How To Get Started With Building An Audience in 2022

well let's go ahead and kick things off how do you think about audience building and and what does your audience mean to you sean 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 the way i approached it was after i sold my company i said alright i could 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 well and and i that was were big question i kinda scared me so then i i i trimmed it data i said alright we'll do i just wanna spend my days what would be a normal 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 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 they or it's you know where the hell you know do peanuts grow on trees from the ground i i don't let me go find that out right like whatever it is i was i wanna be professionally curious alright well that's cool the curious part's it's 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'm i wanna you know go look into and then i just gotta package up my learnings at the end and share them with others alright 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 professional professionally curious to be able to wake up and just dive into the things that's most on my mind that day and have no other restrictions be beyond that that's that i'm sorry how about you yeah i mean i think that building an audience is a lot like making money especially in the year two thousand and twenty two which is that you have to provide something that two thousand exist and then people will comm out it with their attention or you know your business then 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 is just to continue to fill niches started out filling one particular niche built niches and niches and niches put an underlying philosophy that ge that and then continue to try and build more on top of that which just results in overall top line figure that continues to go up yeah 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 point o one percent of podcasts get just so many more downloads than even the top one percent of podcast like when i figured it when i found out what was even in the top one percent i was wait like twenty thousand downloads i mean how can i was i even know how you make a living for something like that and then you know you compare that to what the top ten are so i think that execution is harder than every 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 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 to play like simple simple not easy right yeah it could be simple what the the answer is but not necessarily easy like we did this like getaway like this getaway where root and play basketball with a bunch of interesting people and one of the people that came was mister beast the number one youtuber in the world so he you know he knows the thing or two about audience building and it's like if you talk to him you're like hey you know awesome what's the what's the what's the secret what's the trick for getting huge on youtube but he's like he's like i just wanna make the best youtube videos possible make great videos and like okay yeah but like you how'd you do how'd you do go number one he's like just try to make great videos every everybody day just wake up and i'm like alright what's a great video how do i make that and it's like simple not easy in the sense that like he he didn't over complicate okay well what makes a great video something that gets your attention something that holds your attention something that you know makes you feel something at the end you know laughter or you know feel good moment or outright whatever it is you could choose and either you could break it down from there and add a little more detail but fundamentally you're not gonna get some answer that's like damn i never thought of that alright wow they had this insight that's just not it wasn't available to me and and now that i have this insight now i i too can go succeed it's like the best the people were the best do the simple thing just better than everybody else totally is is make great content is that really kind of the the bottom line here if you're were to say like what separates that top one percent the saga was mentioning from the other ninety nine percent is it as simple as just make great content or yes okay well and with your yc right i'll will you you were guys were were you in yc we did yes yeah what what's the yc motto right yc the greatest startup up accelerator in the world bard on has a create greatest track record created almost half a trillion dollars of value of the companies that went through it what's the secret make something people want is their motto just trying to pay start up don't get distracted by fundraising and press and all these other things that you could try to growth hacks are you making something people want of course really you know tell me how do you know what well what what gives you that feeling and then there's sort like i don't know i just got sort of assumed i was it sounds so simple that i just sort of assumed i was already doing that same thing with content or audience building are you making content that people want right that's the that's the thing because i've just make great content it's make content that people want that's what great content is when he talked about picking niches and then figuring out how to serve that niche that's what he doing making content that people want in that category and then doing it better than than others and doing it consistently so they build a habit etcetera etcetera i completely agree yeah i mean i get approached for a lot of people hey will this light do it for me will this camera i'm like camera not a problem bro i'm like your conscious problem i'm like make that that good everything falls man you know i recently spent sixty thousand dollars on cameras and that's after three years of doing this but needing four k cameras was an added benefit for my existing audience not what i needed for a requisite to start like sure there's the baseline level of production i think a pop filter like a yeti ux usb mic and a basic webcam and that is not a high start cost and everybody's like what about my thumbnails what about my listed thumbnails matter headlines matter all that other stuff matters etcetera but what sean is talking about which is that all mister beast does is he knows exactly how to rank of retention thumbnail all of that stack it all on top of each other iterate it a million times and then come up with the quote unquote secret sauce he has the exact same youtube dashboard that i have that all of us have of that that europe access to he just figured it out how to read it better than anybody else so i always say is the content good that's my number one concern is it good is it compelling and that as he said it's simple it's not easy and know at a certain point it it is strange like it is really one of those like you know it when you see it i can listen to something and be like that's compelling and i can listen to something like i don't know what it is ma'am this needs work and and it it's tough to exactly explain what that is yeah we we listen to a a session on product like growth yesterday and it was almost like everybody was kinda like well what's what's the hack what's the tactic what's the secret and our speakers were very simply like well you need an a plus product in order to have any sort of product led growth and i feel like the the principal stance stands true for any form of of audience growth as well you now both of you have pretty distinct personal brands as well as like a a business brand that you're you're both independently growing either on accident or on purpose how do can you think about these sort of brand building as like as a company as an entity versus personal brand building do you have any heuristic or or ways of thinking about it saga you know the way that you kinda use your own twitter versus like right breaking points yeah that's interesting so from a business obviously it has be you whenever and john you you too you're like you're in a partnership right so this is inherently not something that you have total and a hundred percent freedom month so like whenever i'm doing something under the bp umbrella or you know business or hiring it's not necessarily just a reflection of me it's a reflection of the ethos and the principles that we decided that we were gonna grow on mutually agree on together you know within that framework everything is being brand is being used that's a reflection of us of our philosophy etcetera on my personal brand to be honest i just to have a a lot less capacity for carrie guide like if i'm interested in it i'm just gonna explore it i frankly i'm at a level where i can do that if i want to and if people have only i'm i literally don't care you know either issue you know how hard it is thunder to find get find tweets that i'm able to show yeah i was like i was little scared whenever you can it early i was like oh man i was earn a piss off at the audience but i mean that's fine you know i'm just to it in this line of work and that's kind of what i'm what i'm getting at which is that their the business has an orientation which is a make money b perpetuate itself for me personally i mean obviously my personal brand probably thought about this very very differently whenever i was younger and i was like on the up and up but at this level i actually just do whatever i want to do and so that is the i the only dichotomy between the two how you think about sean so what kind of answer would be interesting to you here well what what's like the like because i try to figure out what's the question behind the question so so the question the surface question is like what's the difference between your your pod brand and your personal brand but what is the question behind that the question behind that here let let me start with the problem so the problem is that audience building as a brand is hard it's hard to create affinity when it's it's not coming from a a human face and people often find at least in in the folks that i've i've chatted with it even person on honestly demand curves twitter has has been difficult to grow versus like you know like individuals as like julian for example has a much easier time with his with his growth and then we do as a company account so yeah the question behind the question that's a great question sean is you how how ought to like how how should start up some companies be thinking about audience audience building when they have yeah but they have got like the personal brand i understand no i understand yeah the question really is like what am i doing wrong here with demand curve hey but but more generally was speaking like i don't know the it's i haven't cracked this no what's the difference i've i've noticed personal brands are easier to grow but i also do i want my company thing to grow blah blah blah i think that here's my like very simple slash controversial take on this which is i think if you're a company you should be using individual faces to grow you'll go we'll go faster that way if you're an individual trying to grow like a media property you should put it under a brand umbrella mostly because you can't ever sell you so like if you wanted this to be an asset and not a job you needed to grow its own brand like you need breaking points or like in market case like i had a personal newsletter and a personal twitter that grew really fast i grew my personal twitter from like ten or twenty thousand followers to it's at three hundred thousand and like a year basically a year and a half in a year we got to two hundred thousand and then it just trickled up but like great what am i gonna do with that i'm i i don't really wanna be some like influencer and and great like you know i can't hand this off to anybody it's my voice is my name as my face so it's a job now i need to maintain this thing and it's cool because like i just don't get like i'm like sorry i just don't care so i'll go six weeks without tweeting because i i'm not trying to maintain some schedule it's not a business of mine but when i created the milk road it's intentionally not called sean's crypto newsletter which actually would have been easier at to start to get subscribers for because people already had bought into the sean franchise so going for oh sean it's gonna talk about crypto and do crypto analysis and crypto opinions great i wanna know about that but instead i called it the mill road because i thought one day i'd like to not be the guy writing this thing one day i'd like to not be the person maybe even owning this thing i'd like to sell this someday i want this to be an independent asset and so for that again me as an independent media a content creator i created a brand umbrella for those reasons but let's say it was my startup i would be saying hey i'm sean the growth guy from be and i wanna talk about growth over here not the be account doing it because it's gonna get less play because people would rather follow people than than companies and so you gotta use you bake that trade off when you're already a company then use the fact that people would rather follow people if you're an individual you take a little hit by putting it under a brand umbrella but you get this big benefit of it's not tied to your name and face forever that way so it's a strategic bet that's my it's my opinion on this yeah well no it's super helpful and it kind of points to the problem that we originally had at demand curve where so much of our brand equity was tied up in julian brand equity and so you know being able to build that up under a a new brand has certainly been something that you know we've done over the last last couple years that's super helpful okay we yeah let's go ahead and and start to repeat that tweet segment here let's we're we're gonna experiment with screen sharing for the first time see how this goes and yeah both of y'all all the the idea here is for both of y'all to just re react to the tweet what were you thinking when you tweeted it out why do you think it took off why did it work and yeah any other context that you think we would find interesting oh i wonder what percentage of these i'm just gonna be like i have no idea what i was thinking i stupid these these are bang on so so hopefully hopefully remember sean you you did this hot take about everybody being wrong about the med obviously is a very hot topic at the time when you did this what can you what can you tell us about this well i'll tell you kind of like okay i'll tell you my point in a second but like i guess that's a little less interesting even than just the what made this work so this thing reached i think i don't know the exact stats i think it's like sort of like some was ten and twenty million people in the us but then it also was it got shared like crazy on instagram and i shared in china like some big chinese like social media influencers were posting it i guess so it got like millions of views there logan paul was talking about on his podcast mark zuckerberg referenced this and le stream interview so hey like went really far and i was like why did this go so far and i think it goes because it basically had three things number one it was timely so this is right when facebook had rebranded into meta people were talking with the meta and i think everybody had this like sixth sense and they still sort of like you know sneaking suspicion that everybody's bullshit about this but like nobody knew it was all smart people and big names that were were saying how the meta the future nobody was saying what the health of meta is or why it's the future and so like i think everybody kinda smelled i didn't know how to call it so it was timely i was calling bullshit which generally is like something people are gonna wanna click into and read and then last thing was i think i backed it up i think i had a good point that could get you to agree with my my my conspiracy theory if so to speak was not so far fetched and basically what all i was saying was like when people hear the word med they think about this like virtual reality shit like i'm living in something i'm a avatar now and i said actually i think it's more like this concept called the singularity which is an an artificial intelligence which is like this moment in time this tipping point where computers you know have reached a super intelligence and they're so vastly smarter than then then humans and they they are so smart they just program themselves to become it's like runaway intelligence they program themselves to become smarter and so i thought oh the meta is kinda like that it's basically this tipping point where well a lot of my friends are online now i i think i have this experience many you guys do look at this like experience we're having now a lot of my work is now digital my social identity like my profiles my followers are all digital you know my if i buy t's cool so my art is no digital more and more things more important more things that are important to you are now like they live on the internet and so at some point all of your digital stuff matters to you more and you spend more time and energy and focus there than you do in your physical that doesn't mean you'll never go eat or walk or exercise or anything like that that's not what it means but it just means like sort of there's a tipping point where before rewind twenty years it it didn't matter like you know i had a computer room in my house that was like you know there was computer room and everything else was non computer and now like you know the computers attached to my body basically right so it's like you've seen this transition already it's just gonna continue and so hey don't think it's this crazy virtual world it's just this tipping point where at some point that we've been creeping towards it creeping towards it at some point we're just gonna value our digital stuff more than we do our physical in the sense that we're gonna spend more time and energy and effort and money on on the internet than we do offline that was the idea so that's that's my explain the super helpful man it it was surprising to me during your podcast with hu mina that he was he he was genuinely triggered by the suite it it affected him at like an identity level yeah he called me he was like hey can i call you i don't know the guy by the way i didn't know him before this he's like he he had followed me from one other tweet that went viral about club house and he then he called he called me he was like bro i like i do stand up comedy and real look crowds with real people that energy that is my home that is my craft that is my favorite feeling in the world and like god i don't want this like you know meta bullshit like you know and yeah talk through it and i was like i don't know what to tell you about like i i think it's going to that direction i don't think you know i remember i remember people like i i love waking up getting the newspaper bringing it in from my front lawn and the feel of the newspaper right and like it's true you you probably did like that thing but guess what you liked more was like instant real time news constantly flooding into your brain turns out that that was more addictive that like you know being able to get news from all these different sources rather than just your local provider that turned out to be really important being able to access it on the go on your phone turned out that wasn't really important so yeah you like the feel of but there's all these other benefits that like ended up crushing that so that was a that's what happened after after this tweet if you contextualize it well we talked about kind of the benefit of accountability you a book double edged sword here we're you know get the upside and the risk involved in that super interesting saga yes it's like i like i said challenging to find fleets i can share with everybody here but i would love to hear fargo yeah actually i think her most far was two days ago i i i just thought that yeah very good up there if you gotta talk to us about what why did this this tweet work what well what is this speaking to and like why do you think this resonated yeah i'm actually it's interesting i kind of pivoted it's to becoming the gas guy politically this really is really just purely a function of what i talked about earlier which is that i if you were to ask me why i think my show is successful is i think because i cover things in a way that most people feel are not being covered by existing sources of information that's very basic like thesis statement that's why i think it does well i've always noticed that coverage of gas is skewed in a particularly part way so one of the things that i like to do is just highlight a text class time think that reed american has to put into their car on average a couple of times where or at the very least like once a week a couple of times a month so what did i do i said the average american nets x amount of money after taxes at five dollars a gallon that means that they're spending approximately ten percent of their take home pay on gas when you include food and housing it gives you a picture of how bad things are that's not a political statement that's just like a statement about where things are that got shared as saying i mean people screenshot it it was shared on instagram both ways it's like why you know oil companies need to stop profit here's why biden needs to start drill i mean you can put it any particular way you want i mean in general my most viral content actually auto just speaks to more putting out like facts and then contextual them in a way where people feel like they can be used to something that is very meaningful to their life i'll give you another example one of my most viral posts recently has been about mortgages and it really was just a basic take about like hey in twenty twenty one you could buy ex house price house for this monthly payment mortgages price has now gone up so now you get less house once again like you can read that whichever way you want like you could be like congratulations jerome powell you can say screw you jerome out like you could put it any particular way so i think to you piggyback on what shaun is saying i think timelines is everything everything so ty is you know ty is because number one it has to be timely number two it has to be the most viral stuff i believe has to be able to resonate with somebody and not tell them how to think just given the ability to then form something and then three i think it's also concise which is why twitter is very very helpful yeah that that's great by the way this it's like you handed them like a hammer and you're like yeah beat up whoever you wanna beat up with the exactly this could be used on any anybody yeah you know just think use it to serve your agenda which is like kind of the like i don't know cynical take on content creation which is like you will blow up faster if you sort of gas up an audience around something that they already have a bias or or belief system of and you feed that this happens for example like it doesn't even have be political with crypto this happens all the time which is like oh just be anti the dollar anti fed anti warren buffett anti whoever you just keep feeding information that like r up this zealous crowd that already believes and all they're looking for is like but not looking for real information they're looking for information that just fits their worldview view only and i i don't mean that to pick on them because pretty much everybody does this and so you know everybody's looking for information that feeds their worldview view so one useful way of think about it is what world do i like and respect and maybe share what worldview do i understand and then that's the world that i can serve by producing good packaged nuggets because i know what will hit with that audience and then i i'm focused on that versus just generically producing content and then not really thinking about the world that it's gonna go live in our software is the worst have you heard of hubspot see most crm are a cobb together mess but hubspot is easy to adopt and actually when fortress sweet think i love our new crm our software is the best hubspot grow better by the way that what what's the what's the tweet that went viral two days ago oh that was about doctor fauci we don't have to get into that one i about that one here to do i mean all go into it i don't care sure well they'll not to derail your not talking derail christian for those who are not familiar with something called the lab leak theory the theory is is that coronavirus leaked from a lab and so the underlying facts and circumstances around this are pretty interesting the tweet that i did was again you know actually speaks directly to what you just talked about sean which is that if you're familiar with the characters who are involved there's one particular guy who served as the cutout as so called cut out of funding from the nih wuhan institute vi his name was doctor peter das he's been intimately involved kind of in the cover up of any facts or evidence around the lab week theory this was all old news at this point basically two years ago that we've known all of this information well you know doctor fauci on his weighing days as the head of nia d actually just granted a six hundred thousand dollar grant to the same individual for the same type of research which possibly led to the the escape of coronavirus from the wuhan that was it there you go it's right in front of you fauci sheet is winning days as you said like here's information why do i think it went viral i mean that's not difficult because nobody else was reporting it and millions and millions of millions of people are interested that's literally just a screenshot from a government website like that's the way yeah you you said something like you know i know a lot of people care about yeah like i know that gas issue or something a lot of people about that they don't feel is being adequately covered how do you know that you're reading youtube comments to get this information you're talking to people we're how are you figuring out both what my niche is interested in and then where are they where there's a lack of service on that topic is it because you're not seeing it and so you're like oh i i am a customer that's how i know or you do you have some feedback loop how do you do it at this point is art and a science so i have a general intuition of like this is not being covered also the reason why i got to gas was because i could see that my segments on inflation where you're going astra like dramatically high really what it is is i did a monologue months and months and months ago just it was very basic i was like hey we are gonna have an energy price crisis this was actually before the entire russian invasion of ukraine because we were still having problems in our gas supply and i was really obsessed like why the specific market conditions and it just went mega viral and i got all these emails from these people being like hey man like thank you so much like nobody talks about is like a heating oil in vermont and like couple of contracts look like for these things and you know for me and my family i only make fifty thousand dollars a year so when have to lock in at x price like it really really hurts and i was like mh well that's interesting and so then again you know you throw a couple test segments and you're like do some segments on it each one either consistently performs or it does more so than normal i'm like okay well clearly people care a lot about this and so what i do then is like kind of use my insider ability is a guy who works in the washington press corps and more to like cover it in a professional manner and i think that was the way that i can discover but i also have a general sense of you know i work in this media i work in media i live in dc i know what the people in power are talking about and obsessed with and my general orientation had been to bet against whatever that is and cover anything else and in general that serves me very well so there you go that's cool i like that one thing that saga shared maybe when i when we get into more tactics later you can cover this but one of the things that worked for him early on was i think you would said like just posting transcripts of like what have different people would say so trump would say something all you would do is just snip the transcript and just sweep that out and let people to have whatever take they wanted it on it mh yeah i mean i share that so my first fifty thousand followers i was i was really obsessed with twitter like obsessed which is not a good thing i should say i went both was younger and i was like i wanna get more where i i remember michael i was i want fifty thousand followers i i had like four thousand at the time i had a job i was white house correspondent i'm like okay well how can i take advantage of this so all i did was i just got really proficient at using live transcription services which literally watched cable television and then spit out rough transcripts copy and pasting it taking out the cast editing it for clarity and just trying to be one of the first people to be like trump said x or the secretary of state said why and as you said all bill you're just pumping information out into the world this is why also you know i think i probably have a timely bias because i work in the news business like for us timelines is everything if you're two hours late like you might as well be dead you know the year hobby and so for for us like micro second especially in the you know in the so called like information distribution gain you're competing against the associated press against reuters and you know like major multi dollar professional organizations it really just turned out to be getting pretty good at tweeting out transcript so i think my first fifty thousand followers all just came from people were following me in order to find out like what was going on that day in politics and since that was literally my job i was both doing my job well and i was building an audience so there's there's a lot of yeah there's there's a lot of ways that people in this audience can apply that i mean you're all in your own niche you all have the the influencers and the leaders in their in those niche is going out and doing appearances there's ways of adapting this strategy not just in that news and timelines context but even in the tech i i have a quick well timelines oh yeah yeah got works justifies simplifies it so i created or so there was this big news event that happened in crypto where this token called luna crashed and it had been one of the high flyers and then it goes to zero kind of like overnight and i had a position in luna so i ended up losing was like a million dollars in that crash and i also had kind of like a an interesting take because you need to have a take on you know everybody knows what happened but they wanna know is you know either why it happened or what it means and and so i had a good take and i decided okay the way i'm gonna do the and and two things happened i was a little bit busy that week i was like a vacation stuff like that i came back alright a couple days go by and then i was like okay what do do either i'm just gonna post this as like you know it's you know a couple tweaks it's a thread or what if i made like a video on this and so i go on youtube i end up creating this like almost like a the like the john oliver show what's last week tonight i go and i create this like i'm like i do this rant i i rant about luna i rant about why why blue white i got big and the why crushed i got devastated and they was had jokes splice in heard this editor the editor is amazing we're working on this we're iterating on it we're making great content and we put it out now two and a half weeks have gone by as you put it out you could see this if you go to youtube luna john or something like that and the the video has like i don't know seventeen thousand views or so twenty thousand views maybe at this point but i know it never went viral and like so you i consider that sort of like a flop of a piece of content especially one that i tried really hard on and the funny thing is like kinda knew this that like like the smarter thing would have been if i literally had opened up my phone typed out a thing in the notes app screenshot it and just posted it immediately when it happened it would've have been less great because it was not the joe torn as good the there was no video production it was no nothing but it would have been on time and on time matters way more than great and it when it comes to this type of what does everybody care about right now because lot time three weeks have done by just nobody cared about it anymore the world had moved all there's two other crises to worry about and so that was a an expensive of time wise lesson of how much effort i put into something that did not go viral compared to shit that did go viral because i did it you know good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time totally agree good enough that the right time is better than great at the wrong time that is the the quote and heck of a some art here that you got going on sean i love it okay cool let's rapid fire through one more each let's see so sean we have your club that one but i feel like it's pretty close to the meta one as to why that work do you wanna talk about this elon one or do you wanna talk about this learning one yeah i'll do both real quick the elon one is actually like kickstarter was saying i i one of the threads that went viral was not no original insight elon was on club house elon like popped down to club boss when club house was hot and you know just i guess appears by elon musk is not something you get very often and also club house was like overload it was like invite only and it was overloaded so i just go for those who are locked out of elon thing here's what he's saying and i just live typed and transcribed everything interesting he was saying in a thread in real time and i was the only guy doing it and like you know on one hand i felt a little silly as i oh man i've become like a professional note taker on a fucking beta app of club club house like jeez what does my career come to and then also i was like oh wow it's just like seven thousand likes already okay never i'm shut up like go and so you know i just like just did it but it was like it it it talks about that same thing which is like some people think they need to have this like really great insight or amazing you know perspective or whatever and sometimes you're just providing a service better than others you're just clipping good content and you're posting it and you're doing that consistently and people will follow you for that you can build a huge audience as simply a curator or remix of content you don't even need to be an original content creator i would say in most cases you do not need to be so that's kind of what this one was which is i just pull this was separately i just pulled out you know this this great quote you know by elon and and you know this is another one where it fits people's worldview my my audience is mostly entrepreneurs entrepreneurs love to have this chip on the shoulder this badge of pride about like how hard it is to be entrepreneur which i find pretty stupid in general but i can play to it and so i played into it here which is like elon was like you know if you need words of encouragement for doing a start don't do a start up oh yeah like you know that's right we are the special breed and like we don't need this you know motivational you know speech speeches whatever so i knew that this would play and so you know just threw out there to and and sure enough if it hits the other one that you shared was oh yeah this was meant to trigger people so everybody thinks that everybody thinks that things like education and health care are like highly nuanced topics and i find it also that really funny and stupid like i i think that nuance is something that spark people love to hide behind because it's so easy to just say well you know it depends and like you know it's it's not so simple it's not so easy it's not so cut dry it's not so black and white it's not so binary they love to like do this this nuance thing and so i knew i could trigger everybody if i just said here i i could fix education in like a tweet it's like oh classic tech bro thinks he could fix education in a stupid tweet and so you know i know how to like you know just bait the animals with like here you go right and it's something i do believe which is that most people when they wanna learn something they start by trying to learn it like go read about it they watch about it they they go attend seminars and workshops or take courses about it and they'd be better off just going and trying to do the damn thing and then when they get stuck they should go look up how to get un stuck like i do believe that that's true but if i just said that it would have gotten a tenth of the likes by by adding there a i fixed education i was able to trigger a bunch of people and so you know that was you these are the jedi mind tricks of of the of the great creators i mean i really hear that you relate to twitter as a game like it's not like thing where you have to tell like you you what you believe exactly the way you believe it you're you're there there's there's a bit of a game that you're playing is that how you would relate to it yeah don't take it too seriously like i don't think anything too seriously but definitely not gonna be twitter of the things i take too i i barely take parenting and like you know the things like that seriously i try to be playful and silly and lighthearted but those too so i'm definitely not gonna take twitter too seriously and the other thing is i i'm lucky that twitter is not where i like i'm not twitter is not my my my real job you know like i i've basically been successful outside of content creation so i had the security that i can just kind of f around with content creation and do what i think is interesting because i'm not doing this in order to become successful so i don't have to so i didn't have this mental block of like i need to play things a certain way so saga i was talking about this too like once you get to a certain size whether you did it outside of content or even through content you can start playing much looser because the of day your life storage do whatever you wanna do is say what you wanna say it's a lot more fun rewarding and fun and interesting that way and so you could do that you know you could buy yourself that right but most people are sort of have this mental block where they're like afraid and they take everything so seriously and then it becomes an unpleasant and experience for them i think i think a lot of people don't don't enjoy social media because they don't treat it like a game you enjoy games you don't enjoy things that are ultra serious and so you know i think that's where most people get it wrong that's that yeah having that that block of like i need to get it right think is the kind of the internal conversation that that keeps people from even even taking that action in the first place soccer let's see we have this on student debt or this on cnn plus which one would do you like to chat about oh that i like that one that's a good one narrative that i always enjoy that so that one was yeah so just for those oh may have to watching the failure of cnn plus and laps ago obama's five cotton crap are related so why is this tweet successfully you take two viral events that are being discussed you pair them together and then you put a thesis statement on why exactly it supports a broader meta chin established when content previously forced to us and cable monopoly era simply cannot compete in the free market streaming the revolution has just begun so revolution has just begun punchy beats the thesis you know most of the people who follow me and i in general anybody below age like fifty doesn't like cable monopoly and cable news so obviously a huge market there you know biology actually said biology sri option one says something of is always bet on charts it's just you gotta find the right chart to bet on and so i always say that the right chart for me is trusting in the mainstream media which is thirteen percent that means my market size is eighty seven percent of the united states so i only have even more to grow and if you crude the globe on that even like man so i feel sorry for cnn serving this niche for poor if they made some help i got it's about flipping things on its head and it's like no no it's like you're the one who is only serving they need so putting these two things together that obama the spotify contract did cnn like two legacy established political both brands kind of in their own right everybody knows but yet not not a lot of people are consuming and then putting them together and saying and trying to describe a market condition that is arising that can tell us about why these two things have failed that goes against the way that people who actually work in professional media explanation are able to tell you i mean to date i have not seen a dis disproportionate view maybe out of one or two people i can count one hand sarah fisher over at ax i she's awesome there's like dylan buyers over at puck news i think he's a straight shooter or two those two are pretty much the only ones i've seen with like an actual rundown of like why these things don't work compared to the amount of money that are being invested in them the obama spotify contract is the same juan it's like you know they paid the foreign president in the united states millions of dollars and it just didn't do that well when he was paired one of the base ro shares on earth that's that's kind of insane i mean you have somebody who hundreds of millions of people knew there no he's named billions of people probably know his name you have somebody who received like ten how does of millions of votes collectively over two elections and get he can't even crack the top ten on like how does that how does the former mma h fighter beat this person like how how is that possible and so that's a very interesting story and nobody wants to tell that story because you know when you work in the quote unquote powers at b you're gonna offend the wrong people and so it again that's just the niche that opens up for me to come in and to fill that so i think that's why that it took off it was it's not a not even a difficult one really to explain oh no that's that's i'd like that take two viral events get it together with a thesis statement and then cater to that eighty seven percent of the audience yeah who doesn't trust the mainstream media very clever cool well let's go through some rapid fire questions tactical questions and some questions from the audience over the next five to seven minutes and then we'll call it a day saga talked to us you know if you mentioned the the strategy that you did early on kinda just taking scripts of what other more influential people are saying like what were really the inflection points or tactics that took you from from that first zero to a hundred k let's let's think twitter okay so a zero to twitter is actually not that hard which is that most of the people follow only a few amount of get those few amount of accounts in order to follow you and get them to re you and that's basically the secret to grow i don't think that can complicated so what does that mean it's like well find the that niche the point o one percent what do they need in their feed that they're not getting provide that service for me i was the first guy in order to tweet transcript which means that they were all following me which means that they're all re retweeted me and exposing to there are millions of followers which means some people would then follow me so for me it was i would say around ten k is a big is a big jump for some reason in people's minds it's like when you cross ten thousand that is a point where you're gonna get exponentially more new numbers of followers what i have discovered across all of my platforms the more followers you have the easier as it is to get followers which is so frustrated whenever you're starting out you're like when you're at hot man five thousand that at that point five five thousand dollars on instagram which you know once upon a time was the case i got fifty i was like oh my god i lose fifty a day to now actually more probably we were like hundred and get all net out you know at a a thousand a week something like that and it's simply because of like the churn the burn the way that your algorithm treatment is offered so i think ten is a big inflection point i think fifty is an even bigger inflection point that's where things really begin to go vertical and you know this is probably the same startups which is just getting that you know first initial customers and then compounding that to a sustainable ish business is like the really most difficult it requires the most amount of thought because at the end of the day that's right that's where you're filling the niche that's where you're discovering the niche that's where you're playing around that's that's that's really the time too of the most experimentation where you have really really high stakes so i would say it's there and then also on the other end where you know after i through on a k actually after i reach two hundred camp twitter i was i just don't care anymore i was like if it goes up it goes up i could care less you know my business is almost entirely dependent on youtube you know i could frankly i care more on instagram then i do about twitter i think i have much higher quality engagement just from what i've seen my ability to sell either my subscription tickets any of those things are there so then it just became a complete date after that i just genuinely did whatever i want so those are kind of the interesting inflection points cool yeah i i like the idea of finding look there's a few accounts that everybody follows like it's almost account based marketing at that point where yeah getting in in touch and making an impression with those nodes those sort of super nodes in your in your industry sean do you have any anything to add that's smart i wish i done that that it didn't have that insight but i learned something great today yeah mine was sort of like the actually it was the same but i did it in a much slower stupid way which was the first kind of twenty five people mattered a lot and so it's not the number it's who those twenty five are for me i built those relationships in person so like you know ryan hoover had a popular twitter and i had known ryan in person you know for you know seven eight years at that point and so once i started getting active and start saying it's doing things he was happy to kind of like share i never asked him to he just he followed me already he thought some things i said was interesting and he would share with his audience and and then that happened with like twenty five important people in tech that were already well known but i had built in person relationship with them built in person credibility with them and so it's kinda of the same idea actually but just a very slow version of of what you just talked about and i didn't think about it like creating content that that serves them that they would wanna share with their audience i just thought like it just it just accidentally only happens so you know sort of along the way the main things that i would say is like you know figure out your you know the the domains you're trying to build your authority in so you know get really tight on that the tighter the better but it's very tempting to be broad and i've made this mistake many times at they're site being like well it's that but it's also these other things that i like and it's there's also this and it's also that and actually you'd be better off just starting off starting off there then there's basically like some tactical things like you know for example there's this theory called the red pill theory i guess i think in politics this has a different definition but i heard it when i talked to the guy two guys who who do weight but why and so there's like tim who's like the writer at the famous guy and then this is his friend andrew who a childhood friend who helps run his businesses and andrew i talked to andrew andrew was like yeah you need to have your red pill which is like you need to have the truth that you can say that people that wasn't like it's not the thing everybody's saying but when you hear it people like some to say one of the people nod their head vigorously right so what is the end other people called this your spiky point of view it's like you know what is your what's your thing right like you know maybe your thing was like that inflation is a way bigger problem the government is playing this down boom that's your red pill and you can you can base your whole brand off that for a period of time and then you have to eventually swap out and create a a second red pill which is like you need to be giving people and by the way red pill comes from like the matrix which it's like do you want if you take the blue pill you go back into the matrix so you just live like a sheep again then you just don't question anything or do you want the truth and that that's the thing you're trying to give people the truth in a way that they're not that they haven't been told and then you can become known for that and so i think that's important that's a very useful tool i think some other tools are speaking from the eye i i i found great success in this which is a lot of people in the more successful that they get they'll just keeps saying you like a fortune cookie like oh you you gotta do this you gotta do that you know when you feel this way you gotta try doing this and it's like it's much more powerful when you're like you know i was feeling this way i was going through this i had this experience and it made me think this but what i need to do differently is i need to do this it's a much more i think in general good for personal accountability to speak from the eye but secondly i think it plays really well to contact because it's different than what everybody else is doing so same thing personal stories and speaking from the eye i think works but like the high level things is you know you could be either a generous expert sharing your knowledge and expertise or you could be a curious novice and i'm curious novice is somebody who's just going through like you're saying you're just typing out the transcript you're just finding interesting clips and sharing it you're remix packaging c and presenting you know stuff as a beginner point of view rather than saying i know everything so you gotta know what areas are you an expert in and what areas are you gonna be a curious novice and then use both in your content and the last is just i don't know don't quit and go viral like that that's ultimately like if you wanna win don't quit and like find ways to go viral or you won't grow so if you just we're only gonna remember two things on the strategy is like don't quit and go viral i would say is that the the takeaway okay talked about the offer for another hour this is awesome yeah just the the the the nuggets at the end nonstop i i think we're gonna create an illustration of this to capture a lot of those things so stay tuned for that yeah thank thank you both so much for spending your time with us today this is a ton of fun