How To Get Started With Building An Audience in 2022

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Saagar Enjeti** (1:09)
But let's go ahead and kick things off.
How do you think about audience building? And what does your audience mean to you, Shaan?

**Shaan Puri** (1:17)
Oh, wow, emotional question. How do I think about it? I think about it like, I don't really think about it. It's the byproduct of what I do. So the way I approached it was, after I sold my company, I said, all right, I can do whatever I want now. So like, hey, time to face the tough question. What do I actually wanna do? What do I actually care about in my life?
Those were big questions that kind of scared me. So then I trimmed it down. I said, all right, well, how do I just wanna spend my days? What would be a normal, what would be a great day that I could do every day?
And the thing that came to me was like, the thing I enjoy doing the most is just getting curious. I'm generally very curious about things.
And if I have to like go do work and then put those on the side and hopefully get to them when I get to them, that seemed like that was not great. But if I could just make my work that I could just be curious about these things, whether it's crypto or it's audience building or some new science tech thing, or it's where the hell do peanuts grow on trees or from the ground? I don't know, let me go find out. Whatever it is, I was like, I wanna be professionally curious.
All right, well, that's cool. The curious part is easy. How do you be professionally curious? Well, one way was let me turn that curiosity into content. So I'll take these questions that I wanna go look into and then I just gotta package up my learnings at the end and share them with others. All right, cool, that'll make it more fun for me and it'll turn into something that actually generates a bunch of income which will let me just do this all the time. That was my thought process. So audience building and content was just a kind of a necessary means to an end or a byproduct of the main thing I wanted to do which was just be professionally curious, be able to wake up and just dive into the thing that's most on my mind that day and have no other restrictions beyond that.

**Saagar Enjeti** (3:04)
About that, Saagar, what about you?

**Saagar Enjeti** (3:07)
Yeah, I mean, I think that building an audience is a lot like making money, especially in the year 2022, which is that you have to provide something that doesn't exist and then people will commoditize it with their attention or, you know, if you're a business and you're building, you're trying to get revenue. So with the way that I built my show and the way that I consistently think about building and getting more audience, it's just to continue to fill niches. You started out filling one particular niche, built niches and niches and niches, put an underlying philosophy that girds that and then continued to try and build more on top of that, which just results in overall top line figure that continues to go up. I actually don't think it's really that complicated as a concept, it's just incredibly complicated to execute, which is why not a lot of people do it. And there's really, you know, not that many people at the very, very, very top of the game and why, you know, in the whole influencer market, all returns are exponential. Both, you know, the top.01% of podcasts get just so many more downloads than even the top 1% of podcasts. Like when I figured, when I found out what was even in the top 1%, I was like, wait, like 20,000 downloads? I mean, how can you, I was like, I don't even know how you make a living for something like that. And then, you know, you compare that to what the top 10 are. So I think that execution is harder than anything else in this game. Probably exactly the same as business. I mean, it sounds easy to fill a niche, but actually doing that, doing it on a consistent basis over years and years through changing conditions, you know, changing market conditions for business, changing information environment for somebody who's in the content game, that's where the scale all comes into play.