Audience Capture

Jun 9

Welcome, entrepreneurs. I’m so glad you’re here.

I’m writing to you on a sunny, beautiful Michigan morning in which I already have 9 holes of golf under me. I’ve been able to play significantly more this year than normal, because my two boys are getting into the game. I consider myself a lucky man (although my driver is still broken).

I’ve created a life in which I get to do amazing things like play golf in the middle of the week, but I know many hyper successful people for whom that kind of freedom is still out of reach. People who tried to create freedom for themselves, but instead ended up prisoner to their own success.

Such is the topic of today’s post. I hope you enjoy.

The existential risk of an optimized approach to creation

au·di·ence cap·ture (ˈȯ-dē-ən(t)s ˈkap-chər) n.
When a creator gets captured/changed/brainwashed/imprisoned by the audience they have created.

About four years ago, after my departure from startup land, I started writing.

My goal was to write whatever I wanted—to express myself honestly, come what may—so I ended up writing about things like feeling my feelings again, Kobe Bryant, and adult summer camp (classic). But eventually, I discovered that my heart and my energy led me more and more often to the founder’s journey, so I began to focus my efforts there, launching a small newsletter along the way. Subscribers trickled in. Then people started emailing me. Friends at first. Family. People from the internet. My subscriber count hadn’t even hit 100 before I started thinking: “How can I get more subscribers?”

Once a founder always a founder. I began to turn toward the market like a flower turns toward the sun. According to the sages of Google, the pathway to “success” rested on two strategies:

Post a bunch of things in a bunch of different ways and measure your audience’s reaction to each one. Figure out which posts get the most likes, the most RTs, the most multi-time opens.
Once you figure out what your audience wants, niche down, and say that thing one thousand different ways, one thousand different times.

I could use data to guide my writing process, the internet said. No need to trust your gut; we’re past that!

It turns out, and I can say this empirically now, my early audience was way more interested in reading about building successful cultures and pitching investors without setting themselves up to fail than they were in learning the path to self-love and forgiveness. And they LOVED anything numbered like the four barriers to self awareness or the five practices to transform a founder into a CEO. People just ate that shit up.

I knew what I needed to create to be successful.

And I felt the creative part of me wince.

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” – Martha Graham

I had only tiptoed a little way into the infinitely deep rabbit hole that is audience optimization before I pulled back and remembered why I started writing in the first place.

To express myself fully, not just to show people the parts they found palatable or useful.

And to allow the people with whom my whole self resonates, to become my moderate, but true, honest, audience.

Turns out that’s a great way to build a business, too.

Chasing freedom, working on an assembly line

I have more than a few friends in the worldwide playground of the internet who have built significant businesses atop large audiences. From the outside, they are the luckiest people in the world and often talk loudly about the freedom and control they have. But when we’re 1:1, they tell a different story about the sad reality of being locked into creating content about leaving your job and building an audience on LinkedIn (or whatever their audience has trained them to talk about) every day until they die.

These ambitious, brilliant people took a bold risk in pursuit of freedom and built themselves a boss in a million parts instead. A boss who doesn’t communicate with nuance or creativity. A boss who doesn’t respect new ideas. A boss who demands, above all else, consistent performance within a boundary defined by data. One missed week, or one topic too far out of bounds, and they risk obscurity and financial ruin.

That sounds like torture to me. For writers and for startup founders.

I know countless founders who started a company they were passionate about. Curing a disease, or fixing the climate. And then they found out there was a larger or more rabid market in mobile apps for ride sharing or grocery delivery or cat videos, and they pivoted their entire business (read: 26,000 hours of their life over the next 7 years) to getting really good at finding just the right length of cat vid that gets the most traction.

“I wish everybody could become rich and famous, so they can see that it’s not the answer.” – Jim Carrey

Companies and founders make billions of dollars following the data trail that their audiences leave behind. And if you’re in it to make a lot of money, then more power to you. That was my prime directive, too, once upon a time. But these days I’m meeting more and more people who have experienced the cost of this process. The cost of living the life and making the thing that the market, or your audience, wants you to, rather than the one that lights you up.

You don’t have to choose. You can succeed materially, while staying true to the unique story that’s only yours to tell.

I want to propose an entirely different framework for creating, whether that’s writing or building startups, from an authentic, soulful place. And I want to do it with Rick Rubin and Stephen King.

The Audience Comes Last

Art and commerce in the 21st century are no longer fixed assets but rather a conversation between creator and audience. If you want to build something true to you and make money doing it, you have to involve your market. It just matters a lot how and when you bring them in.

@glo.io Rick Rubin shares why artists should put their audience last. #rickrubin #creativity #ideas #creators #creativeinspiration #creativeprocess #interview #motivation #musicproducer #art ♬ original sound - Glo

To make something as great as it can be, you have to make it for yourself. From the inside out. Then and only then, can (and indeed must) you involve the audience. As Stephen King has said, “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”

Step 1: Write/create/build with the door closed

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.” ~ Stephen King

To anyone making something in this world, whether you’re launching a small newsletter or a startup, the door is a metaphor for the willingness to shut out the world and go inward. It’s representative of the need not only for privacy, but for turning the lens of awareness around, letting go of what other people may want you to create, and listening to yourself and your own instincts instead.

Creating with the door closed is an act of excavation and expression. Excavation of what is most true, honest, and important to you, with care and discernment not to confuse those things with mimetic desires or projects you’ve inherited from your surroundings. Expression of what you find, honestly and courageously, regardless of where it may lead.

Creating with the door closed is a phase of deliberate disregard for what others may find valuable, and the intentional choice to not only prioritize, but to take action on and express what is most true for you. It takes courage and the willingness to accept that people may not like what you’ve done.

Ironically, when you create something important to you, and when you show that thing to the world at the scale afforded by the internet, a counterintuitive thing happens: as quirky and eclectic as your point of view is, you attract others who resonate with it.

And this audience, these customers, earned bit by bit through revelations and deep conversations, is different. They don’t carry with them the weight of expectation; your relationship with them is instead built on commitment, a mutual respect, and a promise to do the work to be more and more yourself. To do your work more deeply, more thoroughly, and with more skill, yes. But to do YOUR work. Not anyone else’s.

Because that’s what they signed up for.

Step 2: Re-create with the door open

“All first drafts are shit,” said Hemingway. “Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” agreed Mike Tyson.

Re-creating with the door open is the recognition that, no matter the soul or care or time or craftsmanship you put into a creation or a startup, no matter how important it is to you, it has not yet evolved into its full expression until you’ve shown it to others. Until you’ve allowed its rough edges to get tumbled and smoothed in conversation with others and the marketplace.

Like communication, any creation necessarily involves two parties: the creator and the consumer. And the creation, what the writing or startup or content really is, deep at its core, is defined not only by the creator, but equally by each consumer. A company or piece of art’s true meaning is not one thing, but the sum of all of these individual meanings, existing in a crucible of conversation.

But this conversation must happen after the creator has shepherded the creation to its initial maturity, rather than at any point during the creation itself.

If you blend the two, you risk audience capture.

If the creator gives up what lit them up about their creation in pursuit of market acceptance, the creation will blend into the glut of average atop the bell curve of market wants. Far better, once you’ve written or built with the door closed, to invite feedback that supports you in your vision and enables you to fulfill your creation’s market potential more skillfully and completely. And to be very skeptical of feedback that tells you your creation is wrong, and you ought to be creating something else entirely. Because if you don’t create what’s uniquely yours to create, nobody else will.

What if your creation doesn’t have a market?

I hear the lean startup acolytes having a field day. “Getting feedback and iterating on what customers want is the only way to find product/market fit. You can’t just build what you want. Then you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. ”

I call bullshit.

The lean startup model, and in a similar way the methods through which creators analyze their audience and adapt their topics of interest to better match those demanded by their audience, are highly adapted within the venture ecosystem to building large, mainstream businesses, for which you need an audience/customer-base of millions.

But between the worlds of “hobby” and “customer base of millions” includes 99.9% of all businesses. It’s a wide target to aim for, and, for most, the bar to a viable business is only 1,000 True Fans.

“The key to failure is trying to please everyone. The key to success is to resonate with someone." – Seth Godin

In fact, even if your goal is to build a large business, you may be better off going about it by building something authentic to you and attracting those for whom it resonates, rather than trying to chase and serve a large, faceless market. If you aim for the large market, if you miss at all you disappear into the boundless ocean of competition. But if you aim for something true and real and unique to you, you dramatically increase your odds of hitting it, and any hit above 1,000 people can build a successful company. Plus, if you can get those early true fans to sneeze their excitement on other people, you may end up growing a market of millions in the viral way of an idea said in just the right way. And a market grown is infinitely more defensible than a market served.

If you want to build a unicorn, you may need to find and follow a massive market. Just don’t be surprised when the following changes your idea, and you as its shepherd, into something unrecognizable.

If instead you want to build a successful business (defined as a business that allows you to live the lifestyle you want to live, including those who want to live extravagant, free lifestyles), you can do that with much less. Attracting your one thousand true fans can be the backbone of the life, and the Work, that you want to do every day. Work that makes an impact on the part of the world you were born to impact. Not because you can play the optimization game well, but because it’s always been in you. And your customers see and appreciate that.

Simply write with the door closed, and rewrite with the door open. Don’t mix the two, and don’t skip a step. And do it over, and over, again.

Want to dive deeper?

If you liked this, check out this list of my top posts, read and shared by thousands of entrepreneurs.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Executive Coaching for Entrepreneurs

There’s a reason every elite athlete in the world works with a coach. You need more than one perspective to see your best work.

I’m an executive coach and the founder of Inside-Out Leadership, a boutique leadership development agency that supports entrepreneurs to step fully into their lives, and transform their companies into their masterpieces.

Leveraging 15-years as a founder/CEO, along with deep training in mindfulness, psychology, Neurolinguistic Programming, psychedelic integration and more, I have helped leaders from some of the fastest growing companies and VC funds in the world design a more conscious life and make key changes to improve their performance and satisfaction.

I coach leaders how I want to be coached: