Build your audience now (before you're ready)

Our dilemma

You're about to embark on a long, arduous, and oftentimes lonely journey of creating something new: a book, a film, a dance, a play, a product launch, a startup. It's a daunting but enticing project. You can't help but to launch yourself into it.

How much time will you be investing in this project? 500 hours? 1,000 hours? 2,000 hours? 10,000 hours?

It's bold. Audacious. Courageous. You're nervous and excited. You can feel the creative energy building up inside you, ready to flow into the world. You're about to build the future you imagine so clearly in your mind's eye.

But there's one major problem.
One tangled knot in your throat.
One haunting phantom in the back of your mind.

You don't have an audience.

You're about to invest so much time, blood, sweat and tears into a massive creative project. And you have no guarantee that anyone will know about it, let alone care.

Without an audience for your project, when it's done, you risk a spiritual defeat: obscurity.

The risks?

• You launch to nothing. The silence is deafening.

• You suffer from "creative stagnation." You risk not finishing your project, wasting time, and, ultimately, never fulfilling the potential you know is inside of you.

• You don't have an audience that can give you feedback and encouragement, and there is a lack of actionable analytics from content you could have produced along the way. Your plan, in a nutshell, is "Release and pray." But hope is not a plan; it's a gamble.

• You waste a massive opportunity to capture content for marketing your project and connect with your audience throughout the journey.

• Creative isolation means you don't build a peer network and find potential future collaborators.

• You risk your work becoming outdated or irrelevant by the time you release it. If you miss the trend, you're too late.

• Your creative project, hard work, planning, commitment, and emotional investment are not allowed to be seen and valued by the world.

Create in public

The solution to our dilemma?
Create in public.

Counterintuitive as it might feel, building your audience before you're ready to show your project to the world is how you ensure that you have an audience when it is finished.

Why does this strategy work?

1. By creating in public, you generate noise. You generate interest and attract followers and supporters.

2. You build accountability along the way. Your audience will help you keep your promise to yourself. A growing audience entails a growing sense of accountability.

3. You share your hero's journey. After all, you're a creative and you're on an adventure! People love adventures, they love a good story, and they REALLY love an underdog.

4. You get to turn the difficulty into motivation. Adventures are risky and dangerous. We love heroes because of who they BECOME as they confront and overcome challenges.

5. You master your fears. Fear can trap you or drive you. Creating in public empowers you to harness your fear of NOT being heard to overcome your fear of putting yourself out there.

6. You start "flywheels" early. You design and execute self-reinforcing systems, i.e. "flywheels," from the beginning. The hardest turn of a flywheel is the first one. By pushing hard well before you plan to show your work to the world, you get their momentum behind you once you're launching your work.

7. You start to be your future self now. Who do you need to become to achieve your dreams? You begin being them now. Bring your growth and development forward by intentionally changing your identity into the person you need to become.

Most importantly, you want to have fun! The more fun you make it, the more effortless it will feel to build, share and connect.

The purpose of "creating in public" is simple: We want to go from obscure, struggling artist to well-known and known-well creative maverick.

We want to eliminate the risk of silence when we go live. We want to virtually guarantee that we have a fanbase ready for our work when it is ready for them. Ideally, we want them cheering us on along the way. Even if it starts small, we can get it rolling and watch it snowball into something incredible.

Initial results

I published a brief CREATIVE CAPITAL manifesto on the 1st of April, which I consider a special edition. So this is the first instalment of my "regular" newsletter.

Why did I choose to write about "creating in public" as my first newsletter?
I'm taking my own medicine.

We're going to demonstrate the principles of audience creation and creating in public in situ. And you, my beautiful early audience, will get to come alone from the very beginning.

Let's review our first few days of audience building and creating in public.

I began posting on April 1st 2025 (six days ago). Most of those posts were short-form posts, and three were medium-form threads about "creating in public." Before April, I had not been active on LinkedIn: no description, out-of-date photo, and no posts in over 12 months (if ever). However, in the last 6 days, I've had the following results:

• +2,679 impressions

• 752 members reached

• +9 followers

• +1 inbound connection

• +2 inbound DMs

That might be very small. But compound that for another 3, 6, 12, or 36+ months, and my tiny audience will turn into an avalanche.

As I publish my second, third and fourth books, I will have increasingly larger launches. Even more exciting, as I launch more products, I'll have more fans supporting and encouraging me throughout each creative development.

And I'm just getting started.

Social media is a powerful tool. Platforms like LinkedIn match content to people based on their interests. As such, they are more than just "social networks": they are "interest networks." By posting regularly, you elevate your participation on social media from a consumer to a producer. You become a tributary of the great "interest ocean" of the social networks. Over time, the goal is to grow from a brook to a creek to a stream to a river.

People are exposed to your content and ideas as you contribute meaningful and valuable content and ideas. They follow and connect with you if your content is relevant, novel, interesting and valuable. They begin to build a relationship with you. In other words, publishing valuable, interesting content on social media is a way to scale your audience relationship building.

What's the best way to efficiently and regularly publish content that is relevant to your audience, interesting, novel and potentially valuable?

Share your journey.

Let your audience into your world before you're ready to publish, launch, or go live. Give them a "behind-the-scenes" experience of creating the work you're creating for them. Bring your people along for the ride.

Start Your Creative Journey Doco

Let's get practical. How can you implement this idea?

I call it "The Creative Journey Documentary."

It's a simple strategy for making the most out of your creative development: define and execute a simple micro-action plan.

Our goal is simple: Turn your creative journey into a content strategy. You can execute it with minimal extra overhead. It has the added benefit of turning your creative development into a "reflective practice," i.e. you'll improve your craft faster.

There are three main phases:

1. 🎬 Before Phase: Before and at the start of the creative development.

2. 🎥 During Phase: The journey of the creative development.

3. 🎞️ After Phase: The final delivery of the project and shortly after, before commencing your next project and content journey.

🎬 BEFORE PHASE

1. Inspiration: You let your audience know what inspired you to start on your journey. Why are you embarking on this adventure? What artistic, entrepreneurial or creative problem are you trying to solve?

2. Power Trailer: You give your audience a preview of the finished work. For example, if you're writing a book, then write a public blurb; if you're producing a film, then release some sort of short trailer. Use the power of "backcasting" - envisioning your desired end state and working backwards to make it a reality. Ask yourself, "What must be true for my vision to become a reality?"

3. Plan: Your let your audience know about your goals and plan for achieving them. How will you bring your creative work to life? Give a high-level outline of how you intend to bring about your vision. Everyone knows plans change, but letting your audience know you have a plan is a powerful way of signalling that you're serious about the project. When you commit to your project, your audience will commit to your journey.

🎥 DURING PHASE

• Challenges & Victories: You share your difficulties and how you plan to overcome them.

• Commentary: You share your thoughts as they evolve throughout the process.

• Open Progress Reports: You share your progress against key progress metrics, such as words written or scenes filmed. By showing your progress objectively, you demonstrate to your audience that you're making tangible progress. By letting your audience know well in advance of any delays, you can build anticipation and manage expectations.

• Milestones: You share highlights of the journey, including achieving major milestones in your plan or memorable highlights. Bring your audience along on the journey. Let them experience the highs and lows of your creative journey. Let them feel your disappointment when things go wrong and your joy when things go well.

• Learnings: You share your insights, mistakes, and creative solutions. How could your audience learn from your experience? Knowledge is wealth. Helping your audience learn from your experience (potentially for free) is a fantastic way to deliver value, build trust and goodwill, and create an audience relationship built on a foundation of mutual growth.

• "Opening Season" Campaign: You ramp up content as you approach your project's publication date, launch week or open night! A pre-launch campaign makes sense not only from a financial point of view. It makes sense from an "audience experience design." After waiting for weeks, months or years, you reward your longest-standing, most committed and most invested fans with a big launch event. It's not just a big moment for you; it's a big moment for your supporters, too!

🎞️ AFTER PHASE

1. Post mortem: Dissect your project. What worked? What didn't? What would you do differently next time?

2. Reflections: How have you grown as a person? How are you feeling now, and what are your most impactful learnings?

3. Teaser: What's next!? Give your audience some hints about what your next big project might be!

CREATIVE CAPITAL project launch

So, without further ado, the CREATIVE CAPITAL project launch!

The Inspiration

I want to write books, build software, and - one day - create my own films.

But I don't want to go the "traditional" route. I want to maintain my creative autonomy. As such, I need to have a direct relationship with my audience and own those relationships, including the technology, brand, strategy, data, and distribution infrastructure.

If I ever want to go the traditional route, such as working with a publisher or film studio, owning an audience will empower me with more leverage in those future industry relationships.

Building an audience is powerful whether you stay indie or choose to pursue traditional, pre-Internet paths in the future.

The Plan

• Start date: 7th of April

• First draft deadline: 26th of June

• First draft timeline: ~12 weeks

• First draft word count: 54,000 ± 6,000 words

• Publication date: Christmas 2025

• Timeframe for revisions and edits: ~4 months

• Timeframe for cover, formatting and launch campaign: ~2 months

• NB: This plan is extremely ambitious, and I may slip. Remember: the plan is an outline and expression of commitment, not a prison sentence. Use it to navigate and sense-check your progress as you execute.

The Power Trailer (i.e. blurb for a book):

Sound exciting? Let me know by replying to this email!

I check my emails regularly, and I can't wait to discuss these ideas with you in more detail.

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Join me and my community of creative adventurers on our journey into the creative unknown.