The most common questions we get revolve around audience growth and development — specifically the growth and development of a minimum viable audience (MVA).
- What is an MVA?
- What are the benefits of developing one?
- What does it take to build one?
- How can you accelerate the process?
- How do you know when you’ve reached this pivotal threshold? (And is there a certain audience number to target?)
In this edition of 7-Figure Small, Brian Clark and Jerod Morris answer these questions and more about what Brian once called your “unfair business advantage.”
The discussion includes the three characteristics your audience needs to have to know you have an MVA, plus an analogy about Brian’s gym that will help to illustrate the power of the MVA … until the analogy falls apart due to the important differences between brick-and-mortar business and building a business online.
Links
- 5 Ways a Minimum Viable Audience Gives You an Unfair Business Advantage
- Follow Brian Clark on Twitter
- Follow Jerod Morris on Twitter
Subscribe to 7-Figure Small
Or search for “7-Figure Small” wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
How Much of An Audience Do You Need to Succeed?
Jerod Morris: Welcome to 7-Figure Small, the podcast that brings you the stories and strategies that are driving the growing number of solo businesses achieving 7-figures in revenue, without investors or employees. Here are your hosts for this edition of 7-Figure Small — serial digital entrepreneur, Brian Clark, and me, Jerod Morris.
All right, Brian, we are recording this on Friday, a couple of days before the Super Bowl. So when people listen to this, they’re going to know the answer to this question, but I’m curious if you made a final decision yet on whether you’re going to buy a Super Bowl ad to drive traffic to Further, or if you decided that that wasn’t a good investment of your 7-figure earnings.
Brian Clark: You know, if I didn’t have to pay you, I could have pulled off that Super Bowl ad.
Jerod Morris: I wish that was the difference. That would be great.
Brian Clark: Yeah, that would be a good problem for both of us actually.
How Would You Utilize a Super Bowl Ad?
Jerod Morris: Okay. But that does actually present an interesting question. Not that you would ever do it, but let’s say that you had a Super Bowl spot to advertise a curated newsletter. Off the top of your head, how would you utilize that time, that space?
Brian Clark: Well, that’d be a terrible idea at those prices, let’s start there.
Jerod Morris: Sure, but if you just had that time and that number of eyeballs.
Brian Clark: Yeah, well, you’ve got to make it a response-driven advertisement. You’ve got to have a very clear message, very clear call to action, and send them exactly where you want them to go, and tell them what you want them to do. That’s how direct response advertising works, whether it be print, radio, television.
So yeah, I’d take my best shot at it. I mean, with that kind of crowd, it probably would work to some degree. Again, if you made it very clear who it was for, which means excluding probably 70% of the audience, but that’s okay.
What Is a Minimum Viable Audience?
Jerod Morris: Yeah, that is okay. So that kicks off this conversation that we’re going to have about audience. It’s interesting, because the Super Bowl is the biggest audience, the biggest single event audience for a television show that you get throughout the year.
This topic of audience and what constitutes the amount of audience that folks need for the kinds of things that we’re teaching them how to do – this is a constant topic of conversation.
I just got done doing a Q&A inside of the Unemployable Initiative and I think out of the 10 questions, three of them were about audience. You know, “How big of an audience do you need to launch a community? What do you need to do to build an audience for a podcast? How do you gauge how you’re building your audience for your curated newsletter? It was just so many questions about audience.
So let’s spend some time talking today about audience and about what a minimum viable audience is, which I think most people probably know, but we can certainly provide a refresher. And then how to know when you actually have one, because that seems to be one of the questions that I get the most.
Brian Clark: Yeah, those are good questions. Much better questions than I see people ultimately, or initially, I should say, focusing on how big an audience they want to end up with. I think that’s a little bit missing the point. It’s a bit of an abstraction. You see various people and their size of audience and all of a sudden you think, “Well, that’s the size of audience I need, which is often sometimes in the hundreds of thousands. And, of course, that’s not true at all.
I think it can be detrimental to focus on those kinds of numbers when you’re getting started, because they can seem, especially when it’s slow going at the beginning, and it always is, that you get discouraged and you just figure, “Well, I’m never going to succeed, because I’m never going to get into six figures.
That’s not necessarily the goal at all, ever. But it’s certainly not your goal at the beginning. More important than anything is figuring out the type of person that you want in your audience. Ultimately, that will determine how much value you can deliver to that audience and how much value can be returned to you in turn, based on who they are and what they want.
I mean, you can have an audience of a thousand people and if the price point is high enough, for example, in certain B2B industries, that’s more than enough. So it’s all relative and it’s all tied to the specifics of your own audience.
I was thinking about this topic, because again, as you say, it’s the question that people ask in various ways over and over and over again.
So I go to this gym here in Boulder. It’s a small gym. It’s one of these 24-hour remote access places. It’s only like 4,000 square feet, so it’s not like a 24-hour gym or some super gym like that. It’s a little place. But you can go anytime you want, you have a little fob, you go in.
And I was thinking, as I watched the owners who are also personal trainers, it occurred to me, “What’s the best way or what’s a very bricks and mortar way to start a personal training business?
Well, easy, just buy yourself a gym. I know that sounds crazy at first, because you’re like, “Well, yeah, that is very capital intensive or what. But think about it. That’s a good analogy to what we do when we build audiences, but way less money, way less risk, all of that. But effectively, these people own this small gym and people join the gym. That’s kind of their baseline audience.
And then you can imagine that they add to their profits typical stuff. They sell supplements and related stuff. Not a ton of merchandise, but they do offer personal training services. It’s even on the sign outside. So that was in their thoughts obviously. “If you break even on the gym, you make your profit off personal training. Okay, a lot of business models work that way.
If you want to take the analogy further, if you don’t have a minimum viable level of people joining that gym, where you’re not even breaking even on that high rent — and trust me in Boulder, they’re paying some rent, unless they own the building. Even then, that real estate is very expensive.
So they don’t have a viable business at that point. But if you do manage to just get broke even on memberships, that tells you a certain amount of things about the foot traffic in that gym — the ability to get to know the people in the audience, figure out what their individual needs are, and then supply it through personal training services, through supplements, through nutrition advice, all of this type of thing.
It struck me that that is incredibly similar to what we do with online audience building. But it puts it in perspective for you — that this is so much less risky and so much more lucrative than you could ever make in that very expensive, very high risk (when you look at it) type of business. But that’s kind of a classic business model.
And so we’re taking it here and we’re building an audience, trying to figure out exactly the type of people that we want to attract.
Once they show up, that’s when the real learning happens and we determine: what’s their pain, what are their problems, what are their desires. And then, we’re able to develop products and services that match up with them perfectly as a group of people, not as a market abstraction. It’s a very real thing when you’re serving real people. So that’s kind of the best way to think about what a minimum viable audience is.
Effectively, you have an MVA when number one, you’re receiving enough feedback from that audience, whether you’re soliciting it directly through surveys or just saying, “Hey, reply to this email and tell me what you think. It could be comments on blog posts, replies to emails, social media chatter, just all these ways that you receive information back from this real group of people. And you’re able to adapt and evolve your content to better serve the audience.
Number two, and this is a big one, because that struggle to get to this point all starts to pay off. When you’re growing your audience organically, thanks to people effectively sharing your newsletter, for example.
On Further, my biggest source of new subscriptions comes from the ambiguous direct. When you don’t know where they’re coming from, but it’s such a large number of traffic and such a high number of relative conversions to other sources. You know what it is — it’s Gen Xers forwarding it to other Gen Xers, because it resonates with them and they want to share it. It says something about them as much as it says something about the service that I’m providing. And that’s where you’re really hitting that sweet spot where the audience starts growing itself.
Then finally — and this is a big part that we’re really turning the normal process of product development or startup companies on its head — you’re gaining enough insight into what the audience needs to solve their problems or satisfy their desires beyond the free education you’re providing or the free content. At that point, you’re like, “Oh, this is what I need to sell.
You know with a high degree of confidence that that’s what they will buy. As opposed to the other model, which is you dream something up that you think is cool or you think people ought to buy and they don’t. And that is why most startups fail.
Jerod Morris: Going back to your analogy, which I thought was a really interesting one. In that analogy with the gym, the folks who own the gym, as you said, they’ve got to have enough customers coming in to cover those costs.
But when we’re talking about a minimum viable audience, just to be clear, it doesn’t mean that you have to be gaining enough revenue from these people yet, right? Because, as you just laid out in all three of those, you need a big enough audience so that you can learn from folks and understand what the problems are and figure out what to sell them. But this can actually be before you’re making money, before you’re making revenue.
Brian Clark: No, it is. I mean, go back to the beginning of Copyblogger, I went 18 months. That’s where the bricks and mortar analogy breaks down. If you’re not charging people in that model right away, you don’t make it. That’s the beautiful thing about audience building in the digital environment — it is super low cost, almost minuscule to start building an audience, especially with the process of curation where you’re not even spending a lot of time, which is the equivalent of money. You either spend time or money in order to get it done.
That’s the beauty of this business model. And you tell people, “Okay, I built an 8-figure company this way. I launched three 7-figure startups this way. And again, what does that gym owner make a year? A hundred grand, maybe? It’s tough in the real world, but that’s the beauty of audience.
We’ve been talking the last few episodes about sometimes scale is the opposite of success. And we’ve been talking about Jeff Goins, who basically is like, “I’m just going to work with less people to have more satisfaction, yet it’s not going to cause me to severely limit the amount of money I make. Because it’s about the value I can deliver to this smaller group of a certain type of person, otherwise.
So you’re right. Here’s the reason why I’ve never opened a bricks and mortar business, Jerod. I think you just hit that one right on the head. I mean, I’m spoiled rotten. I can’t even imagine that people work so hard, take that much risk, and the return is relatively small.
How Has Building a Minimum Viable Audience Changed?
Jerod Morris: How has building a minimum viable audience changed? Because obviously, there’s the organic way to build it and you have to be very patient that way, and to a certain extent, building a minimum viable audience the right way is always an organic process.
But there are ways now to potentially speed it up if you’re smart about it and you have some money to invest, like using paid ads to get attention on what you’re doing. How has it changed and how do you think people should view some of these other ways now that they have to speed the process up?
Brian Clark: Yeah, things have really changed drastically. I catch myself reflecting on pre-2010, and man, how blessed were we for that free-for-all of early social media! I mean, I can remember just coming up with a topic for an article, matching it with a headline, making it the best I can make it, and then basically posting it. Back in those days, you had the — what were the DIG influencers called? Power users?
Jerod Morris: Yeah, power users.
Brian Clark: Yeah, so you became friends with those guys.
Jerod Morris: I was in some of those circles.
Brian Clark: It was almost all guys. I am not using that generically. And then they’d submit it for you. Next thing you know, you were trying to keep your servers up for the rest of the day. I mean, it was just so different. And it was really imprecise when you think about it.
I remember also, for every subscriber that we gained through those massive bursts of traffic, we’d have 15 little haters telling us we sucked. You know what I mean? Because you’re not laser targeted toward the type of people that you’ve determined you want to attract. It was really like the transition between mass media and where we are today in those days of kind of viral, organic, social media traffic.
And then, of course, all the links you got from other bloggers when you made the DIG homepage and of course, that enhances the SEO and authority of the site. So it was a magical time that is long gone.
The upside is, you’re right, social advertising is very inexpensive, again, compared to television, radio, billboards, almost anything you can think of as legacy advertising or media. And it’s so incredibly targeted. It’s scary to a certain degree, and we’ve seen the downside of that. But the upside of it is, if you can do the work up front and say, “This is the type of person I want to serve, you’re not accepting whoever shows up. You’re like, “These are the people that are my perfect match.
Then you do some small experiments attracting those people. 5 bucks on Facebook ads, 10 bucks if that works out, get a small group. And if you’re on the right path, then you can spend your way to a point that we call the minimum viable audience. Again, it meets those three criteria that I just went over.
At that point, once you understand, the audience starts growing itself. So you’re saving money there. That is the redeeming organic aspect of audience building. It still happens. And I love the fact that it happens through email forwards, which is how it used to happen in the late ‘90s. Back when everyone forwarded everything and you’re like, “Please stop.
But now, if someone forwards something to you and says, “Hey, you should check this out, you take it seriously, because people don’t forward just casually anymore. They don’t just necessarily rave about you on social media casually. That was something that happened much more often early on. So it still happens. You just have to really focus on who you’re serving and the value that they’re looking for.
Here’s another thing: if you’re a straight-up entrepreneur and you want to do the audience-first approach, like we recommend, then yeah, I think you’re going to have to do your homework and then invest a little bit of money, not huge amounts, because you’re only trying to get to this point. You’re not trying to say, “Okay, I have $100,000. How can I build an audience of 50,000, 25,000? No, you don’t want to do that.
As an example, we created a product for Unemployable with an email list of less than 4,000 people. I think that still blows people’s minds and they don’t really want to believe that. But that was a minimum viable audience for us. It’s not about the size of the audience. It’s about the quality of the feedback and your perception of, “Do I get this group of people or not?
Once you do that, and then you’re able to launch something and it actually sells, then you can invest money that you’re bringing in through revenue in order to attract more of the same type of person. You don’t just go, “Hey, Everyone, come on in now. No, that would be a huge mistake. But I see people doing that as well.
And one more thing. If you’re currently a freelancer working with clients, if you can somehow create your area of authority that compliments what you’re already providing as a client service provider, then you have great ROI advertising potential right now. Because client services, you charge much more than if you’re selling an ebook or a course or what have you. So that is my favorite way to go about it, if you’re early on.
Almost everyone starts out as a freelancer or a consultant before they move into products. So if you can build an audience first that grows your existing business, you’re making a profit while building the audience, and then the audience tells you the product they want to buy. That to me is a perfect scenario, because you’re not necessarily coming out of pocket if you can advertise and get a return through your existing business right now.
How Do You Foster Ambassadors Early On?
Jerod Morris: You talked about once the audience starts to grow itself and someone takes your newsletter and they forward it to someone else. That is incredibly powerful, because the person they’re forwarding it to is now primed to like your content, because it comes from a recommendation from someone they trust, rather than just seeing it on social media or in an ad or whatever. It’s such a great way to start building the audience.
One of the mistakes that I see people make a lot, whether it’s working with people who are starting new podcasts or building email newsletters or whatever it is, is everybody is always focused on the next subscriber and adding the next person to their audience — fair enough. Not enough people actually look at the subscribers they already have and try to figure out, “How can I build the ambassadors? How can I encourage these people to go out and do that? Especially early on, because it’s like, “Hey, you’ve got 10, but you’re just focusing on getting to 100.
What do you do or what can people do with some of those early subscribers, maybe when the numbers aren’t huge, to try to foster some of those ambassadors and some of those people that are going to go out and really become your loyal early folks and help bring other people into your mix?
Brian Clark: That’s such a great question. There are so many points where people make the mistake of focusing on more of the thing that’s not the objective. We’ve talked about this before — more content, more content. They get so intensely focused on creating more content that they never are actually learning anything about the audience, because that’s very hard work.
I think if you’re paying attention to what works and what doesn’t and you’re taking an iterative content approach. Okay, your content is connecting better, but the hard work is really figuring out what they want to buy. And when you talk about creating ambassadors, it’s really more than that. Yes, there’s that. But there’s also just getting the most engaged people to talk to you.
One thing that I never used to do, because we used to have blog comments, and I used to be able to learn so much about what people were feeling and thinking and just their perspective on things from that type of environment. Social media to some extent now — it’s still the greatest market research environment there is if you can handle drinking from that fire hose.
But here’s the thing that I do now that I think just constantly shocks people. I’ll say, “Hey, hit reply to this email and tell me what you think. And like you, I get just ridiculous amounts of email. Most of it I can delete right away. But people do. And I learn more from that than anything these days.
Here’s the thing, I reply to those people and they freak out. They’re like, “I can’t believe this really goes to you. I’m like, “Yeah, it does. And it is a challenge when you have a busy inbox, but there are ways to handle it. You can create special folders where things are routed and all of that.
So them replying is the feedback portion that’s so crucial of the three criteria. But the replies to them and the dialogue that sometimes ensues is where the affinity, kind of the bond — and you do that when your audience is smaller, because it’s manageable. Think about that.
I think there are some people that are really good at this, and I probably somehow just gleaned this from people. I know Chris Brogan is great at this. Just really being a human being, God forbid, and talking to the people who are blessing you with their attention.
When your audience is smaller, maybe at MVA or just before it, take that opportunity while it’s manageable to talk with people, to correspond with them. Some people will even recommend that you just ask a handful of people to have a phone conversation with you or Zoom or Skype or whatever.
It seems to be the opposite of the kind of business we’re trying to build, which is more like creator to audience. But the whole idea of this environment from the beginning is interactivity. That’s really the key, because that’s where you figure things out. But, more to your point, that’s where people are like, “Okay, I like this guy. He’s my person for this particular topic, and I’m going to tell other people about it.
I don’t ask anyone to tell other people. That seems silly to me. People, if it’s really there, they’ll feel the need to do it too. Because if you’re doing good work and they share good work, it reflects well on them too. Never forget that.
The Value of Connection
Jerod Morris: Yep. I agree with you so much on that. It’s one thing to be creating this audience by providing value. And you do want the people who are consuming your content to feel like they’re getting value from you.
But there’s a next level when you open yourself up to actually connecting with people. That’s what when someone replies to a newsletter and you reply back. There’s now a connection, because you’re not just the name and the signature of the email. They’re now connecting one-on-one with you.
And I’ve seen this. When we were doing The Assembly Call, it was all an audio podcast and we decided to put them on YouTube. It’s like, “Who’s going to want — we’re just sitting here talking into our microphones? But because it was live and they could see us, there was a different level of connection there.
Then going and being able to meet people in person if you have an event or whatever, even if it’s just going to coffee with an audience member. To me, those opportunities for connection even with just one person can really be valuable, because those people are going to spread the word about what you’re doing. At some point, if your audience gets big enough, yeah, you can’t do that with everybody, obviously. And that’s a great problem to have.
But early on when you can put yourself in a position to really connect, go to the next level — because I just feel in this day and age (and we found this with the community), people want connection. They want your information, they want the value, but if you give them connection, that’s something really valuable. And I just think sometimes people overlook the power of that and the cascading impact it can have on growing your audience.
Brian Clark: More and more, we’re seeing that the connection is the value. I mean, education and information have become the context that enables meaningful connection. And we’ve always kind of known this back to 2007 when we launched our first online education program. But it also had a community aspect to it and the thinking (and I’ve said this before) that people pay for the training and they stay for the community and the connection.
More and more, it just seems that connection is the thing. People don’t have to discover it after they join. They crave it from the beginning. Maybe that’s an indication of where our society is at this point. Or maybe it’s always been that way. But it’s just okay now for people to say, “Hey, yeah, I’m looking for people like me who are interested in this thing or who are doing this thing, because it adds meaning and value to my life, in addition to the tips and the tricks and the, “Oh, can you get me a freelancer to do this?
All the very practical, pragmatic things that we think people pay money for — you know, we’re not that ruthlessly rational, we’re emotional. We make emotional decisions and human connection is way up there. And I think more and more, we have to not only understand that, but embrace it.
Is There a General Guideline for MVA Size?
Jerod Morris: You talked about this earlier and I want to pull the thread just a little bit to see if there’s any place else it can go. And it may be that what you said earlier is as far as it can go. But whenever this conversation comes up (and I just had it happen in the Q&A that I did), people want to talk about numbers, even just general numbers.
And it becomes really hard, because as you said, the context is different. How many do you need on your email list to start a community, to sell a product? It depends on the context.
Do you have any general types of numbers, whether it comes to subscribers or what it is that people can look at as a benchmark for whether they’ve built a minimum viable audience? Or is it not even responsible to give numbers, because it is so dependent on the context?
Brian Clark: Well, I don’t think it’s irresponsible to talk about numbers, but it’s a little bit misguided. It’s interesting to me that the number I used to just give people as a ballpark of 10,000, I proved that’s not even correct for myself. It really does depend, but I’m just going to go out there and say somewhere between 3 to 5,000 people is a minimum viable audience in most cases.
There could be another context in which 1,000 is the floor. I can’t imagine having to go higher than 5,000. If you did your homework up front, chose carefully, stuck by your guns, and made sure that you were attracting the type of people that had the highest probability of being engaged with the type of value that you’re providing.
When you think about it that way, a minimum viable audience is the result. It’s a byproduct of your execution. So we can’t eliminate that at all.
I think that’s where people can stand to gain the most in this audience-building, audience-first approach to starting or growing a business, which is really just being disciplined, taking the time to choose who it is you want to serve. And that’s a very personal thing. It comes down to your own sense of purpose and meaning as well. How do you view the world and how do you find like-minded people?
I think that’s where the real work is done, but it’s also human nature to go, “Okay, how many do I need? And then just kind of put that on the whiteboard and say, “That’s what I’m working towards. When really, you need to have your eyes off of the whiteboard and on to ways in which you can interact with these people.
Jerod Morris: And you also have to commit to putting in the time and showing up reliably enough to build it. It can’t just be something where it’s like, “Okay, I’ll start doing this newsletter weekly once I have X amount of people. You have to start doing it before you have the people to get them there.
What advice would you give to someone who maybe has one foot out, one foot in? At some point you have to commit to, “Look, I’m going to serve this audience and I’m going to build this audience. And obviously if it’s not working at a certain point, you stop.
But I sometimes see people that are doing it halfway and not getting the results that they want. I mean, if you’re not going to show up every week for your audience, how do you expect to build the trust? How do you expect to build the connection that you need to really build this minimum viable audience?
At some point, you’re just going to have to buckle down, do the work, and stay committed to it for a certain period of time to give it a chance to work even before the final results are there.
Brian Clark: Oh yeah, and I get the fear. My biggest fear, it used to be trying to build an audience and no one showing up. But I’ve been doing it long enough now to where I do my homework. To such a degree upfront, which is what I’m trying to encourage and teach people to do in this case, that you’re able to go all in, because your percentage of confidence is high.
I still have nightmares about launching a product when no one shows up. But, again, that’s why you spend so much time getting to know: what’s keeping these people up at night? What’s the thing that you can help solve for them or at least make better? Again, once we get to that point of developing and launching a product, my degree of confidence is way up there. It’s never 100%.
Remember, we did this in the fall when we created 7-Figure Small Intensive. Jerod’s like, “Man, this is going to be a home run. There’s no problem. And I’m like, “Dude, don’t say that. And you’re like, “What? You don’t think it’s going to work? And I’m like, “I do think it’s going to work, but quit saying that.
Jerod Morris: And it worked better than even I thought. So hey, you know.
Brian Clark: Yeah, and man, you have to under-promise, over-deliver.
Jerod Morris: Look, a certain amount of paranoia is necessary for any type of audience building, whether it’s going back and double checking that email again to make sure that you don’t have errors in it, or just kind of fearing that something might go wrong so that you do a little bit extra to make sure that you’re providing value. I think you don’t want to be over paranoid, but a certain amount of it is healthy.
Brian Clark: Healthy paranoia is — I think it was Andy Grove, chairman or CEO of Intel at the time who said, “Only the paranoid survive. I thought that was a bit much. But yeah, a certain level, whether you want to call it paranoia or a general anxiety disorder that you develop in the process of trying to do something good.
Generally, and this is still true today, there are so many people out there who are so obviously just in it for themselves. If you can sincerely come across to your audience that, “Hey, I’m putting you first. I’m thinking about you all the time and I’m trying to deliver, then people respond to that. Because unfortunately, it’s not as common as it should be.
You know what they say, Jerod, “Once you can fake sincerity, then you’ve got it made. No, wait, that was not the way we wanted to end this episode. No faking, no faking. People expect you to be full of BS, they really do. When they discover over time, “Hey, maybe this person actually does care about me, then that’s where that trust comes in. And then it can really be a blessing for a long time.
Jerod Morris: And that’s why I think it’s good to find opportunities to make yourself vulnerable in front of your audience, so they can see you that way and see that you’re genuine. Whether it’s doing a live podcast or doing a live event or something, or making a mistake and even just saying, “Hey, I messed this up for this, that, or the other reason. I think sometimes that can go a long way towards letting people know, “Hey, this person’s real. There’s something real going on here.
Brian Clark: That reminds me of when we first started the Unemployable Initiative and we kept having all those technical problems. There was nothing you could do about it. We were live without a net and so you and I just kind of vibed through it. We laughed about it and…
Jerod Morris: The recordings.
Brian Clark: You’re just trying to make the best of it. But afterwards, everyone was like, “Man, I loved that. That was so cool to see you guys just deal with stuff going wrong. And I was like, “Really? Because I was just trying to make it through with my sense of humor intact.
Jerod Morris: Yeah, now they wouldn’t have loved it if it kept happening, but they were certainly willing to indulge it a couple of times and see…
Brian Clark: We did solve those problems. But I mean, whenever you launch something new, man, you’ve just got to — and to the extent that you can still…
Jerod Morris: Oh boy, so ironically, we just had a technical issue. I don’t know if you noticed that, but you just cut out, so I have no idea what you just said.
Brian Clark: Damn it.
Jerod Morris: We just tempted fate. It’s all right. It’s all right. That’s how this episode should end, with five seconds of silence. But there’s a technical issue. Never talk about it live during our recording again.
Brian Clark: I think that’s a sign right there that we need to wrap this up.
Final Thoughts on Audience
Jerod Morris: That is a sign. Any final thoughts on the process of building a minimum viable audience or knowing when you have one that we haven’t covered yet?
Brian Clark: It’s an unpopular concept, but patience is the greatest virtue, because getting the right audience is inherently a more valuable asset than just some audience.
There’ve been plenty of people who have built an audience, but did not succeed in properly developing the right products or services for them. And that is an exercise in futility if you want to look at it from a business building or startup standpoint.
So just keep your eye on the ball and realize that the payoff is going to be way more than if you bought a gym.
Jerod Morris: All right. Thank you for listening to this episode of the 7-Figure Small podcast. Brian will be back next week with another interview, and we look forward to talking with you then. Take care.