How To Grow An Audience If You Have 0 Followers

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, I got a great question in my inbox this morning, and it is from a guy named Tony L. So he says, Uncle Shaan, I love the nickname by the way, Uncle Shaan, I'm leaning into that. He said, if you were starting from scratch, building an audience again from zero today, 2024, if you're starting again from zero, how would you do it? What advice would you give somebody like me who wants to be a content creator, but has zero followers today? Tony from Miami. All right, Tony, I got an answer for you.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:32)
Let's travel.

**Shaan Puri** (0:33)
First, I got to flash my badge. I'm like an FBI officer who walks into the room, and I got to show you my credentials if you're going to take me seriously. I've built an email following of over 500,000 subscribers. I've built a Twitter following of 400,000 plus on YouTube. I think I have 500,000 plus subscribers. This podcast has done over 100 million downloads in the last four or five years. That's all in a four-year time span. One university block. And all of that has happened. And I've learned some things. And what I'm not going to do today is I'm not going to give you either A, generic advice like, you got to be consistent and just be yourself, right? Like, okay, sure, but not very helpful. obvious and not helpful. So I'm going to share the counterintuitive things I've learned. I wrote down nine. So nine counterintuitive, surprising things that I've learned. I'm also not going to give you some generic one-size-fits-all advice. I hate when people do this, especially this sort of a YouTube guru economy of like, here's the answer, as if there is such a simple formulaic answer that you could follow, that anybody could follow, right? It's very personal and there's art and science as a blend. It's nothing is guaranteed. But I will share with you the wisdom that I wish I had. When I was starting from scratch, four or five years ago, versus today, knowing what I know now, what is the wisdom that was surprising, non-obvious, that I wish I could have just drilled into my brain then?
If you're starting today, you could take this now. I'd also like to say that there are many ways to peel the banana, and all I know is the way that I do it. Maybe other people do it a different way, they have had success, but I can only share with you what's worked for me and how I think about it. You could choose if that fits for you, if that resonates or not. So here's the nine non-obvious lessons I've had building a big ass audience. Number one, forget the numbers. You want to focus on who follows you, not how many people follow you.
Tim Ferriss once said something that really stuck in my head. He says, okay, thought experiment. Would you rather have 100,000 Americans picked at random from across the country, be chosen to read your book or have every member of Davos read your book and love your work? obviously, you'd pick Davos, right? You'd pick the higher value, higher signal group of people. This is a general principle that I buy into, which is that more important than how many people follow you is who follows you. because the content you put out is who you're going to attract. This is hard to do. This is surprisingly hard to do. The first reason is because the platforms shove the numbers in your face, especially a platform like YouTube, where not only do you see how many views every video gets, all your audience members see how many views every video gets, and you know that they're going to see it. So it is very hard to block that out. Podcasting, a little bit easier. Not everybody could see how many downloads a podcast gets, only you can see it. But every platform has some version of this, Instagram, Twitter, whatever your platform is. It is very, very easy to start to chase the number. Hey, real quick. One of the cool parts about what we're doing is that people have reached out and told me that they've built actual million dollar businesses, made their first million off an idea they heard on the show. That is crazy, that's wild, that's why we want to do the show. And we want to see more of that. One of the questions we get asked over and over again is, is there some kind of idea, database or spreadsheet where we list out all the different business ideas that we've talked about? Well, the answer is finally yes. The fine folks at HubSpot have dug through the archive and pulled out 50 plus business ideas and put them into a business idea database. It's totally free. You can go to clickhubspot.com/mff and get the database for you. All right, now back to the show. So the bad news is it's hard to resist that. The good news is it's hard for everybody else to resist that. In fact, they won't even try. Everybody else will fall into this trap. And so it is actually a competitive advantage to completely ignore the numbers at the beginning and focus more on attracting the right types of people to your content. Who are you actually trying to attract? Like I got a buddy, he manages Hollywood talent. So when he writes a newsletter, it doesn't matter if there's 100,000 people reading it or 1,000, as long as the 1,000 people who read it are the right people. They're people that either need his service or they're people that are like him. Agents in the game, talent managers that are very high signal and will become his future professional network. I'll use a car analogy as well, which is dangerous because I'm probably the one guy on earth who knows nothing about cars, doesn't care about cars, but I dabble. So General Motors sells 2.5 million cars a year and is a $50 billion-ish company. Ferrari only sells 13,000 cars, 200 times less, 200 times fewer customers, less reach, but is an $80 billion company, so almost double the value. And so how is that possible where you can have 200 times less reach yet still be more valuable? And it's because Ferrari chose to be luxury. They chose to sell to higher-end customers. One customer for them is worth 200 for a average car company. That's why they have much thicker profit margins and so on and so forth. And there's a principle there, which is attracting the right customer. One of the right customer is worth, I don't know, 100 random or non-correct customers for you.