The Impatience of Wanting an Audience

If you're wondering how to build an audience, there are thousands of strategies available to you.

Post more frequently. Choose the right platform. Create better hooks. Collaborate. Start a newsletter. Optimize your content. Study your analytics.

All potentially useful.

But I wonder whether our obsession with building audiences has made us impatient with the very process through which meaningful audiences form.

We want 10,000 people before we've become important to 100.

We want reach before recognition.

We want people waiting for our next idea before we've given them much reason to return.

I wrote about this impatience years ago. At the time, I thought the answer was to approach audience building more like making friends.

I still believe there is something true in that.

But today I would go further.

Maybe you don't need to build an audience. Maybe you need to build something people repeatedly find worth returning to.

In Create Places People Return To, I explore an idea that feels especially relevant here: meaningful growth happens when we create work, ideas, and experiences people genuinely want to come back to. That shifts the question from “How do I get more people?” to “What am I building that makes returning worthwhile?”

How Do You Build an Audience?

You build an audience by consistently creating useful, resonant work that gives the right people reasons to discover you, remember you, and return.

That process usually takes time because recognition itself takes time.

People rarely encounter one piece of content and immediately decide:

This is someone whose work I want in my life.

They encounter you.

Then perhaps they encounter you again.

An idea helps them.

Something you say gives language to a problem they've been struggling to articulate.

Months later, they search for something and find you again.

Someone sends them one of your articles.

Eventually, your name begins to mean something.

That's different from accumulating followers.

It is recognition.

The Audience Is a Lagging Indicator

Here's a distinction I wish more experts understood:

An audience is often a lagging indicator of work that has become worth returning to.

We tend to reverse the order.

First, get the audience.

Then create things for them.

Then monetize the audience.

But enduring bodies of work often develop differently.

You make something useful.

Then another thing.

You explore an important question from several angles.

Your ideas become clearer.

Your language becomes more recognizable.

And your body of work becomes richer.

People begin discovering it through different pathways.

Some return.

Some tell other people.

And some become clients.

Some stay quietly connected for years.

Eventually, we look at all of those people and call them an audience.

But the audience wasn't necessarily built directly.

It formed around something.

Build the Campfire, Not the Crowd

This gives us a different mental model for audience growth.

Imagine trying to gather a crowd in an empty field.

You could wave your arms.

Make noise.

Invite everyone you know.

Put up signs.

Perhaps people would come.

But then what?

Now imagine building a campfire.

You tend it.

Make it warm.

Create a place where interesting conversations happen.

A few people discover it and stay.

Someone brings a friend.

People leave and come back.

Eventually, there may be quite a few people gathered around it.

The crowd is the visible outcome.

The fire is what made gathering worthwhile.

In an expert business, the fire is your body of work.

Your ideas.

Usefulness.

Perspective.

Your intellectual territory.

The places you've created where people can encounter those things.

If you're impatient about the size of the crowd, tending the fire can feel frustratingly indirect.

But without the fire, you're continually responsible for keeping the crowd there.

People Need More Than Value

I used to say that value was the biggest driver of the web.

Today, I think that's incomplete.

The internet contains almost infinite value.

Someone can find a reasonably good answer to nearly any question in seconds.

AI has made information even easier to obtain.

Being useful still matters enormously.

But usefulness alone doesn't necessarily make someone return to you.

People return because there is something recognizable in the way you help them understand.

Perhaps you name things unusually well.

You connect ideas other people keep separate.

You:

Ask better questions.

Make something complicated understandable.

Have a perspective they trust.

Help them see familiar problems differently.

Information can be substituted.

Perspective creates recognition.

That matters enormously in an environment where information itself is increasingly abundant.

Stop Treating Every Person as an Audience Member

There is another problem with our fixation on audiences.

We start viewing every human encounter through the lens of acquisition.

Could this person subscribe?

Follow?

Share?

Buy?

Join?

What happens if we loosen our grip on that?

Some people will read one article and leave.

Good.

Perhaps it gave them exactly what they needed.

Some will discover you repeatedly without ever subscribing.

Some will quietly read for three years before contacting you.

And some will recommend your work to someone else without ever buying anything themselves.

These aren't failed conversions.

They are different forms of relationship with your work.

A discoverable body of expertise allows for all of them.

Create Places People Can Return To

This is where I think audience building becomes much more interesting.

Instead of asking only:

How do I get more people to follow me?

Ask:

What have I created that's worth returning to?

Can someone explore my thinking beyond today's post?

Do my ideas connect to one another?

Is there somewhere useful to go when someone wants to understand more?

Am I building recognizable intellectual territory, or simply filling a publishing calendar?

Can people find my work without me continually pushing it toward them?

These questions move us from audience acquisition toward infrastructure.

Your articles become places.

Your guides become places.

And your newsletter can become a place.

Your podcast can become a place.

Your frameworks become places people revisit mentally.

Eventually, you are no longer trying to manufacture attention every morning.

You have built things capable of holding it.

Recognition Cannot Be Rushed, But It Can Be Built

This doesn't mean sitting around patiently hoping people eventually notice you.

There is work to do.

Publish.

Distribute.

Collaborate.

Make yourself findable.

Develop your ideas.

Connect your work.

Create pathways into it.

Pay attention to what resonates.

Keep going.

But understand what you are actually building.

The goal isn't simply more eyeballs.

It is a growing pattern of recognition.

That pattern forms when enough meaningful encounters begin reinforcing one another.

And yes, that takes time.

Not because you're doing something wrong.

Because recognition is an accumulation, not an event.

What If You Stopped Trying to Build an Audience?

If learning how to build an audience has started to feel like a race, consider changing what you're measuring.

Don't ask only how many people arrived this month.

Ask whether:

There is more for them to discover when they do.

Your ideas are becoming clearer.

Your body of work is becoming more connected.

People are returning.

Ask whether someone who encounters three different pieces of your work would recognize that they came from the same mind.

Build that.

Your audience may grow more slowly than your impatience would prefer.

But perhaps an audience isn't something you collect.

Perhaps it is what gradually gathers around work worth coming back to.

Tend the fire.

Give people somewhere worth gathering.

N.B. Post revised 2026.