In this solo YouTube clip, Eric Siu explains why building a thought‑leadership platform is more attainable than most people believe. He emphasizes that ego should be set aside and that the primary goal is to add genuine value, not to chase follower counts. Siu shares his own journey—from a fledgling podcast that once garnered only nine downloads a month to a suite of shows now pulling over a million downloads monthly and a YouTube channel that grew from a few thousand to nearly twenty thousand subscribers. He attributes this growth to the power of compound effects, consistent reinvestment in personal skills, and patience. Siu advises entrepreneurs, especially those just starting out, to reinvest earnings back into themselves, improve their content creation abilities (audio, video, blogging), and focus on learning rather than vanity metrics. He also debunks the myth that influencers with large followings are financially successful, urging listeners to prioritize value over perceived popularity. The clip ends with a call to action for viewers to comment, tweet, and subscribe.
Chapters
All right, so in today's clip, we are going to talk about why becoming a thought leader is easier than you think. But before we do, whatever platform you're on, don't forget to rate, review, subscribe if you like clips like this on entrepreneurship, and on marketing, and on whatever I talk about, which I guarantee you will get value from it. So, becoming a thought leader. You know, people say, oh, Eric, you're a thought leader, blah, blah, blah, and I tend to kind of disregard it, and I just kind of move on with my day, because it's good to not get ego around it. That's one thing. Don't be egotistical about it. So I'm very grateful for the fact that there's one podcast that gets about 1.1 million downloads a month. The other one's about 100,000. And then, you know, we have a pretty adequate site. So we have a decent sized audience. When I first started doing digital marketing, I was like, there is no way. Like, how are these people getting a couple hundred thousand visits a month? And now like I'm finally there. I'm like, wow. You look back and it's like all the things that you did, like they added up, they got you there. But man, I used to think it was impossible. To become a quote unquote thought leader, you don't think about it. You understand that you are going to suck in the beginning. Don't think it's about, you know, it's not about how you look. That's very egotistical. It's more so how much value can you add to other people? And when you're starting out, maybe you can't add that much value because you don't have that much skills in the beginning. You don't deserve to have the audience. And even when you do have the skills, it's going to take time to build. You know, every big audience, people started from scratch at some point and it took them time to build. So you have to understand that it's gonna take you time to build it up. The example I talk about a lot is the Growth Everywhere podcast, which is my entrepreneurship podcast where I interview a lot of different entrepreneurs. We were only getting 9 downloads a month after the first year, and this is when I took over a failing business. Uh, and you know, I should not have been doing a podcast. I should have been focusing all my time on saving that business, and I had nothing to show for it. No revenues, nothing to show for it. But what people don't know is I was learning a lot from these people, I was getting a lot of value from these people, and they were giving me, even the experience shares that they were giving me were helping me make critical decisions with my business to help save the business. That was one piece of it, okay? And then after the second year, guess what? I was only getting 30 downloads a day. And same thing, I was still getting value, and I got people emailing me telling me like, Eric, I don't know why this is not getting more downloads, I don't know why this is not getting more acclaim. I wasn't doing it for the audience. Like, I never started it to build a big audience in the beginning. And that eventually led to me doing a podcast with my buddy Neil, and we do a podcast called Marketing School. And that one grew a lot faster because we knew a lot more about starting a podcast. We knew a lot of the ins and outs, the infrastructure. Plus, Neil and I, especially Neil, we had an audience to go off of to really build it up. That helped take it a long way. So compound growth takes a long time, and Compound growth is the 8th wonder of the world because if you think about it, if you keep something compounding over time, it stacks, it continues to stack. And now we've got volume. Just a couple months ago, we're at 1 million downloads. A couple months before that, we're at 700,000, 800,000 downloads. It's starting to stack. And we just posted it to Spotify, our podcast, a couple months ago too. Now it is starting to stack. Our YouTube, the growth has been slow with it, Even getting to about 2,000, 2,500 subscribers was very hard. And in the last maybe year and a half, 2 years or so, it's got to about 17,000, 18,000. Like, it's starting to stack. Even wealth takes a long time to stack. And here's the other thing. Like, if you're watching this right now, you own a business, you're starting out, you're better off reinvesting the money. I'm assuming you don't have— this is assuming you don't have other obligations. You don't have a spouse, you don't have children, maybe you don't have other expenses to worry about. You know what I would do? If you were completely single, Reinvest all the money in yourself. Who else is better to bet on than yourself, right? Compound growth again, that's how I look at it. As you continue to get better, like if you look at this video right now, I wouldn't even say I'm like great at video, but I've gotten a lot better at video since when I first started. When I first started, you know, you're all nervous, your palms start sweating, you, uh, um, uh, and I still did that by the way. It's fine. You know, like you get better over time, you get more confident, and you start to develop your own style. So whether it's audio, whether it's blog, like blogging too, that took a long time for me to establish my voice. But But even that starts to come out. So, you know, everyone you see on TV, they're all human beings. Everyone you see that's an influencer, they're all human beings. And here's the other thing I'll tell you. If they're an influencer and they call themselves an influencer, they are broke, okay? So you don't wanna be like them. Don't be a broke person, okay? All these influencers that have 57,000, 100,000, 500,000, even 800,000 followers, they are broke, okay? So don't worry about that. More so worry about adding value to people around you. Don't worry that someone has more followers than you, all that kind of stuff doesn't matter. At the end of the day, what matters is you're getting better, you're learning, and then you're able to articulate what you're learning, and you're being patient with the compound effect, and you're gonna get better. So let me know what you plan to do in terms of becoming a thought leader, why you wanna become a thought leader, in the comments. Also tweet at me as well. Let me know in the reviews inside of, if you're listening to the podcast, let me know what you think you're gonna do there. And don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we will see you tomorrow. Bye.
