Why build an audience first instead of selling your business directly?

"People cannot grasp the concept of build an audience that doesn't have to do with your business. They choose to read your product because it provides value to them, having nothing to do with you."

Now you have their eyeballs. You monetize later by putting your own business in front of them.

Why does attention matter so much?

Nobody chooses to look at an ad. You see an ad because you had to, based on wherever you were. When you build a media company covering what people want to read, they're choosing to look at you. Locally, that's easy to find: people want to know what's going on around them.

Audience is the most valuable thing you can own right now, and it'll get more valuable as AI floods the world with content. Think about how many people are building amazing AI tools in their basement that nobody knows about. They go nowhere and die. The real moat is audience, and having one gives you options for what to sell later.

Building an audience of tens of thousands of people in AI, crypto or tech is brutally competitive. Locally, with some money for ads, it's easy, because almost nobody is doing it right. In a suburb or smaller town, you might be the only one.

Does this work at a big scale?

Yes. HubSpot bought podcasts people choose to listen to, then runs HubSpot ads inside them. Same concept: get the attention people are choosing to give you, then monetize.

A friend of mine does a version with Fortune 500 executives. He has the audience, so they come to him for strategy. When they say they need someone to do it, he sends them to people he knows and takes a cut. That's being top of funnel, and I want to do the same thing locally.

What can you do once you have the audience?

Launch things to it. A few examples:

• A free training. I posted once in my newsletter offering a free AI training. Ninety people signed up just from that post.
• A new service. An operator I know in Canada started a Christmas light installation business off his local audience. He got 300 leads on day one for a roughly $2,000 service. That's his result, secondhand, not mine.
• Partnerships. One day it hit me that I had an audience of about 20,000 upper-middle-class women in my area that I could pitch a franchise to. That kind of advantage just shows up when you have attention.
• Software. The media company is the reason my app will work. Without the newsletter and YouTube channel, I wouldn't have hired a development company to build it, because I'd have told myself I didn't know how to sell it.

The same thing happened with my content about local newsletters. Very few people were talking about it consistently, so I became the first result on YouTube for it and started getting inbound from people who wanted to partner or hire me. I started that channel and newsletter alongside my local newsletter and went hard and fast. Going fast spreads your luck surface area.

If I could do everything over, I'd go all in on the media company first.

Why don't more businesses do it?

It's indirect. Most real estate people can't grasp "don't hard sell, don't sell at all." Someone I know at a big real estate company's home office told me nobody there will do it, precisely because it's indirect.

Most marketing is me, me, me. Look at me, do business with me, I'm so great. My model flips it: give people something they want first, and pitch later. Just give people value, and you're able to sell later because you've earned their interest and trust.

Realtors are the biggest group I see trying my model and doing it poorly. They constantly pitch, and that's not the model. If you run a digital marketing agency on the back end, weave it into your stories instead: I went to this event, and when we did his Meta ads he was stoked. People see that and reach out.

An SEO agency owner I talked to gets all his clients from Twitter and has never once pitched his services there. He gives good advice, and people DM him asking if he can do it for them.

You can even give away the whole playbook. I teach business owners AI and marketing in detail. My estimate is about 97% won't take action, because they have a business to run. The smart ones with money come back and say: that voice agent thing is great, I don't want to figure it out, what will you charge to just do it?

What does the audience-first version look like?

• A local newsletter with events, news and humor.
• In-person events where people get to know you.
• The owner's offer placed in it like any other ad.

When a business owner needs help with AI or Meta ads, are they going to Google it? Or go to the people they see every week in their inbox and on Instagram, hosting events? They go to the people they know, like and trust.

The old local newspaper worked the same way. It had lots of ads, and people happily read it for 20 years because there was enough value.

Should the audience and the buyer be the same people?

Not always. For a media brand I sketched for business owners shopping for commercial insurance, the audience isn't the payer. Coverage guides, claims data and wild claim stories build the audience. The money comes from carriers or agencies.

If you're building media, it has to look like media. When an early design came back looking like any other insurance page with more data, I pushed back: if it's a media brand, the homepage should read like one.

Who is this best for, and what's the catch?

Professionals who need people to know, like and trust them: insurance agents, financial planners, realtors, mortgage brokers. It also fits anyone with a product but no way to sell it. When someone on my team pitched a custom worksheet product for parents, my first question was how we'd sell it. Build the media brand for people who care about that topic, then sell the product inside it.

The catch is time. My model is slow growth and low success in the short term, then it becomes massive. You can run ads straight to a product if you need faster results. And if your goal is making money from the media business itself, focus on the money side, not the design and events. Understand why you're doing it.

For more on running it as a local brand, see how a local business can use a media brand and why audience is the real moat.