Why I stopped chasing viral and started chasing useful
This started as a throwaway line in a notebook and turned into the thing I get asked about most. So I will try to say it properly.
An audience, on the other hand, is a small group of people who remember what you said last year and came back specifically to see what you would say next. Building the latter takes longer, feels smaller on most days, and is the only kind that survives when a platform changes its algorithm or a channel you relied on quietly disappears overnight.
The work, then, is to write so clearly and so specifically that those ten people cannot help but forward it to one more. That single act of passing something along is how a real audience is built, one trusted recommendation at a time, and it is a great deal more durable than any metric on a dashboard. There is a real difference between a crowd and an audience, and it took me years to learn it. A crowd is mostly noise: anonymous, easily startled, gone the moment something more interesting happens.
What actually taught me something was replying by hand to a dozen emails and noticing, slowly, which ones turned into real conversations. The numbers, I came to understand, are a lagging indicator. The people who stay are the ones who feel, in some quiet way, that you are writing directly to them. Earning that feeling is slow, sometimes discouraging work, but it is the entire foundation.
A useful test, if you are building anything public: could you name ten people who read everything you publish? If you can, you have something genuine. If you cannot, no amount of raw reach is going to save a mailing list that nobody actually reads. The temptation, of course, is to optimize for the largest possible number. But an audience that arrives for free and leaves just as easily is not really yours in any meaningful sense.
Everything else — the launches, the collaborations, the occasional viral moment — is just weather on top of a much deeper and more stable structure. I used to refresh my subscriber numbers the way other people check the weather, convinced that the rising total meant something about the quality of the work. It taught me nothing useful. The conversations are the leading one. A thousand quiet readers who write back are worth more than a hundred thousand silent scrolls past your headline.
None of this is a system. It is just what I keep coming back to, long after the clever ideas have stopped working. An audience, on the other hand, is a small group of people who remember what you said last year and came back specifically to see what you would say next. Building the latter takes longer, feels smaller on most days, and is the only kind that survives when a platform changes its algorithm or a channel you relied on quietly disappears overnight. The work, then, is to write so clearly and so specifically that those ten people cannot help but forward it to one more. That single act of passing something along is how a real audience is built, one trusted recommendation at a time, and it is a great deal more durable than any metric on a dashboard.