Foundation 3: How to build an audience with your 1,000 truest believers
The lesson
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The transcript
“My favourite, most useful strategy in engaging people in my community is to invite someone from the community to talk about the situation or an issue that they care deeply about so that we can amplify their voices while also having meaningful engagement with our people.”
—Nandar
Alan: The School of Splice wants to help you build a viable media business. I’m Alan, one of the cofounders of Splice.
Rishad: I’m Rishad, the other cofounder. If you’re building a media business, the first thing you want to think about is your audience. Which is what Nandar was just saying back there. Nandar runs a feminist podcast in Myanmar, and for her, representing the community means actually including them. Welcome to your third School of Splice foundation lesson: How to build an audience with your thousand truest believers
A: If you haven't already heard the first two lessons, you should check them out as we're using similar language and labels all through.
Stuff like audience, or the users of your products. What do we mean by product? Your product is any content that you make available for your audience in any format.
It sounds obvious, I know, but thinking about your user or audience isn't just a principle. It's a mindset you need to have as a media founder or professional.
R: Absolutely. Your audience is the lens with which you want to look at your business. Let's talk about your thousand truest believers.
School of School works like this. You can listen to all of this in one go. But you might also want to break it up. Hit pause whenever and come back later.
Some of this stuff is pretty easy, so you can lean back, or take the dog out for a walk. Or just wash those dishes.
Other bits require more involvement — like if we're suggesting you write your thoughts down. So you'll need a notebook and pen. 📔✍️ And coffee. ☕️
R: Remember, your media product competes with every single app on my phone.
2021 will require you to go deeper in building a direct relationship not with your users or audiences, but with your true believers. Unless you’re able to capture attention and build a relationship, you can’t monetise, and therefore, you don’t have a business.
Just a quick note here: through these lessons on School of Splice, we'll use words to describe the people who use the content you produce in a number of different ways: user, community, audience, listener, viewer, reader, customer... you get the idea. It doesn't really matter what you call them as long as you remember that almost everything you do is in service to these people.
A: We really mean believers, because these people are buying into your mission, not just a subscription to your newsletter or a Like on your Facebook page.
If you've heard the other foundation lessons, you'll be familiar with this Splice principle: You need to build something useful, something relevant, and ultimately valuable enough to pay for.
R: Just to come back to the true fans concept — credit where it’s due. Kevin Kelly was the founding editor of Wired magazine, and he first wrote about this in 2008. His point was that you really only need 1,000 true fans to make a living. His definition of a true fan is someone who will buy everything you produce. He said these are people who will drive 200 miles to see you sing.
A: Kelly took it a step further: To make a hundred thousand dollars a year, you only need to earn a hundred dollars from each of your thousand true fans.
The assumption here is that a hundred thousand dollars is a healthy annual revenue number to aim for — especially if you're a micro media company with two people.
The actual numbers don't really matter — 100,000 dollars means a lot of different things depending on where you live. The important thing here is how we think about value.
R: Always a good idea to look outside of the media industry to learn about how other startups work with their first 1000 fans or believers. A newsletter I’ve been reading recently is called First 1000, about how founders got their first 1000 customers. Just go to www.first1000.co
Li Jin of Atelier Ventures says that we're diversifying from the gig economy to the passion, or creator economy, and you see this everywhere: Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Telegram, Substack, Shopify. These new platforms share a few commonalities:
They’re accessible to everyone, not only existing businesses and professionals
They view individuality as a feature, not a bug
They focus on digital products and virtual services
They provide holistic tools to grow and operate a business
They open doors to new forms of work
A: That thousand fans idea was really just in its infancy in 2008. Today, in 2021, it’s a reality. And it’s one of the biggest media trends out there because platforms are making it easier for creators to go direct to their fans. At Splice, we actually think of them as believers, because that’s more of an equal relationship.
Let’s imagine what this looks like for the media business.
To build a successful media product, you don’t need a million page views. That’s always nice, but we know a bot who can do that for you.
You want to discover who your true believers are — It’s all in your audience data, but you probably already know many of them by their first names.
R: Seriously. Think about it.
It’s that person who keeps your website open by default.
She shows up at all your online events.
Her newsletter open rate is around 84 percent.
She’s liking almost all your tweets.
At Splice, community is the whole point. We wouldn't be anywhere without the people who believe in us.
Hey Alan, want to do a shoutout to our true believers, like, right now??
So I promise we won't do a hundred, but this is a huge thank you to... Jakub...
A: ...and Gayathrii
R: ...and Janie...
A: ..and Karen...
R:...and Pat...
A:...and Simon...
R:...and Sonny...
A:...and Josh...
R:...and Sudhir...
A:...and Marium...
R: Let's try something here: Write down the first names of 20 of your top believers. Seriously, you know who they are. Hit pause and take a few minutes to think that though.
A: Do you have your list of twenty?
Our work in media needs to be dictated by how we serve our truest believers. We need their voices to make decisions about how we run our business, how we think about finding and processing and publishing content.
You need to start with audience data.
You also need conversations.
R: Yes, actual conversations.
So as more and more privacy laws are strengthened, it's no longer easy for you to track or follow your users around the web — which is a good thing and a bad thing.
So you’ll have to resort to more traditional ways of understanding your audience — which means you may actually have to talk to those true believers.
A: We asked Deborah Augustin of New Naratif how they talk to their audiences.
“We've learned that regular audience research is a must for growth. We run audience research with our members and readers every quarter through video calls and surveys. We also host one virtual members-only event every month where members can discuss our stories, current events, or watch a performance. Interaction and community are essential to member-funded orgs in our opinion.”
A: These aren’t just conversations about YOUR podcast or YOUR newsletter — these are conversations about your audience. Your user.
Who is she? What does she do for work? What does she do when she’s bored?
And what problems does she live with?
R: Before we go further, you'll notice that we're not talking about demographics. That belongs to media strategy from whole other century: we need to move beyond restricting ourselves to oversimplifications like gender, household income, education, and socio-economic data.
People are a lot more than their data, and it's time to recognise the users of our content and media products for who they are: they're real people.
To truly respect them is to know them as well as you possibly can.
A: So who is your user, and how do you get to know her?
Begin by building a model around who she is. That's where lots of real conversations help.
You start with outlining the basics — work, age, salary — then you start colouring in the details.
What is she watching on tv?
What's her go-to app when she's waiting for the elevator?
Is she a WhatsApper or a Telegrammer? Line or WeChat?
Does she have kids?
R: Yup! Design thinking and user-research professionals call this a persona.
We asked our buddy Juliana Proserpio of the design thinking firm Echos in Sydney about how she thinks about personas:
“Personas are important for design thinking because they help us put people at the center of our decisions to create solutions that are grounded in real human needs. As Kate Canales says, empathy is the drive for innovation.”
You build the detailing around your persona through lots of research, meetings, and data — or, if you're a small, bootstrapped media startup, you build that persona through as many interactions as possible with the actual people who use your product. Then you test that persona over and over again, until you have almost a real person – with a name, an identity, a life — that you're speaking to when you build your products and content. Am I writing this story with her in mind? Will she relate to my podcast? Am I solving her problem?
A: We asked our friend Tanmoy Goswami, who runs the mental health journalism platform called Sanity by Tanmoy, about how he thinks about community, and he had this lovely little insight:
"…try and stay away from this urge to constantly create communities. The community that you want to serve likely already exists. You just need to find it and then figure out a way to serve its needs."
A: In those conversations with your user, you’ll probably realize a lot of things quickly. What is at the core of your media business? What can you do to address her problems — maybe even solve them? What are your operating principles? And who is your competition?
R: That's the thing about competition: you'll realise something else when you're talking to your true believer. Your competition isn’t limited to other organisations that also do news. Your competition is what your true believer spends her time doing instead of reading your Very Important Article.
She's watching Netflix. Or playing Fortnite. Or, as Netflix themselves said, their competition is... sleep.
A: Here's a quick exercise that might be useful: take ten minutes to write down what you think your competition is — what app or tv show or podcast or YouTube channel or game.
Hit that pause button now. We're still here.
A: Do you have that list?
Okay, let's go back to that imaginary conversation you're having with your true believer (by the way, do you have a name for her yet?). Think about the amount of content you produce. Is she really waking up every morning looking for breaking news?
She probably isn't really thinking about your news cycle.
R: There's actually a business point to all of this.
Do you really need to be publishing 25 stories a day? Or are you shouting into that existential void of publishing: If nobody’s reading your stories then do they really exist?
Maybe fewer, more relevant stories could be the way forward for your newsroom — and more importantly, for your audiences. And that means saving money as well.
A: A great deal of how she consumes media is in her social feeds, but it's also in her email.
Email is a great way to break out of that cycle and own your own conversation with her.
All the tools to do this exist on your phone, and they’re mostly free or cheap: email newsletters, podcasts, and a good old-fashioned chat over a coffee — or the audio or video platform of your choice.
In short, meet her where she is.
If you don’t ask, how will you know?
R: Remember the marketing funnel? Awareness, interest, desire, action, loyalty. There’s another important one at the end of it: advocacy. A real advocate is someone who will stand up and tell everyone else how useful (and valuable!) you are to them. Why you matter. That's why they’re a believer in the first place.
A: Your believers believe in your principles. They probably believe in your work.
They believe in you, because you’ve demonstrated that you see them and validate them and respect their opinions.
And a lot of this belief comes from your work being useful and relevant to their lives.
R: Useful and relevant — that's something you hear us talking a lot about.
Your believers are your best advocates. How many people do you have in your Mailchimp list who would do that for you? Having a 100,000-strong mailing list doesn’t matter if none of them will vouch for you. Having a million likes or followers won’t matter if they’re drive-by one-offs.
A: Your relationships with these believers are profoundly valuable; they’re making an investment in you — often because they believe in your mission, so don’t think it’s just a subscription to your media product.
R: We're almost done. But this is a good point in this lesson to go back to that list of 20 names you wrote down — 20 of your truest believers. Who's missing?
Now compare it to that list you made about your competition. Could this be the premise of a conversation that you begin with your Twenty?
Ask them what they're watching, what games they're playing, and what you should be doing more of. Or less of.
A: You might be surprised at how much you will learn about your products — and how much you will learn about yourself as a media startup.
Then make sure to thank every single one of them by name — and keep that conversation going.
A little shoutout to Simon Crerar who's building PS Media in Australia — hope this session was helpful for you.
“I am enormously excited about School of Splice. As a homeschooling parent with a toddler of two, on-demand audio is a lifesaver. Alan and Rishad are such experts in the media startup space. I'm sure I will benefit enormously from tapping their brains virtually. I hope that PS will have a thousand true believers by the end of SOS.”
—Simon Crerar
We hope you found this useful.
Go check out the other lessons from this foundation course.
If you have questions, send us an email here, and we'll get right back to you.