Eric Siu argues you need to build an audience before scaling your business. It gives you optionality and freedom. He points to Jimmy's YouTube channel and how Amazon, Facebook, and Google all used scale to create new opportunities.
And so what really matters at the very top is that you build the audience first and then you can build a business afterwards. If you build the audience first, you're gonna have a lot more optionality and you're gonna have a lot more freedom and you don't need to be at the beck and whim of anybody else. And I remember recently someone offered $1 billion for Jimmy's YouTube channel and it's worth much more than $1 billion. Why would he wanna work for his own company? That doesn't make sense. You wanna swing for the fences and you wanna play the game that way. And you can even use Amazon as an example. They built an audience, but they really built a platform. Facebook is a platform. Google is a platform. They built the audiences first and then that gave them the optionality to do what they And Apple, they almost went bust. But then once they rejiggered everything and started to build out the iTouch, which then led to the iPod, which then led to a whole host of other devices that they created, such as the AirPods now, they got more optionality once they had scale. So once you have scale, then you can focus on doing other things.
