i got internet famous... if i started again from scratch, here's what I'd do this time

Shaan Puri (0:00)

People do not want information, they want a feeling. There is no such thing as too long, there is only too boring. You need A plus content with C minus delivery. The rule of 100, 100 videos every time, choose one thing to do better. If you've ever thought about building an audience or building a brand online, this video is for you because I've done it.

The last five years, I've built a podcast. This podcast has done over 100 million downloads. We've got a million YouTube subscribers, half a million on Twitter. I've got some experience of building audiences, and I've learned what I would call a pretty non-conventional playbook. This is my non-obvious advice for you because you've heard all the obvious advice. The obvious advice is you should post consistently, and you should do XYZ. This is not that.

Here's the advice that if I was sitting down younger me who was interested in doing this, actually wanted to be a content creator, wanted to have an audience, these are the hard lessons learned. Non-obvious piece of advice number one, who follows you is what's important, not how many people follow you.

I heard Tim Ferriss say this once. He said, would you rather have 100,000 people on earth at random, read your book or the 100 CEOs of the Fortune 100? That 100 is worth more than 100,000.

And so you really want to get intentional about who is the audience that you really, really care about. If you're making sports content for athletes, then you really want to figure out who's that type of person. How do I make sure that my content will resonate with them? I'm okay getting less views. I'm okay getting less likes as long as it's the right people and the right likes that my message is finding the right ears. You know, just to give you like a business analogy, there's a car analogy, which is dangerous because I'm like the only guy on earth that doesn't care about cars. But General Motors will sell, I don't know, two and a half million cars a year. The company's worth $50 billion.

Ferrari sells 13,000. So 2.6 million versus 13,000, but Ferrari's worth 80 billion. It can sell 200 times fewer customers than GM, but still be more valuable because it's getting luxury customers, high-end customers. And I think if you are like me, you're creating ideally like sort of upmarket content. You're creating content that, you know, is a little bit more intelligent, not the sort of like mass market stuff, unless that's really the game you want to play. Hey, real quick, if you listen to this episode and you like what you're hearing, don't worry, you don't have to take any notes. The sponsor of today's episode, HubSpot, has put together everything in this episode as a free guide for you to download all the notes, everything I'm talking about here in a nice clean little note structure for you. It's in the link in the description below.

All right, number two.

Most people don't know what they should talk about. And I have some advice here, which is very simple. I got this from my trainer. He said, look, the best products in the world are ones where the founder just pushes a little bit of themselves out into the world. It's like, you know, going inside out, just whatever's in your belly, how do you push it out? I call this finding your inner nerd. The question you should ask yourself is not kind of like, what does the audience want? But what is the thing you nerd out about the most? Maybe it's something that sounds a little boring or you like it to a degree that's sort of abnormal. That weird is something you want to lean into, not lean away from. So it might look odd to others, but it feels right to you. For example, I remember going to my uncle's house one time and he took me to the basement. Don't worry, it's not that type of story. Down in the basement, he's got a model train set up and every night he was spending hours tinkering with this model train set. It was so elaborate and he flicked it on to show me and he showed me that the lights, the timing of the green lights and the yellow lights were like realistic. So he's showing me like his proudest work and I'm thinking, wow, my uncle's the biggest dork. But for content, that's actually what you want because it turns out the internet is this amazing thing where you will find the other thousand, 10,000, 100,000 or million people who are just as nerdy about the same topics as you. This is why you'll see creators who go viral about random stuff. We talked on this podcast before about the woman who's doing perfume tours in New York. She's just nerding, her inner nerd is about scent and she knows more about scent than you know about scent. She cares more than you care, but she will find the audience of people who care as much about perfume and scents as she does. There's a guy who does work wear, like men's style, and he just loves writing about the pant cuffs and the hems and the cuts and he'll write a thousand words on this stuff, something I would never do, but one, it eliminates competition because while there's many people creating content, very few people will have the same taste palette, the same inner nerd as you. So you end up in this, if you just follow that, you're just honest about it, you will end up almost with no competition, which sounds crazy. It's like being in an incredibly crowded room, yet you have five feet of space all around you. And the second is that success is guaranteed because if your version of success is, am I famous with millions of followers yet? You're going to be unhappy for a long time, probably forever. But if you really just focus on, dude, how do I just talk about the stuff that I love, that stuff that I find really fun? Then every day is a win and you will attract brick by brick the right audience for you. You shift your odds of success from less than 1% to 100% because you're going to be playing a different game. The game you'll be playing is where playing is winning versus only if I'm successful, then it's a win. Learn the five Ds. Most people just want to be famous, but I recommend having a different goal. The goal is not to be well-known, it is to be known well. What does that mean? What does it mean for somebody to know you well? Well, you want to be able to share your stories, your hopes, your dreams, your fears, your obsessions. I call these the five Ds. The first D is done. What have I done? What is my track record? Your audience should know that about you. What have you done in life? Deliver. What do you deliver for people who follow you? What's the service you offer? What's the value add you give them? Why should somebody follow you? Do. What do you do for work? What do you do for fun? What do you like to do? People should know about your work, your hobbies, those sorts of things.