Summary
This video explores the concept of building and leveraging an audience—defined as people who voluntarily want to hear from you and have given permission to receive your messages. Unlike a target audience reached through paid advertising, these are followers or subscribers on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, or Twitch who anticipate your content and engagement.
The speaker emphasizes the mutually reinforcing relationship between success and audience growth, often described as a “chicken and egg” dilemma: should you achieve success first to build an audience, or build an audience first to achieve success? Both pathways are valid, but the most effective approach is to pursue both simultaneously, as each fuels the other.
Key Insights
- Audience Definition: People who want to hear from you voluntarily, not paid targets.
- Audience’s Role: They support and perpetuate your success through engagement and purchasing your offerings.
- Success vs. Audience: Success can help build an audience, and a strong audience can accelerate success.
- Starting Point: Both success and audience growth begin with an idea—a unique approach or solution aimed at serving people better.
- Building Both Together: Sharing your ideas with an audience helps refine and improve those ideas, which in turn strengthens your mission and success.
Core Concepts
- Desired Feeling: People engage with your content or product because it helps them achieve a specific desired feeling or outcome.
- Idea Development: Ideas can be developed through learning, mentorship, experience, reading, or experimentation.
- Platform Stability: Choose a stable platform where you can reliably reach your audience without risk of sudden removal or censorship.
- Content Cadence: Maintain a consistent content creation schedule that aligns with your audience’s needs and desired feelings.
- Mutual Benefit: Engaging with your audience not only supports your mission through financial and emotional support but also improves your own understanding and execution.
Practical Recommendations
- Build your audience even before achieving full success by sharing valuable ideas and content.
- Use audience feedback and engagement to refine your ideas and strategy.
- Develop a platform presence that you control or that is relatively secure and long-lasting.
- Recognize that meaningful success and audience growth take time and persistent effort.
- Leverage the internet and digital platforms as powerful, accessible tools to build and communicate with your audience.
Timeline of Concepts
| Time Range | Topic Covered |
|---|---|
| 00:00:00–00:01:40 | Definition of audience vs. target audience; audience voluntarily wants to hear from you. |
| 00:01:40–00:03:26 | The chicken and egg problem: success vs. audience; both start with an idea; advocate for building both. |
| 00:03:26–00:05:53 | How to build an audience: understanding desired feelings, developing ideas, choosing stable platforms. |
| 00:05:53–00:07:34 | Audience building is for everyone, even those without major success; sharing ideas improves mission. |
| 00:07:34–00:08:32 | The new era enabled by the internet makes audience building accessible to all; a modern superpower. |
Definitions and Comparisons
| Term | Definition | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | People who voluntarily follow and want to hear from you, e.g., YouTube subscribers. | Different from paid or targeted advertising. |
| Target Audience | Group of people you reach through paid marketing; may not have given permission. | Not the focus here. |
| Desired Feeling | The emotional or practical outcome your audience seeks by engaging with your content. | Central to content and idea development. |
| Success | Achieving your personal or professional goals, often supported or accelerated by an audience. | Can be defined differently by each individual. |
Final Takeaway
Building an audience and achieving success are deeply intertwined processes that start with a meaningful idea. By simultaneously nurturing both, creators and entrepreneurs can accelerate their journey, improve their ideas through audience engagement, and gain emotional and financial support. The internet has democratized this process, making audience building a powerful tool accessible to almost everyone today.
00:00:00
Let’s talk today about audiences. So, I’m talking about those people who want to hear from you. People who have given you permission to send them messages that they anticipate and they want to hear. So, this could be things like YouTube subscribers. It could be followers on a different different platform like Instagram or even Twitch. Um, but generally just people who are your audience, people who want to hear from you. Not your target audience, not people you are going out and spending
00:00:28
money in order to send messages to, but people who are anticipating and voluntarily want to hear from you. And it seems like a lot of successful people have built audiences. So people who have done well for themselves typically have followers who want to learn from that emulate it and be get that success for themselves. So the question is well and also that audiences tend to perpetuate that person’s success that the audience members are the ones purchasing something that the person develops that
00:01:04
the person is associated and so on and so forth. The rich get richer. So the question becomes when do we start building the audience? How do we build the audience? Do we have to get the success first or should we build an audience in order to let them bring us success? And therein lies the chicken and the egg problem. And what I’ve noticed, I’ve seen both sides where people start off by trying to get success and using that success as a lever to build an audience or vice versa where they focus on building an audience
00:01:39
and they use that to later springboard them into their definition of success. And it can go both ways. But what defines both is that both start off with an idea. An idea of doing something better, an idea of creating content in a different way. So for example, in success, you could think of ideas like the idea to bring electronic vehicles into the mass market or an idea of building an audience with like Mr. at least creating unique content for the people to consume. Whatever it is, it starts off with an idea. And
00:02:22
I’m advocating for an approach where we can build both simultaneously because both play off of each other. The successes that you’ll see from having a better idea that aligns more deeply with the people you seek to serve is going to help you build an audience. And the audience that you build by sharing that idea, by helping others also engage with that idea is going to help with your future success as well. So the people who do it best are not only focusing on success uh or focusing on building an
00:02:54
audience. They’re doing both. They’re building an audience and they’re using that to leverage their um mission and they’re using their mission to perpetuate the word of mouth. So I think the default approach right now is for people to go for their definition of success, which is great and all, but it can be much easier and a much faster journey if you do the work of also building an audience as well. So, how do you build an audience? And it starts off by understanding that who it’s for, the people you seek to
00:03:33
serve have a certain desired feeling that they engage with you. They engage with your services. They engage with your product because they want to achieve a desired feeling. And the process, I think, is to go and discover ideas that make that better. Whether it’s by learning from other people, finding a mentor, reading books, or taking courses, whatever that might be, even just living experience and figuring it out for yourself to develop an idea and that becomes the foundation for something that you can share with
00:04:09
the people in order to get them closer to that desired feeling which is whatever which whatever that might be. So and then once you do that obviously to create the platform for them to follow you create something where they can follow you where you have access to them that is something that is not easily revoked. So, um, if YouTube was more volatile, if competitors could put fake copyright strikes on you and take down your channel, which does happen in rare cases, um, but to for the most part it doesn’t, to look for a
00:04:44
stable platform where you can speak to your audience is going to be very valuable. and to to have a cadence of creating content that helps these people and to align with them uh and help them achieve their feeling basically while doing the work that you seek to do for yourself, the mission that you seek to accomplish. And what you’ll notice is by engaging and working with the audience itself, it helps your actual mission, not just because of the people who engage with you as followers, quote
00:05:18
unquote, but because when you’re out there doing the sharing of the idea, the the idea that is also going to help your mission and help you give you help give you an edge when it comes to the actual execution of that mission. The process of sharing of of um organizing your thoughts of researching more material is only going to make your actual strategy for accomplishing your mission stronger as well as well as the followers as well as the benefits that you get from the followers. So building audiences isn’t something that
00:05:53
is only available to people who have achieved a certain level of success. that if you’re a physical trainer and you come across a better way of doing things and and you just know because of your education, let’s say, but let’s say you’re not a Mr. Olympia and you’re not the strongest or the best version of yourself yet, but the strategies and the things that you the ideas that you develop are still worthwhile and they’re worth sharing and they’re worth helping other people with.
00:06:27
So as you go out and apply that idea to yourself and start building it in your own way because it’s going to take time. Anything worth anything significant is going to take time. And so while you’re in that process of developing that, you’re also out there sharing your ideas, improving your idea, thereby making your ability to accomplish that mission even better. you develop an audience who are there to not only support you emotionally and maybe even financially but as students um you and you as the teacher get to
00:07:01
develop a clearer understanding for yourself as well. So this is one of the reasons why it’s so important that whatever it is that you do, you start to do the work of building an audience to share your ideas of how things can be better because it’s going to improve your ideas and it’s going and those ideas are ultimately going to translate into success in terms of what you what change you seek to bring about in the world. and the people who follow you and learn from you as a result are also going to
00:07:33
be the ones who are supporting you. So this is I think the new approach um that is only recently available to us because of the advent of the internet of our ability to communicate like imagine if YouTube wasn’t around imagine if texting and cell phone phones weren’t around it would be very costly to build an audience but now this is something that’s available to everyone and this is a really a superpower that I think everyone should be leaning into. So hopefully that was helpful. Hopefully,
00:08:03
you start building your audience today. That being said, thanks for watching this video and I’ll see you guys on the next one.