing content and then not really thinking about the worldview that it's going to go live in.

Exemplifies it. So I created, uh, so there was this big news event that happened in crypto where this token called Luna crashed, and it had been one of the high flyers, and then it goes to zero kind of like overnight. And I had a position in Luna, so I ended up losing what was like a million dollars in that crash. And, um, I also had kind of like an interesting take because you need to have a take on, uh, you know, everybody knows what happened. What they want to know is, you know, either why it happened or what it means. And, um, and so I had a good take and I decided, okay, the way I'm gonna do the— and two things happened. A, I was a little bit busy that week. I was like on vacation, stuff like that. I came back, all right, a couple days go by, and then I was like, okay, what do I do? Either I'm just gonna post this as like, you know, um, you know, a couple tweets, a thread, or what if I made like a video on this? And so I go on YouTube, I end up creating this like almost like a, like the John Oliver show, what's it, Last Week Tonight. I go and I create this, like, I'm like, I do this rant. I rant about Luna, I rant about why, why it blew, why it got big, and then why it crashed, why it got devastated. And it was— had jokes spliced in. I hired this editor, the editor is amazing. We're working on this, we're iterating on it, we're making great content, and we put it out. Now 2 and a half weeks have gone by as we put it out. You could see this if you go to YouTube, Luna Sean or something like that. And the video has like, I don't know, 17,000 views or so, uh, 20,000 views maybe at this point. Uh, but it never went viral. And like, so, you know, I consider that sort of like a flop, uh, of a piece of content, especially one that I tried really hard on. And the funny thing is like, I kind of knew this, that like, like the smarter thing would have been if I literally had opened up my phone, typed out a thing in the Notes app, screenshotted it, and just posted it immediately when it happened, it would have been less great because it was not— the jokes weren't as good, the— there was no video production, there was no nothing, but it would have been on time. And on time matters way more than great in it when it comes to this type of reactionary, what does everybody care about right now? Because by the time 3 weeks have gone by, just nobody cared about it anymore. The world had moved on. There was 2 other crises to worry about. And so, uh, that was a le— an expensive, time-wise lesson of, uh, how much effort I put into something that did not go viral compared to shit that did go viral because I did it good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time.

Uh, yeah, I'll do both real quick. The Elon one is actually like Sagar was saying. I, uh, I, I— one of the threads that went viral was not— no original insight. Elon was on Clubhouse. Elon like popped onto Clubhouse when Clubhouse was hot.. And just a guest appearance by Elon Musk is not something you get very often. And also Clubhouse was like overload. It was like invite only and it was overloaded. So I just go, for those who are locked out of the Elon thing, here's what he's saying. And I just live typed and transcribed everything interesting he was saying in a thread in real time. And I was the only guy doing it. And on one hand, I felt a little silly. I was like, oh man, I've become like a professional note taker on a fucking beta app of Clubhouse, like, geez, what has my career come to? And then also I was like, oh wow, this is like 7,000 likes already. Okay, never mind, let's shut up, like, go. And so, uh, you know, I just like just did it. But it was like, it talks about that same thing, which is like some people think they need to have this like really great insight or amazing, you know, perspective or whatever. And sometimes you're just providing a service better than others. You're just clipping good content and you're posting it and you're doing that consistently and people will follow you for that you can build a huge audience as simply a curator or remixer of content. You don't even need to be an original content creator. I would say in most cases you do not need to be. So that's kind of what this one was, which was I just pulled— this was separately. I just pulled out this great quote by Elon. And this is another one where it fits people's worldview. My audience is mostly entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs love to have this chip on their shoulder, this badge of pride about like how hard it is to be an entrepreneur, which I find pretty stupid in general, but I can play to it. And so I played to it here, which is like Elon was like, you know, if you need words of encouragement for doing a startup, don't do a startup. Oh yeah. Like, you know, that's right. We are the special breed and like we don't need this motivational speeches, whatever. So I knew that this would play. And so, you know, just threw out there and sure enough it hits. The other one that you shared was Oh yeah, this was meant to trigger people. So everybody thinks that— everybody thinks that things like education and healthcare are like highly nuanced topics. And I find it also that really funny and stupid. Like, I think that nuance is something that smart people love to hide behind because it's so easy to just say, ah, well, you know, it depends. And like, you know, it's not so simple. It's not so easy. It's not so cut and dry. It's not so black and white. It's not so binary. They love to do this nuance thing. And so I knew I could trigger everybody if I just said, here, I could fix education in a tweet. And it's like, oh, classic tech bro thinks he could fix education in a stupid tweet. And so I know how to just bait the animals with like, here you go, right? And it's something I do believe, which is that most people, when they want to learn something, they start by trying to learn it. They go read about it, they watch about it, they they go attend seminars and workshops or take courses about it, and they'd be better off just going and trying to do the damn thing. And then when they get stuck, they should go look up how to get unstuck. I do believe that that's true. But if I had just said that, it would have gotten a 10th of the likes. By adding there, I fixed education. I was able to trigger a bunch of people. And so these are the Jedi mind tricks of the great content creators.

Uh, oh, that, I like that one. That's a good one. Narratively, I always enjoy that. So that one was, yeah, so just for those who may not be watching, the failure of CNN Plus and lapsing of Obama's wife, are related. So why is this tweet successful? You take two viral events, that are being discussed. You pair them together and then you put a thesis statement on why exactly it supports a broader meta-narrative. Shitty establishment content previously force-fed to us in cable monopoly era simply cannot compete in the free market of streaming. The revolution has just begun. So revolution has just begun, punchy, feeds the, uh, thesis. You know, most of the people who follow me and I in general, anybody below age like 50 doesn't like cable monopoly and cable news. So obviously a huge market there. You know, Balaji actually said— Balaji Srinivasan once said something to me, is always bet on charts. It's just you got to find the right chart to bet on. And so I always say that, uh, the right chart for me is trust in the mainstream media, which is 13%. That means my market size is 87% of the United States. So I only have even more to grow. And if you include the globe on that, it's even bigger.

Okay, so Twitter is actually not that hard, which is that most of the people follow only a few amount of accounts. So get those few amount of accounts in order to follow you and get get them to retweet you. And that's basically the secret to growth. I don't think it's that complicated. So what does that mean? It's like, well, find that niche, the 0.01%. What do they need in their feed that they're not getting? Provide that service. For me, I was the first guy in order to tweet the transcript, which means that they were all following me, which means they're all retweeting me and exposing me to their millions of followers, which means some people would then follow me. So for me, it was, I would say around 10K is a big jump. For some reason in people's minds, it's like when you cross 10,000, That is a point where you're going to get exponentially more new numbers of followers. What I've discovered across all my platforms, the more followers you have, the easier it is to get followers, which is so frustrating. Whenever you're starting out, you're like, when you're, oh man, 5,000. At that point, if I had 5,000 followers on Instagram, which, you know, once upon a time was the case, if I got 50, I was like, oh my God, I lose 50 a day. Now, actually more, probably more like 100. And yet I'll net out, you know, at $1,000 a week or something like that. And it's simply because of like the churn, the burn, the way that your algorithmic treatment is offered. So I think 10 is a big inflection point. I think 50 is an even bigger inflection point. That's where things really begin to go vertical. And, you know, this is probably the same startups, which is just getting that, you know, first initial customers and then compounding that to a sustainable-ish business is like the really most difficult, requires the most amount of thought, because at the end of the day, that's where you're filling the niche. That's where you're discovering the niche. That's where you're playing around. That's really the time too of the most experimentation where you have really, really high stakes. I would say it's there, and then also on the other end where after I reached 300K— actually, after I reached 200K on Twitter, I was like, "I just don't care anymore." I was like, "If it goes up, it goes up. I could care less." My business is almost entirely dependent on YouTube. Frankly, I care more about Instagram. Than I do about Twitter. I think I have much higher quality engagement just from what I've seen, my ability to sell either my subscription, tickets, any of those things are there. So then it just became a complete game after that. I just genuinely did whatever I wanted. So those are kind of the interesting inflection points.

Uh, that's smart. I wish I had done that. Um, didn't have that insight, but I learned something great today. Um, yeah, mine was sort of like, uh, the, actually it was the same, but I did it in a much slower, stupider way, which was the first kind of 25 people mattered a lot. And so it's not the number, it's who those 25 are. For me, I built those relationships in person. So like, um, you know, Ryan Hoover had a popular Twitter and I had known Ryan in person, you know, for 7, 8 years at that point. And so once I started getting active and started saying interesting things, he was happy to kind of like share. I never asked him to, he just, he followed me already. He thought some things I said was interesting and he would share it with his audience. And, um, and then that happened with like 25 important people in tech that were already well-known, but I had built in-person relationships with them. Build in-person credibility with them. And so it's kind of the same idea actually, but just a very slow version of what you just talked about. And I didn't think about it like creating content that serves them, that they would want to share with their audience. I just thought like it just accidentally happened sort of along the way. The main things that I would say is like, you know, figure out your, you know, the domains you're trying to build your authority in. So, you know, get really tight on that. The tighter, the better. Uh, but it's very tempting to be broad. Um, and I've made this mistake many times of just like being like, well, it's that, but it's also these other things that I like. And it's also this, and it's also that. And actually you'd be better off just starting off, uh, starting off there. Um, then there's basically like some tactical things, like, you know, for example, uh, there's this theory called the red pill theory, I guess. Uh, I think in Politics has a different definition, but I heard it when I talked to the guy. Um, there's two guys who do Wait But Why. And so there's like Tim, who's like the writer, the famous guy. And then this is his friend Andrew, who, childhood friend who helps him run his businesses. And Andrew, I talked to Andrew and Andrew was like, yeah, um, you need to have your red pill, which is like, you need to have the truth that you can say that people, that wasn't like, um, it's not the thing everybody's saying,. But when you hear it, people like some said, say, when those people will nod their head vigorously, right? So what is the, and so other people call this your spiky point of view. It's like, you know, what is your, what's your thing, right? Like, you know, maybe your thing was like that inflation is a way bigger problem and the government is playing this down. Boom. That's your red pill. And you can do, you can base your whole brand off that for a period of time. And then you have to eventually swap out and create a second red pill, which is like, you need to be giving people. And by the way, red pill comes from like the Matrix where it's like, do you want, If you take the blue pill, you go back into the matrix, you just live like a sheep again and you just don't question anything. Or do you want the truth? And that's the thing. You're trying to give people the truth in a way that they're not, that they haven't been told. And then you can become known for that. And so I think that's important. That's a very useful tool. I think some other tools are speaking from the I. I found great success in this, which is a lot of people in the more successful that they get, they'll just keep saying you like a fortune cookie. Like, oh, you got to do this, you got to do that. You know, when you feel this way, you got to try doing this. And it's like, it's much more powerful when you're like, you know, I was feeling this way or I was going through this, I had this experience and it made me think this. But what I need to do differently is I need to do this. It's a much more— I think in general it's good for personal accountability to speak from the eye. But secondly, I think it plays really well to content because it's different than what everybody else is doing. So same thing, personal stories and speaking from the eye, I think works. But like the high-level things is, you know, you could be either a generous expert sharing your knowledge and expertise, or you could be a curious novice. And a curious novice is somebody who's just going through, like you're saying, you're just typing out the transcripts, you're just finding interesting clips and sharing it. You're remixing, packaging, curating, and presenting, you know, stuff as a beginner's point of view rather than saying, I know everything. So you gotta know what areas are you an expert in and what areas are you gonna be a curious novice? And then use both in your content. And the last is just, I don't know, don't quit and go viral. Like that's ultimately like if you wanna win, don't quit and like find ways to go viral or you won't grow. So if you just, you're only gonna remember two things on the strategy is like don't quit and go viral, I would say is the takeaway.