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."
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."’
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.
Well, being at the right place at the right time really is how 19/20 people get rich ("become entrepreneurs").
> 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.
Title: Build a Business, Not an Audience
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?
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?
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.
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.
I don't see how describing reality is a pessimistic take.
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
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.