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My First MillionHow To Get Started With Building An Audience in 2022 (#373)
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WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Audience growth basics: make wanted content, nail timing, leverage niches
- Shaan framed his audience as a byproduct of “professional curiosity,” where he turns personal learning into packaged content he can share.
- Saagar described audience building as filling niches with an underlying philosophy, emphasizing that the idea is simple but sustained execution across years is hard.
- Both argued the fundamental differentiator is creating content people actually want, not obsessing over gear, thumbnails, or other surface-level optimizations at the start.
- They contrasted personal vs. business brands, with the view that people follow people (faster growth) while brand umbrellas create independence and sellable assets.
- In discussing viral tweets and early growth tactics, they emphasized timeliness, concise framing, and distribution via influential accounts as key levers.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasAudience growth can be a byproduct of designing your life around curiosity.
He described starting from the question of what a “great day” looks like and realizing he wanted to be “professionally curious,” then using content as the packaging step that makes curiosity sustainable and shareable.
The core rule is “make content people want,” and everything else is secondary.
He said it’s not about “great” in an abstract sense; it’s about whether the content is what people actually want, paralleling Y Combinator’s “make something people want.”
Audience building is simple in concept but difficult to execute consistently.
He argued that execution over years—through changing conditions—is what separates the best, and noted how attention outcomes are highly skewed with exponential returns at the top.
Choose personal vs. company branding based on growth speed vs. asset independence.
He said companies should lean on individual faces to grow faster, while individuals who want a sellable asset should build under a brand umbrella so it isn’t permanently tied to one person.
Timeliness can matter more than production quality for viral, news-driven content.
Shaan said his “Luna” video didn’t spread because it was released weeks late, concluding that “good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time” for reactionary moments.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesI wanna be professionally curious.
— Shaan Puri
You have to provide something that doesn't exist, and then people will commoditize it with their attention.
— Saagar Enjeti
The best, the people who are the best do the simple thing just better than everybody else.
— Shaan Puri
Good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time.
— Shaan Puri
Get those few amount of accounts in order to follow you and get them to retweet you, and that's basically the secret to growth.
— Saagar Enjeti
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SPEAKERS
Shaan Puri
hostEntrepreneur and co-host of the My First Million podcast.
Saagar Enjeti
guestPolitical commentator and co-host of Breaking Points.
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
