F2F #46: Creating an audience: the good, the bad and the ugly

This week's issue is written by my good friend Iñaki Arriaga. I've mentioned his Friday twitter threads more often than not in my recommended content section of past issues.

As I mentioned, several of my friends will write some issues for me during my paternity leave, so I'll leave you with the first one! Enjoy!

If you spend any time on social media, you’ve probably seen countless gurus pushing the “build an audience first, then monetize” gospel (conveniently packaged with their $997 audience-building course, because selling courses is the only business they actually know). So today we’re going to talk about this topic, even though I got my audience after starting my business, I think I can tell you a couple of things about it.

In the early years of Acumbamail, my main concern was the business. Period. No events, no newsletter, no interviews, and no distractions. We wouldn’t go to an event even if it was at our doorstep.

In the last three years, I’ve gone from being completely unknown to having some presence, especially in the software creation and sales segment. Appearances on more than a dozen podcasts, a newsletter with 5,000 subscribers, thousands of followers on social media.

After years of doing both, I honestly can’t tell you which approach is “right.” Building an audience first? Building a business first? They each have their tradeoffs. So instead of pretending I have all the answers, let me just share the raw truth about what I’ve learned – the wins, the headaches, and everything in between.

The good

• For someone who has been confined for years with their computer just producing, these types of activities are refreshing.
• I believe that sharing learnings and trying to help those coming behind contributes positive things to the ecosystem. The words of people who already have experience doing things are useful, even though they’re often hidden by those from people who have no idea but are better at communicating.
• Any form of expression where you have to write a script beforehand will allow you to reflect and delve deeper into the topic. The best way to improve a skill is to try to teach it.
• For me, the key part is the connections. This topic has allowed me to meet many people like me. We live in a small city far from business hubs, and sometimes it feels good to be able to chat with people who understand the problems you’re going through.
• There’s a financial upside that’s nice to have, even though it’s peanuts compared to my main business income. But there’s something satisfying about treating it like its own mini-business experiment.

The bad

• It’s time-consuming. I mainly create written content, although I’d like to do video content, and that’s why I find it faster and easier. But if you want to get serious about it, it takes quite a bit of time.
• It’s mentally demanding – being able to have the discipline to write every week is sometimes hard. Also, I’m afraid of ending up writing topics that are bullshit just to fill the gap. It’s happened to me a few times, but occasionally it happens and it pisses me off.
• I personally feel that everything I publish is crap. And that’s hard to face week after week. On the other hand, people’s feedback makes you think that what you’re doing makes sense.
• You lose focus. Acumbamail is in a quite advanced phase and has an interesting level of success. I don’t think I would have had the opportunity to do this when the project was starting and we were putting in all the hours of the day.
• Building an audience without actual experience is a recipe for mediocrity. When you haven’t built anything real, you’re just recycling other people’s ideas and passing them off as wisdom. Sure, some of these people get huge followings, but look at their audience it’s mostly other wannabe influencers and people who’ve never shipped anything. It’s the blind leading the blind.

The ugly

• There are lines I’m not willing to cross. And this is quite tricky because you compare yourself with people who really go viral and the things that really work, and you feel like you’re failing. Then you can end up doing stupid things, TikTok dances, or selling smoke, which is something I’m not willing to do.
• Depending on the type of business, it will help or not. In our case, an email marketing SaaS, it helps but it’s not the perfect business for this type of strategy. It would work better if we sold training or consulting, but there is a relevant number of customers who have chosen us because of the content.
• If you really want to monetize it, the path is probably training or premium content. And when I started doing this, my idea was to do it for the good of the ecosystem, so putting a paywall in front of my content feels like a small betrayal of my mission. Despite this, I’m aware that if I want this to be sustainable, we’ll have to get there at some point.

Iñaki Arriaga is best known as the cofounder of Acumbamail, a startup based in Ciudad Real that developed an email marketing product serving over 4,000 clients in Spain and Latin America. Acumbamail is notable for being a bootstrapped software company that reached €2.4 million in annual revenue without raising external capital, and was eventually sold twice: first to the Italian company MailUp and then again as part of a subsequent transaction. I've hosted him on the Life on Mars podcast to discuss entrepreneurship, bootstrapping and not being a shithead in business (in Spanish). One of my favourite episodes of all time.