Build A Million Dollar E-Commerce Business With An Audience Of 500 People Or Less

The main takeaway that I want you to have from today is that you only need about 500 to 1,000 people to have a really profitable business. And if you spend the next 30 to 90 days building up an audience of 500 to 1,000 really responsive people, you can absolutely have a million dollar business over the next 12 months. In order to build an audience, you don't need to have 100,000 Instagram followers, you don't need to post a ton of content on TikTok, you don't even need to be active on social media in order to build an audience that is profitable and influential to your business. You can do all of those things, but those are tools to building an audience. It's not the actual audience building. If you want to become an influencer, then what we're gonna talk about today probably will not be helpful for you. I am not an influencer. I am not famous. I am not good at that kind of stuff. In fact, I've been doing content for over 10 years and I have a relatively small audience, at least in comparison to the other people who talk about the same things that I do. However, I do have multiple seven figure businesses and I've had one business that I built and sold for $16 million. All of these businesses had very small audiences. In fact, the business that I sold for $16 million at its peak only had an audience of about 10,000 people and that took four years to build. So I am not the guy to go to for building really big audiences or big followings on any specific social media platform. Instead, where I can help you is building a small group of raving fans or hyper responsive customers that actually impacts your business. So if your goal is to build a really successful and a profitable business, even a business that does a million dollars a year or more, then this is for you. And where I specialize in helping clients and our members is getting their business off the ground, sometimes with as little as a hundred people in their audience. And if we start with a very small audience of hyper responders, that is enough to move the needle to launching a product, to getting it profitable, and to get the ball moving so that you have consistent sales and predictable growth in your business. So today I'm going to share with you how to build audiences that happily buy your product, that are raving fans of your business, that even tell other people about your product and your business without posting a ton of content on social media, without trying to become an influencer, and without trying to become something that you're not. And Putting out fake content in the world that feels inauthentic to you or to your business. To illustrate this, let me tell you a story of a friend of mine. I have a friend who is an influencer. She is one of the biggest influencers in her space. She posts content every day, sometimes twice a day. And, and she's one of the leading authority figures on a specific type of content. And her entire business is monetizing that audience with ads and sponsorships from other companies. It's selling courses and coaching programs. And she does pretty well. She has a low six figure business, but the minute that she stops making content, she stops making money. She has to keep creating content in order to keep the music going. She is the business, her face is the business. And she is constantly worried that the algorithm is going to change, that Instagram is going to kick her off, or that she says something that isn't so PC. And now she gets shut down on a platform that's being an influencer. And yes, she has an audience and yes, she makes a decent amount of profit from that audience. But that's not the only way to build an audience. And it's not the way that I build audiences or that our most successful clients and customers build audiences. Let me give you a different example. One of our members, Bradley and Chelsea Halbert, they're a young couple with four kids and they started a business as a side project. And this side project sells organizational products for other busy parents. If you are a parent, you know how crazy the house can get when the kids are out playing. So they started selling organizational products to this audience. They simply showed their product being used and sometimes their face is in front of the camera, but most of the time it's just showing them using the product. Now, they started with a very small audience. They got a few thousand followers and a few thousand email subscribers, but every single person who is in that audience wanted to buy the product. And as a result of them cultivating that audience, they have a multimillion dollar business that doesn't require their face to be on camera. If they take a day off from making content, the business keeps going. If they don't want to put their face in front of Instagram or on Facebook, their customers don't care. They have a business that can be scaled and sold and they have a multimillion dollar business as a direct result of creating this type of content and building this type of an audience. Which one of these do you want? Do you want to build a big audience that considers you famous or do you want to have an influential audience that buys your products and supports the growth of the business? In my case, again, I don't have a very big audience, in contrast with a lot of the people who create entrepreneurial content or content about making money. But I have a multimillion dollar business as a result of creating a certain connection with the audience that I do have. And let's face it, most of us don't actually want to be famous. We just think that we need to be famous in order to have authority and in order to influence our business. Because we see a few examples in the space of people who became famous and as result they built really successful businesses. But I hope that at the end of today you realize that you don't need to do that in order to have a business that makes a lot of money. So to make this very clear, let's define what an audience is. Most people think that an audience is the number of people of whom you can get their attention. If you get a lot of attention from your content, if you say something and a lot of people listen, that's what they consider an audience. And that can be part of audience building. But in the context of impacting a business, that is not how I define an audience. In terms of impacting your business for the purpose of building a profitable and even a seven figure business, I define an audience as the total number of leads and potential leads that that you can contact. Alex Hormozi in his book $100 million leads defines a lead as a person that you can contact. And I define an audience as the total number of leads that you can get in contact with for the purpose of impacting your business. So an audience is a pool of leads, it's not just a pool of attention. And that's a very important difference. When you look at people who are famous, people who create a lot of content, and people whose business model depends on you paying attention. For example, if you watch the news like CNN or Fox News, they have a very specific audience. Depending on which side of the aisle you fall on, the content is going to be tailored to you. It is designed to keep your attention. That is their business model. But when I look at impacting a business, I say they do not have responsive audiences. Why? Because they do not have a collection of leads that they can contact. Fox News cannot effectively create a call to action that will get you to buy a product. Instead, they have to rent their attention to other people who do have direct calls to action. That's why CNN and Fox News business model is to sell advertising. So what do they have to do? They have to constantly create new or more shocking content to keep your attention in order for them to be able to sell that attention to other people who are getting leads. That's not the business that I want to run. I, I assume that it's not the business that you want to run. Instead, our focus is getting the attention of the leads and the potential leads that want to buy our product or participate in whatever our business does. Since we live in a TikTok and Instagram world, it can be tempting to think that audience building is just getting the maximum number of followers or the maximum amount of attention from the collective audience, which is the world, because we can get in front of millions of people if a video goes viral. But that usually doesn't impact a business. It might over time if someone builds authority and credibility in a space. But just going viral does not change your life and it certainly does not impact your business. Unless, of course, you're going viral to the exact people that your business wants to serve. So, so for the purpose of impacting a business, our attention on audience building will be getting in front of our leads and potential leads, meaning people that we can serve within our business. That means that our job is to cultivate a certain level of connection, a certain amount of authority and a certain amount of attention with a core group of people. And you can think about it this way. If you have a small audience of just 300 people, but those 300 people buy every product that you release, and they buy on auto ship, so it's coming to their house every month. And then those 300 people leave positive reviews on your product. And then those 300 people provide video testimonials for you to use on your social media or in your advertising. And then those 300 people tell their friends who are like them about how great your business is. If you have just 300 people that do that, do you have an impactful audience? Well, let's look at this. If you have 300 people that are paying you 100 bucks a month, you've got a very healthy business that does mid six figures in revenue. And if those 300 people go and leave reviews on a platform like Amazon.com, then they're going to make your conversions go up and they're going to attract other people like them, which, which is going to drive your conversion rates up, it's going to allow you to charge higher prices, and it's going to get you in front of the ideal person. That are like those 300 raving fans. If those individuals are giving you video testimonials that you're posting on your own social media, then it's going to give you credibility in front of more people like them and expose you to more people that you didn't impact before. And those people are going to be like those 300 super fans. So it increases your total amount of leads. Those are potential leads that build your audience. If those 300 people provide video reviews that you run as ads, you can now target more people who wouldn't have heard about you before and bring in even more people that you can serve within your business. So the question is not how big does your audience need to be. The question is not how many people see your posts. The question is how responsive is your audience and how much does that impact your business? If we know that a small group of people can dramatically impact our business, then we are hopefully liberated to focus on cultivating a small group of people that can spread our message to more people that we can serve. And if you're like me, that liberates you to serve those people that are paying attention. It takes the stress out of what's going to go viral. It takes the question out of what type of content am I going to create that gets the maximum number of people to see it? It de stresses the process and instead puts you in a position to serve the people that will pay the most, respond the most, and tell their friends about your business. In fact, I know that if I lose everything tomorrow, all my investments, all my businesses go to zero. I can spend the next 30 to 90 days cultivating a group of 300 people that I really care about and that really care about what I have to offer. And I could have a six or a seven figure business within a few months because I know that I only need a very small group of people to serve in order to have a very profitable business. I hope that at the end of this you feel that same amount of liberation and that you have less stress about audience building and you can focus on cultivating that small group of customers that really cares about what you're doing in the world. And what you will find is that once you get the ball moving, then the audience starts to grow and your business will soon follow. So the question becomes, how do we create an audience that has a very high responsiveness? Here's how I define responsiveness. Authority plus trust times intimacy equals responsiveness. That's authority plus trust. That equation times intimacy equals the responsiveness of your audience. Authority is the confidence that a lead has that you truly understand their problem. So this is your typical content creator or your especially in like the diet and biohacking space. The people who create a lot of content about a specific ailment or a specific problem and they show that they understand the nuances of this. A good example of this would be Andrew Huberman. Andrew Huberman does a lot of in depth content that I don't really understand. But as a result of listing I'm like, this guy really knows his stuff. He has a lot of authority because he has clearly defined the problem that I'm trying to solve and he seems to have solutions that will work. Trust is the confidence that a lead has that you genuinely care about their problem. It's a feeling of I'm on your side. It's a feeling of you're an advocate for me. An example of this again would be anyone in the political space if they are on your side saying that those guys are the enemy, we're the ones who are correct and here are all the values that we share together. You are naturally inclined to trust that person because you agree that they are on your side. And intimacy is how close someone feels to you or your business or how bought in they are to the mission that you are trying to solve. Do they feel like they are a part of what you are trying to do? And do they feel close to you as a result of the mission that you are on? Let's go through a couple of examples of these. One example of authority would be Dave Asprey. In the early days, Dave Asprey was one of the first biohackers to create a lot of content. He had a blog originally called the Bulletproof Executive. He had a podcast and eventually he started launching products and he was creating a lot of content about new biohacks that most people had never heard of before. And as a result, he built up a good amount of authority. If you look at Dave Asprey today, he has now cashed in a lot of that authority. He endorses a lot of different products. Some people will say that the science doesn't really bear out as a result of some new studies that have come out. And as a result, Dave built a lot of authority, but he compromised some of that trust. He endorsed way too many things, he went too wide, he tried to build up authority and it compromised his trust. So as a result, that equation of authority times trust has gone down. He still has name recognition, he still has a following, he still has authority. But there's not as much trust. And so the responsiveness of his audience has gone down over time. Another example would be Gary Vaynerchuk. He focuses on trust. If you follow Gary's content, you'll see that he interacts with his audience. He's listening. He advocates for people's happiness and well being. You feel like he is on your side. He's creating a lot of content that makes you feel like you can do it. And there is a sense of trust with Gary Vaynerchuk, but the authority that he built happened much slower. He was not an actual expert until several years into creating a lot of content. He has it now, of course, because people have seen his track record. But he indexed on trust, creating connection with the audience and making his audience feel like they had an advocate on the path that they were on. And intimacy, that feeling of closeness that you have with someone. This could be illustrated by thinking of your favorite band. This is the band that no one knows about. You're excited about them. You go to their concerts and you excitedly tell your friends about how awesome their music is. They don't have a lot of authority. There's not even trust because you don't really go to them for anything specific outside of their music. But there's a lot of intimacy. In fact, I'm thinking of an example of one band that went out of their way at a concert to greet my nephew. My 11 year old nephew was at their concert and they came out of their way. They brought him on stage, stage. There was a great amount of connection that happened and as a result I. I feel more intimate, I feel more bought into this band. I want to advocate for them. They're called Nerve. They're a heavy metal group. Go ahead and look them up. I feel intimately close with this band even though they don't know my name. So the combination of these three things will determine the responsiveness of your audience. But most people will only focus on one piece of this audience building process. And they usually emulate whoever they follow in the space. So if you follow a lot of authority figures, then you might fall into the temptation of thinking I need to create a lot of authoritative content. I need to become an expert. I need to act like I know what I'm talking about and demonstrate authority by creating a lot of how to content so that I can be an authority figure like the people that I follow. For example, I was working with a client this week who wanted to launch a supplement company and she was thinking of other people that she followed in in the supplement space and how much authority that they had. And she was just paralyzed with fear about creating any content or cultivating any audience because she doesn't feel like she's an authority in the space. But she sees all of these people talking about the types of supplements that she wants to sell. And even though she has an interest and a knowledge in this space, she feels completely paralyzed to talk about it because she's not an expert like those people that she follows. So if you ever felt like that, the shyness or the hesitancy to create content or the question of what do I even talk about in order to serve somebody or to get their attention, I would invite you to consider that you are basing this off of the other people that you follow in this space, rather than focusing on your customers and creating and cultivating a raving fan base that is going to be responsive to your business. We'll talk about exactly how to do that next. Most people will try to over index in one of these three areas. And for most people who feel paralyzed and audience building, they're trying to over index on authority. They're trying to make themselves or their brand look like they're a leader in the space. And oftentimes that comes out as fake. It feels inauthentic. Or sometimes people just make up opinions in order to try and stand out from everybody else. We wonder why there's so much crap content out there. We wonder why social media gets noisier and more confusing. And it's because people are trying to, to look like an authority when they're actually not. Now, you can build an audience by being an authority, but there are other ways to do that too. We can also focus on trust, and we can focus on intimacy. The easiest one to build. For most people, starting is actually going to be intimacy. And that is the thing that creates the highest amount of responsiveness, especially in the early phases of business. For example, I, I, I don't really have a whole lot of interest in being seen as an authority. It makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable when people think that I am the savior for their business or their money problems. That does happen. And it makes me feel, makes me feel a little bit gross, to be honest with you. So I don't try to act like I'm an expert in things that I'm not, at least anymore. I have fallen into that temptation in the past, but when I don't understand something, I don't try to be an authority on that. I might, however, share my opinion or my predictions on Something while very humbly saying that I could be completely wrong, that builds a certain level of trust. I'm also very involved in my communities. I know many of the people who follow my work by name. There is a deep level of intimacy that I have with my audience, and as a result, I have a strong amount of responsiveness that comes from my audience. All this to say, you can build an audience by focusing on any one of these three areas, but it's actually the combination of all three that determines how responsive your audience is. So which one do you focus on? So where do you focus? Where should you put your attention in order to start building a responsive audience? Well, that is not the first question to ask. We will get to that. But the first question to ask is, how will I be contacting the audience? But the first question is, how do I plan to contact my audience? My favorite way to do this, and I think the best way, the simplest way, the most scalable way, is by building an email list. An email list still to this day is the most direct way to contact your list of leads to, to ask for a sale or to create additional connection with your audience. So building an email list is my preferred way to build an audience. What this means is that when I create content, when I am putting something out there on social media, when I am running an ad, I am always first looking at how do I take these leads. They're gonna see my content or my advertisement and put them on to an email list so that I can contact them. That's my preferred way of cultivating those leads. But I do have people who just simply contact their leads via Instagram direct Messenger. In fact, I have peers who have multimillion dollar businesses by cultivating authority and trust with their content and then asking people to DM them and then they take the conversation privately, one on one to dm and then they're either adding value or they're asking for the sale via direct message. You can absolutely do that. There are also AI tools right now that will take comments or will take messages and then convert them into email subscribers so that you can communicate with them that way. But that's the first question that we have to ask. How are we going to contact these leads once they enter our world? If we don't answer that question, then we're just talking to Instagram or TikTok. We're building awareness. We might be building potential leads, but we're not actually building leads. And that is what's going to drive the business. So whether it's DM or getting people on a text message list, or my preferred way, building email lists, we have to answer that question first. And once they enter into our contact mechanism, then they're in a position where we can sell to them and, and communicate with them over time. Now, in the olden days of Internet marketing, the playbook was to run advertising or to create content and send people to a lead magnet. And the lead magnet was there to build up the trust and authority so that then you could sell things to those leads. That still works today, but people over prioritize that part of the process in today's world because we can create content that can be seen by hundreds or thousands of people. A lot of the authority, trust and intimacy can happen even before someone hits your landing page to buy your product or to opt in for your thing. If we do a good job of creating content that builds those three things, intimacy, trust and authority, then we don't have to create a complicated lead magnet. We don't have to create big discounts or product giveaways in order to get the lead. We just need to give them a clear next step. For example, if you are creating content to grow a physical products brand and the way that you're building trust with your audience is by showing your product being used and sharing the video testimonials that are coming from the customers that you do have, all you need to do is send those people over to a waiting list or to a first customer list or or to a small discount list or a VIP list or a newsletter page in order to collect the email and you've got someone who has already trusted you, already sees you as an authority and wants to buy from you. That is completely appropriate and probably the simplest way to build an audience that buys from you. Said differently, all of the selling in that case happens before they hit the page, before they become an email subscriber. If we've done a good job of building authority and trust in our content, of course we can also do that via a lead magnet. But it is not a necessary part of the process. What we are really solving for is how we get attention of the people that we can serve, how we build authority, trust and intimacy with them, and how we translate that into business in the form of sales. So you don't need to write an ebook, you don't need to give a ton of product away for free, you don't need to do big discounts. We simply need to demonstrate authority, intimacy and trust before they enter our world and become a customer. So how do we do that? How do we combine these three elements in order to get in front of the type of people that we can serve and will become raving fans of our business? Let's talk about that. I have a friend who has been blogging for years. And blogging is a slow way to build an audience, at least today. But he's been doing it for years. And as a result he has thousands of readers, not millions of readers, but thousands of readers, many of whom has been following his work for years. And he's built up a small but decent email list of a few thousand people that like and follow his work. But he's been feeling frustrated because he's not making the amount of money that he wants to make. He doesn't want to be one of those Internet marketing bros that does a bunch of discounts or dollar trials for his product. He wants to maintain the authority and the trust that he has with his audience. But he's not seeing the responsiveness that he would expect to have after being involved in this business for so many years. So instead of coming up with a complicated marketing promotion or trying to get better at copy, what I encouraged him to do was to focus instead on building intimacy. That means that he goes deep with his customers. He was thinking about, how do I create even more content to get more people? Why am I not blowing up on social media? Why am, why do I not have a bigger, more responsive audience? And I said, is that what you want or do you want to make more money? Do you want to have an audience that's really responsive? And he said, I want that. So I said, let's add a layer of intimacy into what you're already doing. He shared with me that he was getting about five opt ins a day. Okay, he's getting five email subscribers a day. That's not nothing. But most people would look at that and say, this isn't working, I'm gonna give up. No one's paying attention. So what I encouraged him to do was every time he got one of those opt ins to make a loom video, take five minutes and make a loom video for that subscriber. Pull up their social media if you can find it and deliver whatever value you can for that subscriber. Notice what you notice about their social media. Respond to the questions that they submitted in their signup, act like a person and try to deliver value that creates a certain level of intimacy on top of the authority and trust that he already had with his audience. And just so you know, I do this in my business, if I see a lead that comes in that is potentially someone that we can serve within our company, I will often fire up a loom, review their application, bring up their business, make some recommendations, and give them a clear next step for how we can serve them within their business. And the conversion rates on that are really, really high. Yes, I hope that they become a customer so that we can serve them. Yes, I want them to be a lifelong customer and spend lots of money with us and come to our conferences and be a contributing member to our community. But what I'm trying to do in that step of the process is simply build intimacy, because, again, I know a lot of our customers by name. I am involved in a lot of the transformations within our community, and I like being in that role. And so I'm building intimacy when that lead comes in, which is going to dramatically impact the responsiveness that that lead has throughout the life cycle of their interactions with me. Now, you don't have to do any or all of these different tactics. What I'm trying to demonstrate for you is that when you build authority, trust, and intimacy, you can have a very responsive list, even if you only have a few hundred people who are paying attention to you. In fact, we have a client inside of the 1% right now who spent about 90 days creating content for his ideal audience. His ideal audience was Magic the Gathering Players. And he built up an audience of about a thousand people. I think a little bit more than that, but it was a thousand people. He had no entrepreneurial experience. He had no audience when he started. He had no authority in the space, but he communicated trust and intimacy to this small group. And in his first 30 days in business, he launched a product that wasn't even ready yet. And he did over $100,000 in sales. And that was pre orders. That was products that he couldn't even ship out yet. They're gonna have to wait weeks or months to get their product. But he demonstrated trust and intimacy with this small group of people, and he gave them a product that they wanted. And he did over $100,000 in sales in his first 30 days. Again, with no experience and no background in the space. That's a responsive list. That is what we're going for. So how do you start. How do you start doing this? How can we begin to cultivate an audience that is gonna build our business? Well, the simplest way to start doing this, and the answer that I give to most people, is to start by just announcing what it is that you are about to do. If you announce that you are now building a community, if you announce that you are starting a business, if you announce that you're going to be starting a parenting blog, if you announce that you are going in a specific direction and then invite people to join whatever your contact list is, like your email subscriber list or your text message list, that is your opening move. Your opening move is to announce where you're going and invite people to be on your contact list. Yes, when you start if you are starting from absolutely nothing, the first people who are going to sign up are going to be your personal friends and family. That is not nothing. That is people that you have naturally built intimacy with just by living your life. And over time you will build up credibility, authority and trust with those people and they might become customers. For example, sometimes inside of our mentorship, which is called the 1%, it's where we help entrepreneurs build seven figure E commerce brands, people will kind of complain that the first sales that they're getting are from other members of the community or from their family and friends that already follow them on social media. And I tell them that still counts. Those are still people in your audience who have a certain level of intimacy or trust with you. You've done something right in the audience building process. If someone is buying your product over time, as you either create more content or you are more in service to your customers, you will naturally build up the other two pieces of authority and trust. But at the beginning you might only have intimacy. You might only have connections with your personal friends and family or people who are in your community and that still counts. That is not nothing. One of the ways that you do that is by going all in on the people who are showing up. Instead of complaining about the fact that you're only getting friends and family or that you're only getting two opt ins a day, or you only have 30 people who are on your email list. What if we focused on intimacy with those 30 people? If we did the unscalable things like taking the phone call or responding to the email or responding to comments on social media. If we increase the level of intimacy that we have with the people who are paying attention, then we'll increase the responsiveness of our audience. What happens then? Those people start to bring our message to the rest of the world when we have a post that has a certain level of authority or builds a certain amount of trust, or maybe we don't do either of those things and just that group of 30 people starts to spread us to other People that are like them and the audience grows as a result. So our opening move is simply to announce where we're going and invite people to be on whatever our contact list is. The second step is simply to decide where and how we're going to communicate with our potential leads. So what's the best platform? Where's the best place to put out content to target our ideal customers? Is it TikTok? Is it Clubhouse? Is it MySpace? Is it whatever the new thing is that everybody is testing? Well, here's how I think about it. I am a depth guy. I like long form content that is thoughtful, that is well planned. I like going deep on topics and as a result I'm going to make content that is podcast format, YouTube format, and I don't really care about any of my one specific pieces of content popping off and going viral. If it happens, awesome. I see it as free exposure and free awareness for where I'm really building the audience, which is by developing trust and intimacy with the people who are following my in depth content. Some platforms are better for authority building or better for trust building and better for intimacy. And since I am a depth guy that likes to be very involved, that likes to really understand the journey of my customers and the people that I do business with, I am going to specialize in more in depth content. And just so you are aware, conversion rates and responsiveness goes up the more time that someone spends with you. So for example, you are, you're more likely to get a customer from someone who has consumed seven hours of a podcast than someone who has looked at seven posts. It's different because there's, there's a different amount of trust and intimacy with that potential lead. This is why you have influencers who make a ton of one to three minute clips and they have huge audiences, but they're broke with a capital B. It's because they don't actually have the trust and intimacy and they might not even have authority, they just have awareness, they just have attention. So the more that you can get a lead to consume and develop that trust with them and that intimacy with them, the more that responsiveness is going to go up. So the way that I see the short form stuff like YouTube shorts or Instagram, I see those as advertising, I see those as opportunities to bring people into where I'm gonna go deep, where I'm gonna really build trust and intimacy. And it's not until that point that someone is really part of my audience. So I don't care that much about how much exposure my stories get or how much my YouTube shorts get. Those are simply awareness so that more people find my in depth content. And that's how I'm building responsiveness with my audience for other people. Like if you're selling a $20 widget or a $40 supplement, you don't need a lot of depth in order to create a conversion. You simply need awareness and to be able to contact them and get them to take the first step, which is buying a product and then being really good to that customer. But the question really to ask is how can you consistently build some combination of authority, trust and or intimacy. And the more that you do that over time, the more responsive your audience will be. Now what if you're starting with nothing? You don't wanna be the face of your brand, you don't have an audience right now, you're starting from scratch, but you wanna build an audience that impacts your business. Well, first of all, thank you for giving me the hardest possible situation to get you to just start from nothing and have it impact your business. But it's a question that comes up a lot, so let's answer it. The simplest answer to building an audience that actually impacts your business is to document the journey. This is a cliche answer that was made popular by Gary Vaynerchuk and people often roll their eyes at me when I tell them to do it. But what documenting the journey does is it builds a level of trust and intimacy without having to build any authority. Remember, most people will over prioritize the authority part of this because we see the big influencers who have a lot of authority. They see Alex Hormozi with millions of followers in the business space. They see the Rock who's famous, maybe the most famous person in the world. They see Dave Asprey or Ben Greenfield posting all this authoritative content and so they have influence in their space. But let's face it, most of us are not going to be famous, nor do we actually want to be. We want to have profitable businesses. And if we document the journey, which simply means sharing the wins and losses as you are learning how to be a parent, it's sharing the wins and losses as you build a business. It's sharing the wins and losses as you try to serve your customers by simply opening the doors and letting people in, we allow for a certain amount of trust and intimacy to be built. And I am always surprised at who comes out of the woodwork and offers to support our business when we're honest about the journey in the physical product space. I'm always surprised that the retailers who reach out or the influencers who reach out that have a lot of reach, or even the investors that reach out that say, I really like this brand. How can I support you? That could never happen if we weren't opening the doors and letting people in. And we don't need that many people in order to find the one or two people that are truly impactful to the overall trajectory of our business. Remember, we only need a few hundred people in order to have a really impactful audience. So a good place for us to start is documenting all the wins and losses, not just of you, but also of your customers, also of the business. If you don't want to be the face of your brand, sharing the wins and losses of what happened at the company and how you served this customer and what this person said about your business, or this negative review that you got and how you're responding to it, these are all very impactful ways to build trust with our audience and that can get the ball rolling. Now, if you're an entrepreneur and you're documenting your journey and sharing what you're struggling with and showing the early versions of the product, you don't have any authority in the entrepreneur space, and you don't have any authority in the niche that you're trying to impact either. But you will develop it over time. It's just like when you have friends and family who opt in to your contact list. You, you have a lot of intimacy with them, but you don't have any authority. But as you continue sharing what you are learning about the business, the struggles that you are going through, and how you overcame them, you're becoming an authority over time. And now we have a. We have a magnifying effect on the responsiveness of our audience because we've already built trust and intimacy. Now we're learning things that we're sharing and the authority builds over time. That's really how we build those three parts of the audience building process in a way that reaches a lot of people, but most importantly builds up the responsiveness of the people who are already following. Another way to get off the ground is simply to answer the questions that come up the most often on your customer's journey. If you are a brand or if you don't want to be the face of your brand, then answering the questions that come up most often when your customer is considering making a change, like they're starting a business or they're becoming a parent, or they're furnishing their new place when you're answering those questions. That's a natural way to build authority in the space. So that is a way that you can reach people who are early on in their journey, and they're looking for an authority figure to be able to attach to who can help them overcome the challenges that they will face throughout the life cycle of that journey. If you are in the parenting space, there's like 30 questions that most new parents ask as they are starting their journey. If you simply create content that answers those questions, you will reach the people who are early in that journey, and they will see you as an authority. And that is a way for them to start the journey with you and for you to start to build up some authority in your space. Over time, you will build up trust by interacting with those customers. You'll build intimacy by wowing them or communicating directly with them. And. And you'll increase the responsiveness of your audience over time. A third way to get started is just to focus on intimacy, to not try to be an authority, to not try to build trust, but only to focus on intimacy. This means doing the unscalable things. This means responding to the comments, taking the phone call, or in my case, making loom videos for people who are interested in working with me and what we do at my company. Capitalism.com is going deep with the people who are already paying attention. Now, the natural response of this is, well, no one's paying attention right now. So what you got for me now, Mr. Podcast Man? There are always people paying attention. Most of us have more than 300 people on our personal Facebook pages. Most of our businesses already have email lists of customers that have bought from us in the past. Here's a really good example. I have a client who takes all of his sales on Amazon.com and for years, he was trying to build up an audience by sponsoring influencers or creating content. And it just wasn't working. And I encouraged him instead to do the unscalable things and focus on intimacy. And so what he did was he put an insert in his packaging that had a call to action for people to opt in to join his contact list. That's a really good opening move. There's already people paying attention as customers. He just had no way to contact them or to build any sort of authority or trust with them. And so he takes that contact information and he reaches out to each one of those people that opts into his list, and he either emails them or texts them and opens up a conversation. And after a few conversations, he asks for the review. And that's what he's optimizing for reviews because his platform is Amazon.com and as a result of doing this, it's hard work, it's all intimacy. But he's gone from a few hundred reviews to over a thousand reviews in a few months time. What did that do? It dramatically increased his conversion rate and most importantly, it dramatically increased the average order size of every customer that comes in. So before he was thinking about how do I make the next $50 sale, but now he knows that if someone spends $50 with him today, they're probably going to come back and buy as much as $250 over the course of the next year. Why? Because when he gets that $50 customer, he focuses on building intimacy with them. And they're going to come back and buy from him over and over. They're going to pay a premium price point. They're going to choose his brand over everybody else's. Not by having a lot of exposure, but by building intimacy with the people who are already showing up. So we love to romanticize how we get new people or new sales or new followers, and we overlook building a lot of intimacy with the people who are already showing up. And yet that is actually the most accessible way to build an audience for most people who are starting out. The beauty of this is that if you focus on one of these areas, you will naturally build up the others as well. If you focus on intimacy, you will naturally have opportunities to build authority and trust as well. If you're building intimacy and you get feedback from a customer, that becomes a piece of content that you can share on social media and that builds more trust. Trust with potential leads. As you continually demonstrate that you are helping your customers and solving their problems and answering their questions, you naturally build up authority in your space as well. But we have to focus on one first and do a good job of it. And over time, we'll build up all three of those areas and that's when we have a really responsive audience. So how do you turn all of this into. Into money? Well, we're gonna have to save that one for another video. So make sure you are subscribed to the channel and feel free to drop your comments below so that I can see what you're thinking about as we talk about this process. Because audience building is the lifeblood to getting a business off the ground and scaling it to seven figures and beyond. When you know how to do that, then it doesn't matter what happens on the platforms, it doesn't matter what happens in the world, you always have an asset that you. You can go back to and either launch new products or start a completely different business. But we only have that if we build our audience in a way that cultivates responsiveness rather than simply attention. I'm Ryan Daniel Maryan with capitalism.com, i hope you found value in today's video. My work is helping entrepreneurs build seven figure businesses. We do that by building audiences, launching four products to them, getting them to 25 sales a day at a $30 price point. That's a million dollar business. And that process usually takes about 12 months. And I hope to see you guys next time. Thanks for watching. Take care. And now a quick word from Tristina Timm, one of our members from the capitalism.com community.

We joined the incubator because we knew the things that we didn't know. So we didn't know e commerce at all. And we needed that. We needed somebody to tell us where to go and what to do. Right now we are on track to hit the 3 million mark this year. However, I think next year is just going to double that. We have so many plans for the future and just executing the plan that the incubator brought us, it was fantastic. It was step by step, what to do, how to execute it, and then if we did fumble the ball, we had somebody there to help us through it and walk us through our plans for the future. Of course, this year we have 3 million and then next year 6 and we're hoping to get to 10 million within the next three to four years. Freedom is everything to our family. I homeschool and I love that our family can wake up together every morning. Nobody's running off to school, nobody's running off to work. If I had to work at like a 9 to 5 job, there's no way that I could also homeschool. I get to set my own hours and they're not as many hours as a normal job would be. So that's really fantastic. But again, freedom is everything for our family and I don't. It's strange that our kids don't know any other way. Mom and dad are home every day. I would describe the capitalism community as family. You get so many tips from people, we give tips and I think that we're going to start to work, work with a lot of our fellow community members and everyone really is rooting for everybody else. Nobody is like in competition at all. Like everyone is everyone's biggest cheerleaders.

If you found value in this podcast, and you're ready to go Deeper, here are three resources where we can help you. One, you can grab my book 12 months to 1 million on Audible or Amazon. It has over a thousand reviews and it's the playbook to building a seven figure business. Second, you can join our community of entrepreneurs who are following a plan to build a 1% net worth by building businesses and investing the profits. You can get plugged in@capitalism.com 1. And third, if you're looking to go deeper and build a seven figure business that you can sell, you can work closely with us inside the Capitalism Incubator and you can get on the waiting list and find out what we do over at capitalism.com Inc. That's capitalism.com Inc.