Hey,
When I started building my own business, one of the things I felt most behind on was audience.
I had been inside a large organization for fifteen years. My network was real, but it was concentrated. The people who were already paying attention to what I had to say were mostly people from the same world I had just left.
Building a new audience from scratch felt like a long project. And in the early days, when you need momentum, slow is painful.
So I stopped trying to build first, and started showing up in rooms where the audience I wanted to reach was already gathered.
LinkedIn was already full of them. Directors. VPs. Senior professionals quietly wondering what their next chapter looked like. They were there every day, reading, scrolling, paying attention, they just didn't know I existed yet.
So I started showing up consistently with something worth reading. Not to grow a following. To get in front of the right people, in the place they were already spending time.
That approach created opportunities faster than anything else I did in that period.
I have seen the same thing happen with others. A client of mine had fewer than five hundred followers when she started. Rather than spending months trying to grow that number, she focused on showing up consistently in the space where her ideal clients were already paying attention. Within a few months, the business had moved significantly without the audience she thought she needed.
Most people assume they need scale before they can create momentum. But momentum usually comes from proximity to the right people, not from the size of your own platform.
The question worth asking is not how to grow your audience faster. It is who has already gathered the people you want to reach, and where they are already showing up.
On July 15th I am hosting a free live webinar on how to make your first $5K outside your corporate job. If you have been wondering where to start, this is it.
— TJ
P.S. Five deep relationships with the right people will move a business further than five thousand passive followers.