📰 Build a Business, Not an Audience

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.

Their goal is to become entrepreneurs. But instead of building products, they create content. Or even worse, they do research and take courses on how to create content. But this doesn’t bring them one inch closer to their goal. It’s just a form of procrastination.

Aspiring entrepreneurs are not just wasting a lot of time but also lots of money this way. They spend thousands of dollars on courses that teach them how to remix other people’s content more effectively. They buy the latest hyped-up courses that teach them how to craft more effective tweets, blog posts and Youtube videos.

An exemplary plan looks as follows: “I don’t know what product I should create. So I’m planning to create articles or carousels on Linkedin to find my voice and build an audience.” That’s almost verbatim a paragraph from an email I received two days ago.

Let’s say you have 2000 followers that you got by posting feel-good platitudes, whereas I only have two followers called Elon Musk and Paul Graham. Would you swap accounts?

Valuable content that truly advances the conversation and gets the attention of people you really want to connect with is never effortless. It’s painful. And I’m not talking about some kind of sophisticated editing process, but the writing itself.

In fact, this is how you know that you’re creating valuable content. You should at least be a little scared before you hit the publish button.

If you ever notice that you’re trying to “say something interesting”, stop. You’re just going to feed the Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex.

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.

Save yourself thousands of dollars. Here’s all the writing advice you need: Share meaningful first-hand experiences. Write as if you were emailing a friend, not to impress an imaginary teacher. Now I’m definitely scared to publish this essay. This is exactly why I’ll do it.

A hidden benefit of this strategy is that your writing skills become largely irrelevant.