It's not about you.
The literature and elite public figures have urged entrepreneurs for years to "build an audience" and suggested "build in public" to that end. These are right as long as we take the proper lessons from them.
The advice on this often comes down to tactical advice on how to engage at a surface level. Reply and quote-tweet on Twitter. Tweet threads ("storms") that tell people what they love to hear. There are even information products with pre-written vapid tweets that sound wise one can stick into Buffer or the like for peppering their feed to sound deep or thoughtful.
I would start with substance - what are the problems faced by the market you want to serve? And how can they be addressed?
First, what are the problems in the market? It is perfectly reasonable that you might not have a handle on this question at the outset. We learn! Retweeting and ideally getting interviews are tools to engage in conversations to gain insight from market participants. Go to where they convene and start listening. One can listen publicly. Interviewing on recorded calls where you share the findings and public dialogues on forums are examples. Since they are on open platforms, you can further use social and other media to share those conversations. Non-confidential conversations - such as a hallway track - can get reported after the fact too.
Here's the thing: nobody will pay attention to what you have to say at first. Even if you are right, you are not yet believable. Build an asset of knowledge. Some of that knowledge will be confidential, but the vast majority is not. Publish the latter, larger body in near real-time.
I talk to streamers, video makers, and writers. All of them tell me the same thing: you have to love creating content because it is a terrible way to make money. It's also not great for getting attention in the short term - putting out content is no guarantee that anyone will listen.
What they do tell me is to be authentic and to be consistent. Linking that with the journalistic market-finding work above, consistently talking to the market, and sharing knowledge builds on that ever-so-slow compounding path. They also tell me that it's not like you take a month off to do a bunch and then put it down for a while. One should make the output consistent, and the easiest way to ensure that quality is to make the work of it a daily habit. Y-Combinator Startup School encourages talking to 5 customers per week - that's one per business day.
What's the point if nobody is listening? First, you have the archive. The discipline of writing insights out is rare and valuable. And later, when someone finds one of your content pieces because they think it is insightful or helpful, they will find a library of more profound insight that goes back in time. They can follow your journey of understanding people like them.
Being worth listening to takes work. Putting in that work through listening to the market and repeating concerns is the first step to creating extraordinary value for them. They were unheard - you are their herald.
The next step is to speak to where they are going. Michael Schrage suggests we ask: "What do our customers want to become - and what do we want them to become?" The answer to this normative question is in positive knowledge - which you now have! This aspirational question is where one can rise from being a messenger to a tribune. A hero can point the way to a better path. Now others have a reason to listen to you. You started with repeating the concerns for the market, and now you point the way to a higher plane.
This higher aspiration will get you more attention. A charlatan can start at this normative level and probably get heard through decent salesmanship and cold reading. But a founder who wants to make a difference should come here through knowledge of self and the market.
My definition of servant leadership is leadership born of service. One should aspire to serve, and leadership in thought and deed is the side effect.
Speaking to the ambitions of the market gets other market participants to push back. While facts are facts, aspirations are opinions, and everyone's got one. Now you are triggering dialogue and debate. Fostering that debate is good because it means the concerns of your market get more airtime. In my work, I try to be opinionated, draw out opinions, and then air them in a friendly spirit, even if I disagree. The point is to get the questions aired. In that way, we serve the market rather than our parochial opinions.
As we have gathered facts on the market and started to form opinions built on those facts, we can move to make a change. A technical entrepreneur would have loved to begin at this point. But for the most successful founders I have met, this is step three and not step one. Maybe you built something early, but we turned back to understand the market of today and tomorrow. At this point, we are looking at what the market demands to achieve the state change it wants to make - and that we wish it to make.
As servants of the market, we should be rooting for its success, so to the extent that the market might want faster horses, we are thinking ahead to the car that will accomplish its fundamental need for progress. The difference is in the means of solution, not a dispute over the problem itself.
If we have already built a habit of learning about the market in public and working toward its aspirations, then credibly building a solution should follow. You want the market to be rooting for your success because you root for theirs. This virtuous cycle is a flywheel - slow to start but with power and momentum once turning. You will reap the benefits you read about from the "build in public" literature when you end with this phase rather than start with it.
Finally, all this so far lacked a discussion of commerce. My take is one should engage in the market economically as early in this process as possible. First, learn about needs, and test the learning through applying smaller solutions. Ideally, the work is professional - an invoice at the end. At first, that invoice may be below "market" because you lack believability in this particular domain. That can be ok because the economic signal itself is worth something to you. Straight consulting and value-added reselling are the more accessible paths to this initial income and market signal at first.
As your believability and understanding of the market solidify, your offering can similarly productize. And as you get greater clarity on what the market needs to achieve its goals, you can potentially pre-sell your next offering, creating valuable market validation and financing those efforts. When commerce and storytelling combine around an offering that solves a real need, the flywheel turns faster.
Build the audience, and build in public. But do so through creating knowledge and value about the market and where it is going. And while this will create wealth through a great business, remember the essential rule to serving in public:
It's not about you.
Photo by Matthew Osborn on Unsplash