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Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, this post is a masterclass in audience-building.

I question whether the author believes what he's preaching, since he's taken the time to write this post, create a newsletter, add a sign up form and follow me on twitter plea, and then post it to Hacker News.

I've found that, generally, people who think audience-building is a waste of time don't spend their time audience-building.

What's so clever about this article in particular? It fits into the proven, "pessimistic take on a new trend" form of clickbait, published to an audience that loves pessimistic takes.

Hacker News is the perfect venue for this piece of content, since people here all wish they could just build something amazing and people would flock to it by default. The author is telling the crowd exactly what they want to hear, while ironically, building his own audience.

I would take this post with a grain of salt.

View on HN

I'm the author and wondering if you read the post beyond the headline.

Quotes from the text:

> "But don’t get me wrong. Having an audience is awesome and I love great content."

> "Publishing content online is the best way to become visible so that opportunities can find you."

My point is that churning out content by remixing other people's work for the sake of building an audience is a common procrastination trap. I love when people share first-hand learnings and with my most recent posts, including this one, I'm trying to do just that.

Another quote:

> "Your main priority always should be to do meaningful things, to solve real-world problems, to be the man in the arena. And if you share what you learn along the way, people will start to listen. Write when you have something meaningful to say, and not to stick to some self-imposed writing schedule."

My point is that churning out content by remixing other people's work for the sake of building an audience is a common procrastination trap

If that's your point, it doesn't support your headline. What's that got to do with warning against building an audience?

If you want to see the advantages of building an audience, just go read some indie hacker interviews:

https://www.indiehackers.com/interviews/page/1

Half of those businesses seem to be built on the back of audiences built up over years.

> wondering if you read the post beyond the headline.

Asking if people read the post is against HN guidelines:

‘Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."’

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> But this doesn’t bring them one inch closer to their goal. It’s just a form of procrastination.

Well, being at the right place at the right time really is how 19/20 people get rich ("become entrepreneurs").

Nowhere in the post the author says or even recommends not to build and audience. All he is saying is that it souldn't be your main focus.

> Hacker News is the perfect venue for this piece of content, since people here all wish they could just build something amazing and people would flock to it by default. The author is telling the crowd exactly what they want to hear, while ironically, building his own audience.

What I got from the article is: building an audienc should not be the top priority, the quality of the audience matters more than the size of it and focus on creating valuable content. Again, it never discourages doing it.

>> Nowhere in the post the author says or even recommends not to build and audience

Title: Build a Business, Not an Audience

A sort of reverse-Reddit, if you will (everyone reads just the title, not the article, well, in this case, OP read the article but skipped the title :-)) ).

> Your main priority always should be to do meaningful things, to solve real-world problems, to be the man in the arena. And if you share what you learn along the way, people will start to listen. Write when you have something meaningful to say, and not to stick to some self-imposed writing schedule.

The way I read the author's article was : solve real-world problems and then write about your learnings from it. Do you disagree with the author?

What real-world problems has he solved and what has he learned by solving them?

Curiously, the article fails to mention either.

Although it does have a "Follow my Twitter feed and sign up for my newsletter" call to action at the end. Perhaps that counts?

Yeap, this seems like marketing 101.

Also, looking at the profile, the author seems to be peddling various cookie-cutter "products" he's trying to sell to "entrepreneurs"... I wonder if he read his first link.

I can see why you'd think that, but knowing Jakob, respectfully, you're wrong.

Jakob shares authentically. Not with the primary goal of building an audience to sell stuff to, but because it's natural for him.

His particular brand of learning in public and making connections with others on similar journeys is appealing to me. I worked very privately in my last business as a solo founder. It wasn't sustainable.

I've learnt a lot from how Jakob works. Am I the audience? What is an audience? Is your best friend? Your parents? Your team? What I take out of it is how to make genuine connections instead of inauthentic re-hashed tweets.

Actually, trying to build audience from HN is not a very good idea, because the value of HN is that it is a community-curated content mix, and chances are it's readers are more than satisfied with it's volume and quality.

From my perspective I am always surprised when I see such article on the HP. When I check articles in the newest section - https://news.ycombinator.com/newest - most of them do not get upvotes and dies. So there is for sure some skill involved in getting here. :)

Skill, luck or sockpuppet accounts.

> pessimistic take on a new trend

I don't see how describing reality is a pessimistic take.

Omg, this comment is so brilliant. Thanks for open my eyes. This is more elaborated and intrincated than Nolan's movies.

All we want hear why we are failing. Most of us are going to the chase and adventure of get the quick-buck-overnight success

>this comment is so brilliant.

Eh, this is the tone of virtually every top-level comment on HN. "Actually, ... blah blah blah."

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