Audience or Business first?

Read Time: 3 minutes and 40 seconds

Let’s go down memory lane and I’ll try to keep the cringe to a minimum.

Todays question: Which is more important to you at the moment: creating a personal brand and enjoying the process, or building a business?

Now listen to this:

You came back! Gut-wrenching, right?

You ever hear something and it finally clicks? Because that’s what happened to me when it came to talking about money and business.

I feel like the most common advice aspiring entrepreneurs get is always ‘build a brand’.

Most of last year, I was focused on building an audience. So I bought courses on how to create content and growth on X, spent months reconstructing big accounts playing detective to figure out how they get traction, and built a grave of free guides collecting digital dust on my laptop.

The way I saw it, more content equals more visibility. And once you hit some imaginary ‘high’ follower account you can start selling.

To the point that I was exhausted, lowkey hating social media, and looking at my bank account telling it to hold on — I just need to create content a little longer and make it ‘great’ there will eventually be a breakthrough before you die.

Looking back, it’s funny what stands out. All year, entrepreneurs with actual businesses have echoed the same advice — ‘focus on money’. Even a big influencer tried to prospect me, but failed because I was hell-bent on the starving artist ideology.

See what happened was it didn’t click until a week ago. I had two conversations with entrepreneurs in different stages that made me rethink my strategy.

• One reminded me, wanting to start a business doesn’t need to be all or nothing. You can have a job while you figure it out.

• The other told me, ‘it’s not about fun, it’s about money. You build a business on a skill people will pay for.’

I tried to focus on money once and couldn’t get out of bed for almost a month. But I got the idea wrong. It wasn’t about being some power hungry money grubber. It was make money so you can survive and have the freedom to focus on your work or life with the time money will give you.

Then it felt like a double hit. I wasn’t trying to build a business. If I want to be an entrepreneur, then why am I spending all day trying to write content instead of building something?

I spent the majority of the year going in a circle saying ‘I’m starting a business’ but the only thing I really had was half-ass attempts and a lot of content.

See creating content consistently might have it’s challenges but it lacks the inherent risk with business. If I wrote something and it sunk I could just delete it and try again tomorrow. It didn’t come with the panic of asking for money. I hid behind the excuse ‘I don’t know what people want, I’m researching’ to avoid the real work of building a business.

I’m not saying having an audience is bad, It’s an opportunity to find opportunities and find opportunities.

But when you quit your job to start a business or want to leave your actual job for entrepreneurship maybe start with something that makes money.

If my goal is to start a business, my time need to be focused on creating a product.

But not all followers are made equally either. Look at your content and think about the type of people it would attract. No really.

I hear people say, ‘I want to build for who I was a few years ago’.

Well who I was, was broke, unaware of business, and more prone to get drunk and drool over boys. Not who I’m looking to sell to today.

Now my content today isn’t platitudes but it’s rarely educational. It’s intentional too.

My content is created to talk about my experience on a specific topic and my life. Why? because I want people who don’t take work super seriously but take connections seriously.

What’s hard is pressing publish. My genuine thoughts on topics I feel strongly about.

I’m not interested in being the best copywriter — it’s not a job I’m pursuing. I’m more interested in trying to do interesting things with an idea and needing an Advil to share it didn’t work or that I have a problem.

That is what I’m training myself to do.

My priority is simple: do work, try to solve the problem, share my thoughts along the way, and be the girl people come to for networking.

my twitter strategy is simple:

So here’s what I’m doing on the business side:

• Actively pursuing an immediate income by sending loom video demonstrations to potential employers and waiting for a pitch deck prospect to respond.

• Creating lessons on online networking and creating a product from which hits — including two free Notion templates I use to network.

• Documenting the journey of building an information product and starting a business on X with the backing of my network.

No anxiety or reply guy energy here.

Why make things harder, when business has a way of finding a new problem to solve? ha

Anyway, see you next Wednesday.

Nichole