How To Grow An Audience If You Have 0 Followers
In this solo YouTube monologue, Sean Perry answers a viewer’s question about building an audience from scratch in 2024. Drawing on his experience of growing a 500k‑plus email list, 400k+ Twitter followers, 500k+ YouTube subscribers, and a podcast with over 100 million downloads, he shares nine counter‑intuitive lessons. He argues that creators should ignore vanity metrics and instead focus on attracting high‑value followers, productize their unique “inner nerd” to create a one‑of‑a‑kind personal brand, and think of their content as a magnet that draws a tribe rather than a generic audience. He offers concrete tactics such as the “First‑Last‑Best‑Worst‑Weirdest” exercise for generating personal story ideas, and the “5 Ds” framework (Done, Deliver, Do, Dreams, Dork‑out) to be known well. He stresses prioritizing A+ content over polished production, building a “binge bank” of binge‑worthy episodes, and selling a feeling (e.g., inspiration) rather than raw information. Finally, he recommends an iterative improvement loop—making 100 pieces of content and improving one element each time—citing MrBeast’s advice, and encourages creators to adopt a people‑over‑algorithm mindset. The talk concludes with a call to subscribe to his “Good Friday” email series.
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All right. I got a great question in my inbox this morning, and it is from a guy named Tony L. So he says, Uncle Sean, I love the nickname, by the way, Uncle Sean. I'm leaning into that. He said, uh, if you were starting from scratch, building an audience again from zero today, 2024, if you're starting again from zero, how would you do it? What advice would you give somebody like me who wants to be a content creator but has zero followers today? Tony from Miami. All right, Tony, I got an answer for you. So first I gotta flash my badge. I'm like an FBI officer who walks into the room and I gotta show you my credentials if you're gonna take me seriously. So I've built a, you know, email following of over 500,000 subscribers. I've built a Twitter following of 400,000 plus. On YouTube, I think I have 500,000 plus subscribers. This podcast has done over 100 million downloads in the last 4 or 5 years. So that's all in a 4-year time span, one university block. And all of that has happened and I've learned some things. And what I'm not gonna do today is I'm not gonna give you either A, generic advice, like you gotta be consistent and just be yourself, right? Like, okay, sure, but not very helpful. Obvious and not helpful. Uh, so I'm gonna share the counterintuitive things I've learned. I wrote down 9, so 9 counterintuitive surprising things that I've learned. I'm also not going to give you some generic one-size-fits-all advice. I hate when people do this, especially this sort of YouTube guru economy of like, here's the answer, as if there is such a simple formulaic answer that you could follow, that anybody could follow, right? It's very personal and there's art and science as a blend. It's nothing is guaranteed. But I will share with you the wisdom that I wish I had when I was starting from scratch 4 or 5 years ago. Versus today, knowing what I know now, what is the wisdom that was surprising, non-obvious, that, um, I wish I could have just drilled into my brain then. And if you're starting today, you could take this now. I'd also like to say that there are many ways to peel the banana, and all I know is the way that I do it. Maybe other people do it a different way. They have had success, but I can only share with you what's worked for me and how I think about it. And you could choose if that fits for you, if that resonates or not. All right. So, Here's the 9 non-obvious lessons I've had building a big-ass audience. Number 1: Forget the numbers. You want to focus on who follows you, not how many people follow you. Tim Ferriss once said something that really stuck in my head. He says, okay, thought experiment. Would you rather have 100,000 Americans picked at random from across the country be chosen to read your book, or have every member of Davos read your book and love your work? Obviously you'd pick Davos, right? You'd pick the higher value, higher signal group of people. This is a general principle that I buy into, which is that more important than how many people follow you is who follows you, because the content you put out is who you're going to attract. And this is hard to do. This is surprisingly hard to do. The first reason is because the platforms shove the numbers in your face, especially a platform like YouTube, where not only do you see how many views every video gets, All your audience members see how many views every video gets, and you know that they're going to see it. So it is very hard to block that out. Podcasting, a little bit easier. Not everybody can see how many downloads a podcast gets. Only you can see it. But every platform has some version of this. Instagram, Twitter, whatever your, your platform is, it is very, very easy to start to chase the number. So the bad news is it's hard to resist that. The good news is it's hard for everybody else to resist that. In fact, they won't even try. Everybody else will fall into this trap. And so it is actually a competitive advantage to completely ignore the numbers at the beginning and focus more on attracting the right types of people to your content. Who are you actually trying to, trying to, uh, attract? Like I got a buddy, he manages Hollywood talent. So when he writes a newsletter, it doesn't matter if there's 100,000 people reading it or 1,000, as long as the 1,000 people who read it are the right people. They're people that either need his service or they're people that are like him, agents in the game. Talent managers that are very high signal and will become his future professional network. Right. I'll use a car analogy as well, which is dangerous because I'm probably the one guy on earth who knows nothing about cars, doesn't care about cars, but I dabble. So General Motors sells 2.5 million cars a year and is a like $50 billion-ish company. Ferrari only sells 13,000 cars, 200 times less, right? 200 times fewer customers, less reach. but is an $80 billion company. So almost double the value. And so how is that possible where you can have 200,000, 200 times less reach yet still be more valuable? And it's because Ferrari chose to be luxury. They chose to sell to higher-end customers. One customer for them is worth 200 for an average car company. That's why they have much thicker profit margins and so on and so forth. And there's a principle there, which is attracting the right customer. One of the right customer is worth I don't know, 100 random or non-correct customers for you. And I use customer because in content, whether it's a viewer, a reader, a follower, they're customers of yours. You're producing a product, they're consuming it. Let's call that a customer. Um, so point number 1, quality matters much more than quantity. You might think you believe that, but watch, 95% of your attention will go towards your follower counts, your view counts, and all that other stuff. Resist this. Okay. Lesson number 2, what should I talk about? My trainer, uh, who I work out with every morning, he's got these great phrases and one of his great phrases is the best product is just you pushed out to the world. And basically like if I just turned you inside out and the whole world got to see what you are all about, what you stand for, that if you could just productize that, this is me pushed out to the world, that is the best product. Why? Because no one can compete with you at being you. If you truly just take your your interests, your tastes, your opinions, and you package that and productize that properly, you are in a market of one. Nobody else can match your taste palette. Nobody else can match your set of experiences, prior experiences and stories, and nobody can match your delivery style as, as well as your opinions. And so the core thing you could do if you really wanna be great and separate yourself in the content game is make the product you pushed out. I call this finding your inner nerd. So quick story. I remember going when I was younger to my uncle's house. And we get to his house and he's like, hey, you want to see something? And he takes me down to the basement and he shows me, flicks on the light, and he shows me this elaborate model train set that he has been working on for years, like 5 years plus. And it had all these little, like, the scenery, the trees and the trains. And it was, I mean, it was incredible. And he's showing me this proudly. He's beaming, he's smiling. And in my head, I'm trying to smile back, but I'm like, wow, my uncle is the biggest dork in the world. But in the content game, you wanna be like my uncle. You wanna unleash your inner nerd. You wanna go, go, go down the basement and show everybody that train set that you've been tinkering with for a long time. Why is this? Well, because the things that you nerd out about are the things that you know the most about. It's the nuanced, in-depth, detailed, over-the-top, passionate, obsessed that actually turns into great content. And you see this, by the way, on platforms like TikTok. You'll see a guy who's a tomato farmer and he's like all about tomatoes. He thinks this guy thinks about tomatoes more than anybody in my city has thought about tomatoes. And so, That guy's got an obsession and an inner nerddom about tomatoes. And the reality is that the internet is a geography vaporizer. So let's take me, for example. If I just took my set of inner nerdy obsessions, it's like, oh man, I really love— on one hand, I love startups and building companies, and I love going and reading old stories about the PayPal Mafia and leaked email transactions about how Zuck bought Instagram. That's my, I love that. That's my Netflix, right? But then I also like basketball and I also like trashy reality TV. I, I like a bunch of different things. Now, if I walked outside my neighborhood growing up and I tried to find somebody who had the same interest as me, zero, right? There would be nobody who has the same set of weird obsessions as I do. Even if I took one of them, like I like basketball, but I don't just like basketball, I freaking love basketball. I'm obsessed with basketball. And there weren't really many, many people growing up that were as obsessed with basketball as I was. They didn't find the jokes as funny. They didn't find the, the nerdy X's and O's stuff as interesting as I did. The internet vaporizes all of that. On the internet, you go on there, you will find your tribe. You will find the 10,000 people in the world that are as weirdly obsessed about a single subject as you are, right? And, um, that's what works. And so there are people who do this. There's a guy on Twitter I love, @dyeworkwear. This guy just loves men's fashion, and he will think about, talk about, and obsess about, you know, how long a pant leg should be on a men's suit. Something I don't personally care that much about, but He does, and he has found his tribe online. That's what you want to do with content on the internet. You want to find your tribe by unleashing your inner nerd. Uh, you get— gets rid of competition. And also, by the way, the secret here, it makes success a guarantee. What do I mean by this? Normally, if you come to me and you said, hey, I want to build a big following, uh, you know, winning to me is becoming famous online. Nobody really says this, but that's what we all want. Winning to me is having a huge audience. Well, if that's your only definition of winning, you will almost certainly fail. And even if you succeed, you will feel like a failure for many years, probably before that ever happens. That's a pretty miserable thing. Like 1% odds of success, if ever. And in that 1%, it still takes years. So every day you're gonna feel like a failure. However, when you unleash your inner nerd, the benefit is you're just reading about stuff you're really interested in. You're talking to people who are You know, experts at the thing you really love. You are learning, packaging up what you've learned, and you're sharing it with the world, and you're just really into that stuff. And so every day feels like a win because you are talking about the things you are most interested in, which just lights you up. And so you shift the odds of success to maybe 1%, maybe many years down the road, to every day, 100% of the time. I like those odds. Okay. Lesson number 3, build a magnet, not an audience. Everybody wants to build an audience. I think that's the wrong way of thinking about it. The way I think about it is I am building a magnet, a giant magnet that will attract like-minded people into my life. So every blog, every podcast, every video, it's a honeypot. And I'm just trying to trap like-minded people into coming into my orbit. And then I get to know them, I get to meet them, and then they start to, um, share things with me that, uh, you know, they know that I'll like because we're like-minded. And this has led to incredible deals, you know, for my business. It's led to incredible friendships for me. It's led to a faster rate of learning because people will start to send me stuff they know that I'll like. And so I'm trying to build a magnet to bring people to me, not an audience. Okay, next one. Back in the category of what do I actually talk about? There's an exercise that I'll give you. This is probably one of the only tactical things that I'm gonna say, like a, everybody can literally go write this down and do this and it will make your content better. And again, I'm trying not to go super prescriptive because everybody's got their own voice. You might like LinkedIn, another guy likes podcasting. You can win. There's a million different ways to win. I'm giving you the, timeless principles and hard-earned wisdom. But one tactical thing I will give you is an exercise you can do, and I call it First, Last, Best, Worst, Weirdest. 5 questions. First, last, best, worst, weirdest. Stole this from Matthew Dicks. I added the weirdest one. He did the other stuff. First, last, best, worst. So what you do is you take any subject in your life like jobs. You say first job, last job, best job, worst job, weirdest job. And in each, you'll just immediately come up with things. My first job was I used to, um, coach basketball at a school for autistic and Asperger's kids. Cool. My last job that I had was working at Twitch. My, uh, worst job was when I created, I, I built a sushi restaurant and every day my hands were like covered in tuna. My weirdest job was when I worked for this psycho billionaire in Indonesia who, um, too many stories to tell there, but that guy. So everybody has a version of these and you could do that with relationships. What's your first relationship, your last relationship, your weirdest relationship, your best relationship, your worst relationship? So you could do this with jobs, relationships, you could do this with side hustles, projects, whatever. And that will create just this huge pipeline of personal stories that you can tell. Because most people when I say, all right, what do you got? What's your content? They have like 1 or 2 ideas. It's like you should be idea rich, time poor maybe, but idea rich. And the way to get idea rich is a very simple exercise. First, last, best, worst, weirdest. And then you plug in different subjects and you'll suddenly be sitting in front of 200 personal stories that only you can tell. And then you basically circle the ones that you think have the most juice and then you, that turns into content for you. All right, next one. A thing I wish I knew earlier, the 5 Ds. So a lot of people wanna be famous, but I've learned over time that is the wrong goal. Fame itself, kind of annoying, but there's something to it, right? Like I don't, I don't think I want to be famous, but I do want people to know me. Well, what is that? Well, I don't want to be well-known. I want to be known well. So what does it mean to know somebody well? That's an interesting question. I think it's, you know, their personal stories, like I just said, their hopes, their dreams, their fears, their obsessions, their quirks. That's what, that's what goes into actually feeling like you're known well. And when somebody feels like they know you well, they feel connected to you. When they're connected to you, that's when they subscribe to you. That's when they pay for you. That's when they show up to your live events and sell out arenas. That is how you build a truly powerful audience. So the 5 Ds, what are they? The first D: Done. What have I done? What's my track record? You should know that about me. That's a goal you should have as a creator, that your audience should know what you've done. They should know what you deliver. Meaning what do you offer people who follow you? For example, this podcast— on this podcast, I offer interesting business ideas. So opportunities, trends, business ideas. Business breakdowns. I'll tell you about businesses you haven't heard of that are interesting, that are either just cash flow monsters or, you know, they could be billion-dollar companies in the future. I'll tell you about those and teach you about those. And the last one is frameworks, ideas. Much like this podcast here, I am telling you a way that I think about things that might be useful to you, bring you clarity, and bring you hopefully more success. So that's what I deliver. What do you deliver? The third D, do. What do I do for work and what do I do for fun? I want you to know that. Fourth, dreams. What am I shooting for? What's my goal, right? If I said Gary Vee, a very popular person who is very well known, but also known well, Gary Vee wants to buy the Jets. If you've ever followed Gary Vee, you probably know that Gary Vee wants to buy the Jets and, um, that's his dream. And by the way, it's such a good dream. So smart of him because A, it's aspirational, it's relatable, but wanting to buy, own a sports team, it tells you about him. He grew up a miserable Jets fan. It's also likable. He didn't say, I wanna buy the Yankees, which is like, oh yeah, of course everybody wants to buy the Yankees. I want to buy the loser franchise from my hometown. I want to help turn them around. That's an admirable sort of like underdog, underdog way of saying something that's kind of douchey in reality, which is I want to be so rich I could buy a sports team. So anyways, you should tell people your dreams. And the fifth one, dork out. What are you really into? What do you, what are you a nerd about? What do you collect? That's what people should know about you. So the 5 Ds. This gives you two wins. Your audience feels more connected to you, but also you get luckier. It's weird I said that, right? Luckier. Yeah, that was a surprise to me too. There's a certain type of luck where when people know you really well and they find something that they know you will find valuable or you could help them with, they will reach out to you. And it's almost like you were out there searching for it, but you never had to leave your room. Uh, the analogy here came from Naval that I really loved, which was, imagine you are known well, you are known well, you are known to be somebody who loves diving deep sea for treasures, and you are the best at this, and you have done it several times, you've shared your stories. Well, when somebody on the other side of the world finds a hidden treasure buried deep in the ocean, you will be their first phone call because luck will find you in that scenario. And so that's something that comes out of the 5 Ds. Okay, this is getting kind of long, right? But you're still here. That's weird. Well, that's because there's another important principle, which is there's no such thing as too long, only too boring. So if you bounce by now, it's because I'm telling you things that you don't find interesting, you don't find insightful, or you don't find novel. But if you're still here, you listen to one guy on a monologue for this long, you can literally hear my mouth drying up. It's because I'm telling you things that are insightful, that are entertaining, and that are useful to you. So there's no such thing as too long, only too boring. Next one. I think I'm on 7. Don't worry about writing style or production quality if you're doing audio video. The goal is not C-minus content with A-plus production. It's A+ content with C- delivery. That's the starting point you should be going for. That's the first milestone of success. I do not waste hours on packaging, um, or, or perfecting my setup. If you go look at the early versions of this podcast, it's me in a bedroom with shitty headphones and shitty audio. And literally the very first version of this, I had like one AirPod in, like it was bad, right? Go look at Joe Rogan's first podcast. Here's a screenshot of it. If you're on YouTube, you can see it. Um, you know, it's literally Joe with a fuzzy webcam. There's literally like a snowflakes, like trippy effect on the screen, like, which is like, so obnoxious. There's a giant rainbow background behind him. Like today, Joe's the king of podcasts. He's got a custom studio, but back then he didn't worry about all that. He first conquered content, then conquered packaging. I see a lot of people get this wrong 'cause they go look at people who are 10 years into the game and they think, oh, that's how my shit needs to look. No, no, no. First nail content. When you're confident you've nailed content, then start leveling up your production. Number 8, create a binge bank. So At the beginning, your numbers are going to be small. Mine were also small. Everybody's numbers are small at the beginning. That is now normal, natural, and pretty much unavoidable. It is very natural to start thinking at that point, man, what's the point of even doing this? Right? Nobody's even going to see this. My last video got 8 views. You cannot think about the 8 views. It will demoralize you. It will kill your momentum that you need to build up. Instead, the trick here is convince yourself, no, no, no, forget the 8 views. That's not what this is about. I am building my binge bank. So a binge bank is like your own personal Netflix binge-worthy show. It's an hour or two of your content that if somebody was interested, they could go click the button, consume it, and be like, man, I'm a huge fan of this person. That's the goal. Create an hour or two of content that if somebody ever, ever got there, and of course they will, why would they not? You're all, you're awesome. Eventually people will show up that when they do that in an hour or two, they'll walk away being like, wow, I love this guy. This guy's awesome. Um, so that's a trick to overcome the chicken and egg problem of having an empty room at the beginning is no, no, no, forget the empty room. I'm building my binge bank right now. The last, last two I'll give you here. People don't want information. They want a feeling. What does this mean? So I think of any channel I create as a little shop in the world's most crowded flea market, cuz that's what social media is. It's probably the most competitive market on earth, more, more competitive than the dating market, right? Because there's billions of people on social media every day fighting for attention. If you're going to be in that market, you have to know what you're selling. You're not selling things. You are selling a feeling. David Blaine, when he creates his show, he's not selling magic tricks. He's selling the feeling of awe. James Clear talks about habits. He's not selling habits. He's feeling— he's selling a feeling of self-control, a feeling of hope that I can actually turn my life around through this habit stuff. The UFC, Dana White once said, I don't, I don't sell fights. I sell holy shit moments live on pay-per-view. I love that. Tony Robbins, he sells a feeling of motivation. CrossFit, they sell a feeling of satisfying sweat. And if you give people a feeling once or twice, maybe they'll give you a follow-up. But if you give it to them every day for several years, you have a lifelong fan. And I figured out what I wanted to sell, which was inspiration. And I try to do it consistently, meaning I want you— when you listen to me, you're going to be inspired either by a success story I tell you about, about overcoming failure, story about a personal story where I did one of those two things. Or I'm going to sell you inspiration around ideas like, hey, I think this can work, or I think this tactic can work and you will feel inspired to go take action. That's what I try to sell. Why? Because that's the feeling I like. That's why I try to give other people. And last one, my bonus one: be so good they can't ignore you. I have had the fortune of becoming friends with MrBeast over the last few years. And if there's someone you want to learn content from, it's MrBeast. It's the number one most watched YouTuber in the world. And I love his attitude towards content. Here's the advice that MrBeast gives whenever somebody asks him about how to be a successful YouTuber. He tells them, go make 100 videos and every video on the 100, I want you to think of one thing you're going to do better than the last video. Maybe it's your hook, maybe it's your title, maybe it's your thumbnail, maybe it's the storytelling, maybe it's the editing pace, whatever. It doesn't matter what it is. 100 videos, improve each one. Try to make one— be conscious about making one thing better each time. I love this advice. I love it for two reasons. Number one, it's true and extremely useful advice. But more importantly, it just shoos people away because what they come to you for is the secret sauce, the answer. And what he gives them instead is the path. Here's the way he teaches them to fish. It immediately filters people out. He says that like, you know, 99% of people, when he tells them that, he never hears from them again. They never go do it. So it kind of filters out the unserious people. And there's a lot of unserious people in this life. And the serious people, it also works for them. It shoos them away too, because by the time they do the 100, improving one thing each time, they don't need his advice anymore. By the 100th one, they've got it. It's working, it's cranking. They're so busy they forgot about MrBeast. So that's why that is golden advice. I'm doing that right now. So this content that I'm telling you right now is something I wrote on a new content series that I'm doing. So 4 years ago I started this podcast, My First Million. I did it by myself. I interviewed my friend Suli as the first episode, and I just told myself I was gonna try to do 50 of these episodes. And I said, I'm gonna do 50. I'm trying to make one thing better every time. Similar philosophy. I, I used 50 at the time. Fast forward 4 years. I've just started my first new content project since then, which is an email series. So if you go to SeanPerry.com, you can see it. You get to watch me do my 100 reps. This is now rep number 4. All the content that I'm telling you today is something I just sent out in my email to everybody who's on that list. So if you like this type of content, go to SeanPerry.com, subscribe to it, and you get to see me do these reps in public and you'll get more content like this if this is what floats your boat. So I have a new content series where I'm like, people email me and I publish the email chain. So basically fans email me questions and I answer them, and sometimes I email friends. So like interesting people, maybe an expert on the election or an expert on, um, whatever. Or like we're doing one with LeBron James's trainer of, you know, say he's been training LeBron James since he was 19, 20 years old, and for 20 years he's been his personal trainer. So we're doing a series with them where we email back and forth and we publish, publish the whole chain for anybody to read. It's really great. It's kind of like the, uh, like the banter of a podcast because two people going back and forth, but it's the ease and readability of a blog post. So that's my sales pitch for it. But my approach to that, to making that successful, is exactly the same. I'm going to do 100 reps and every single week you will notice I pick one or two things and I'm actually going to publish what is the one thing I focused on making better this week. I'm going to publish that so that anybody can see it. That is how I'm going to make that series great, or I'm going to figure out that, hey, this is not for me. But either way, that is the correct approach to giving myself a chance of greatness. And that's what you should do. For yourself. The other thing I love that MrBeast says is he goes, a lot of people, I hear them say, oh man, I, yeah, I'm trying my hardest. I'm doing great. But you know, the algorithm, I just can't, you know, I have to do all this stuff. The algorithm doesn't like it. The algorithm's not serving my video. And he says, anytime you blame, you say the word algorithm, just switch it with the word people because you're blaming the algorithm. The algorithm didn't like my video. No, no, no. People didn't like your video. The algorithm is just simply giving people videos they like. If the algorithm's not giving them the video, it's because they didn't like your video. I think that's a very useful thing to know, which is it's a skill issue. It is in your control to make your content better, to be so good that they can't ignore you. All right. I hope that's helpful. If you like this, uh, type of content, let me know in the comments here on YouTube. And please go subscribe to my new email series. It's called Good Friday. It's stuff like this. So if this was really inspiring to you, if this felt actionable, felt insightful, felt fun to listen to, check it out at seanpuri.com. I'll put the link in the description below and you could just type your email in and subscribe. There's a little fun animation when you do it. Check it out. Good Friday. That's the email series. By the way, why did I call it Good Friday? Because I knew— I noticed that most email newsletters are sent on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, whatever. Nobody sends emails on Friday because most people hate getting emails on Friday. But for me, I thought about this way. What is the one good email I could send to somebody on Friday? What's a little bit of brain food, something that is both entertaining and insightful that you could have going into the weekend? It's that one good email on Friday, and that's what I committed to. I'm going to send a good-ass email every Friday for the next 100, uh, next 100 Fridays. So we'll see how that goes. Check it out. And, uh, thank you for tuning in.
