Last week, I came across Don’t Build an Audience. It’s a fascinating post and has been occupying a lot of my “free thinking” time. I strongly suggest reading it as it’s well written and excellently argued.

To summarise what it tries to say:

• The market for written content on the web (blog posts, articles etc) is “efficient”: in other words, great work will find its audience without you needing to build a “following” first.
• “Liquidity providers” (influencers, curators, algorithms) are incentivized to share good content because it benefits them. They maintain credibility and engagement by surfacing quality work. Specifically called out are Substack, Alexey Guzey and Tyler Cowen.
• You can speed up “distribution” of what you write with minimal effort. Just 30 minutes to email a few key people and posts on the “right” platforms.
• Therefore, focus on creating excellent work rather than “building an audience”. If it’s truly good, the market will ensure it reaches “everyone who matters”.

I’m a very strong believer in the core message of “make cool things rather than chase followers”. It’s something I’ve done throughout my life and I have zero interest in changing that going forward.

But I don’t agree with the argument that the market is efficient for all types of written content. I think the author is over-indexing on what they write about: topics accessible for a wide audience and do not require background knowledge (e.g. philosophical musings, economic theory, social dynamics).

I write about technical topics. Sometimes this can be so deeply in the weeds that at most a few thousand people in the world would care about it. But it might totally change how these people work: it might teach about how to debug performance in their code, let them know about a new approach to analysing data or even inspires them build an entirely new program.