You’re building an audience for the wrong reason
And that’s why you’ll fail
DEEP DIVE
If you want to start (or recently started) a newsletter, podcast, or YouTube channel, this may be the most important thing you’ll read all year:
You’re building an audience for the wrong reason.
Doing this will hurt you more than it will help.
Let me explain…
Most people want to build an audience for the following reasons:
Make more money
Share their message and world view
Gain fame, approval, and recognition from others
If these are PART of the reason you want build an audience, that’s fine. We all want these things.
However, if these are your ONLY motivations, you won’t succeed.
"It's not about what you get, it's about who you become"
— Largely attributed to Tony Robbins
If you publish content with the sole focus on what YOU will get from the audience (money, recognition, influence), three things will happen:
Your “audience” will see through it (and won’t stick around for long)
You’ll have no motivation to keep creating content after 6-12 months with little to no success.
You’ll give up quickly because getting what you truly want (money, recognition, influence), takes a long time.
Instead, if you create with the goal to become a better, more skilled person — to improve yourself and your abilities — you’ll win no matter what happens.
Here’s what I mean by that:
Publishing a newsletter helps you…
Become a better writer and copy editor
Learn AI, email software, and marketing
Master a topic, niche, or industry
And build many more skills
Publishing YouTube videos or podcasts helps you…
Become a better speaker
Learn scripting, video/audio editing, and design
And so much more
Just by doing the thing, you become a more skilled human.
By building expertise and knowledge through publishing, your life improves — even if you don’t make more money, gain influence, or recognition right away.
These skills apply to other areas of your life. They’ll make you better at your job, help you land a promotion, or find a better career, and more.
If you keep building your skills and expertise you will eventually become a person who can attract an audience, money, and influence.
"To find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate"
— Charlie Munger
This quote applies to everything. If you want money and recognition from an audience, the only way to get it is to become a person who deserves it.
That means your primary goal should be your craft.
Become the person who can create indispensable content.
When you become a person with the ability to deliver what the audience actually wants — building your audience and business is easy.
It’s simpler than you think
Here’s my personal experience with this:
I started a podcast with the primary goal of becoming a better speaker and interviewer.
Those were skills I wanted to master because knew they would improve other parts of my life and business outside of the podcast.
And yes, I also planned to use the podcast to grow my audience and business — but it wasn’t the primary goal.
I knew, whether or not the podcast succeeded financially, I would still get an ROI.
Because of who the podcast helped me become.
I started this newsletter to:
Train my employees on how to grow newsletters
Explain strategies and ideas to my clients + answer FAQs
Clarify my own thoughts on how to build newsletters that I’d learned but never written down and organized
Yes, I wanted to build an audience and make money from it.
I had plans on how to do that. I followed those plans.
But I knew it would be worth doing whether or not the newsletter helped me gain clients, build my brand, and make more money.
In my life…
Every business I started to help ME failed. Every business I started to improve myself and help others succeeded.
The bottom line is this:
Don’t do anything with the sole goal of money, recognition, or influence. Do it because of who you’ll become and what you’ll get regardless of the outcome.
If you do it well and for long enough, eventually you’ll get what you deserve.
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