If you’ve ever built a campfire, you know that to build up the fire successfully, you need to follow a specific, systematic process.

Regardless of what style of fire-builder you are (personally, I’m a log cabin-er), the process is always the same and can be summarized as follows.

1. Gather the materials you’ll need including tinder, kindling, medium and larger logs, and a match.
2. Build a frame using your kindling.
3. Fill that frame with tinder, perhaps paper or wood shavings.
4. Light the tinder. Supply additional oxygen if needed.
5. As the fire spreads to the frame, add progressively larger kindling as the existing frame burns up.
6. Continue this process, over time adding larger pieces of wood as the size of the fire grows to support them.

In a way, the process is nothing short of magical.

While it would be impossible to light even a medium-sized piece of wood with a single match, by following this process, you can fairly quickly build up a fire capable of lighting and consuming whole, uncut logs.

When it comes to starting a fire, this process might seem obvious.

But it turns out that building a relationship with an audience follows a near-identical process. And yet so often we try to skip steps, attempting to set fire to the whole log without first building up the base.

Much like we can follow this systematic, repeatable process to consistently light fires, so too can we follow the same process to consistently grow our audiences.

Defining Your End Goal

Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to talk over what we’re actually trying to build.

When we think about “building an audience” around our creative work, we might first think about the size of our email list, or our podcast, YouTube or website analytics, or perhaps even our customer or client list.

But these are all by-products.

What we’re really looking to build is relationships.

While our audiences are small, these relationships might be reciprocal, meaning we personally know each of the people who follows and engages with us.

As we grow, however, these relationships will be increasingly asymmetrical, meaning we don’t know our individual audience members nearly as well as they know us.

Regardless of which stage we’re at, however, our goal is to always focus on relationship building, which, in the case of our metaphor is the fire itself.

The bigger and hotter the fire we’re able to build with our audience, the more heat we receive back from it in the form of positive benefits.

But before we get to the point of having a fire blazing in front of us, we have to gather the raw materials.

Gathering Raw Materials

The raw materials for fire building are fairly straightforward and can be summarized as follows:

• Oxygen – The existing desires, motivations, and frustrations of our audience. If we build something for which there is no desire (ie. oxygen supply) our fire will not burn.
  
• Fuel – This is the work we feed to our audience and it exists in multiple forms. Much like we can’t dive in and ask personal questions requiring vulnerability with any type of new relationship, we must build up the level of trust and intimacy with our audiences over time by feeding them different types of fuel.
  
  • Tinder – Content that requires a negligible investment of time and attention. This might include social engagement and community participation, snackable ultra-short-form content, and in some cases, simply a very well-written sales page.
    
  • Kindling – This is our medium- to long-form content including newsletters, blogs, podcasts, etc. This content requires more of an investment from our audience members and they must warm up to a certain level before they’re likely to consume this type of content.
    
  • Logs – These are our high commitment offerings that require a more serious investment of time, attention, and/or money from our audiences. These might include live events, courses, paid products, and more. While there is always the potential for these logs to burn when presented to our ideal audience members, they require a great deal of heat before they’re actually capable of catching flame.
    
• Spark – Finally, we have the spark, the concentrated burst of energy that, when directed towards the right materials, will set them alight. The spark is an idea or perspective that reacts with the hopes, desires, and/or frustrations of our audience and is triggered by the friction between where/who they are now, and where/who they want to be. If we want to spark a fire, we need to be keenly aware of this tension our audience holds within themselves.

Choosing Your Fire’s Location

With our materials assembled, we’re ready to assemble them and start the fire.

But before we do, there are a few considerations regarding the placement of our fire.

At the end of the day, the materials that will start, sustain, and grow our fires are naturally occurring but may be more prevalent in one area than another.

This means we need to be mindful of where we choose to set them up initially.

1. A Ready Supply of Oxygen

Of most importance is oxygen, or the existing desires, frustrations, and motivations of our target audience.

Countless businesses, newsletters, and podcasts have failed because the content on offer attempted to address a need or interest that didn’t really exist for the audience.

There’s no guarantee that anyone else will share your interests, or be willing to spend time or money on the problem you can help them solve. This is one of the painful truths of creative work that we all need to come to terms with, especially when what we’re creating just isn’t landing.

No oxygen. No fire.

2. An Abundant Source of Fuel

Starting and maintaining a fire in a location without an easy supply of wood isn’t the best idea if we’re looking to sustain that fire over time.

The same holds true for starting a creative endeavour in a niche or on a topic that doesn’t naturally inspire new and interesting ideas in us.

Much like an abundance of easily accessible trees makes it easier to keep a fire going, a topic, niche, or industry that is constantly sparking interesting ideas and conversations makes it easier to create quality fuel to feed into our own creative fires.

I’ve started many creative projects in the past for which coming up with fresh, interesting ideas was like banging my head against a wall.

Before starting the projects, I’d come up with 10 or 15 potential content ideas, but once I made my way through those, I would find myself stuck. At this point, I would struggle to come up with ideas, start missing my publishing due date, be unhappy with the content I did create, and ultimately shut down the projects.

The best bet is to focus your creative work on a topic or idea you can’t help but think about all the time.

For many of us, this big idea might not be immediately obvious and will require some digging to get to. But once we find it, we can be sure we’ll have a steady supply of high-quality fuel to feed our fire as it grows.

3. Room to Grow

An abundance of both oxygen and fuel will allow us to start and build a red-hot fire. But without room to grow and spread, its potential will be limited.

In practice, a lack of room to grow might result in a project with a small but extremely dedicated fan base. And for some people and some projects, this is enough.

If you’re looking to sell a $10k service, for example, you likely don’t need all that many people to resonate with what you do in order to make a fantastic living doing it.

Many of us, however, require a larger number of people to resonate with our creative work in order for it to be financially viable.

This is where having room to grow comes in.

At its core, this means choosing a topic, niche, or industry where there are enough potential customers, clients, or audience members for you to build a sustainable business from your work*.

Let’s do some quick and simple math to see what this looks like in the wild.

Let’s say you sell a $100 course and would one day love to be making $100k per year.

With this product and goal, you would need to sell 1,000 courses per year. This means you need to choose a market that has room for you to grow into finding 1,000 new customers each and every year.

But that’s not quite the whole story.

Keep in mind that not everyone in your audience is going to buy your course from you. In fact, a fairly standard conversion benchmark for an online course is around 2.5%.

With that in mind, in order to get those 1,000 new customers per year, you actually need to grow your overall audience by 40,000(!!!) people each and every year (1,000 is 2.5% of 40,000).

From there, you have to think about what percentage of people in your niche or industry will ultimately resonate with you and your content? It certainly won’t be everyone.

Even if you’re able to capture 10% of your niche, that means that to meet your goals the niche needs to consist of at least 400,000 people.

Of course, this is an extreme example.

As a creator, you might have a series of products you offer allowing you to sell to the same audience multiple times. Or you may create offerings that are much more expensive, requiring a smaller audience in order to make a sustainable living off your creative work.

And yet, the principal is worth remembering.

Too often creators choose an area to start their fire that limits its ability to grow from the outset by choosing a topic or niche for which there is simply no room to grow into.

In these cases, even if there is an abundance of fuel and oxygen, the fire may be incapable of spreading far enough in order to sustain you financially as a creator.

Assuming you’ve chosen a spot with sufficient fuel, oxygen, and room to grow, however, it’s time to light the fire.

* If you really want to nerd out about this stuff, you can read more about concepts like Total Addressable Market (TAM), Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM), and Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) here.

Lighting the Fire

Much like there are many ways to light a campfire (matches, rubbing two sticks together, and blowtorches come to mind), there are many ways to light the fire between us and each of our individual audience members.

Some of these methods require more effort than others, however.

We talked before about how the spark in our scenario is an idea or perspective that reacts with the hopes, desires, and/or frustrations of our audience and is triggered by the friction between where/who they are now, and where/who they want to be.

This means that first and foremost, we as creators need to be aware of that friction, and of those hopes, desires, and frustrations.

Then, we need to regularly share our ideas related to those topics publicly.

Like starting a fire with flint and tinder, however, we need to be intentional about directing the sparks we’re sending off into the midst of the tinder–which is the most likely thing to catch flame.

In practice, this means first embedding ourselves in a receptive community before sharing our ideas that have the potential to spark connection.

When we take this approach of embedding ourselves in a receptive community, we find that fires are much easier to start. This is because we’re no longer attempting a cold start but are instead simply stoking the tinder that is already lying around smoldering.

In these cases, someone who has already been warmed up in an adjacent fire may make the leap directly to consuming our kindling or even logs.

This is why it’s so valuable to find and engage regularly in the broader community surrounding your topic rather than attempting to build your fire in isolation.

It’s also worth noting that we don’t always need to be the ones to start the fire in the first place.

One of the most effective methods of starting the fire between us and our audiences is by tapping into an existing fire that someone else has already taken the care to create.

Practices like podcast guesting, guest blogging, collaborations, partner workshops, and more all have the effect of taking a hot burning log from one fire and transplanting it to a new collection of fuel and tinder waiting to be lit.

These tactics allow us to quickly build up a hotter and more stable fire than we would be able to on our own.

Building & Maintaining the Fire

Regardless of the method, we choose to light our fire, new fires require nurturing and shelter.

Small fires are easily extinguished by gusts of wind and lack of anything but the exact right size of fuel.

This means that early on, we might need to light and relight the fire several times before it really takes, and then must constantly feed the fire a steady supply of just the right fuel, oxygen, and attention while shielding it from the wind.

During this phase of the fire, much of our effort goes toward fleeting, temporary results.

While frustrating, this is the way building a fire works.

While our big picture goal is to build up a large, blazing fire that can immediately engulf whole logs, we need to take some intermediary steps to get there.

This might mean:

• Chopping down our large, in-depth content and offerings into small, easily-consumable chunks…even though we’d rather people just consume the original.
• Or engaging regularly in other people’s communities related to our topic…even though we really want people to join the one we’ve established.
• Or doing unscalable activities like creating a custom welcome Loom video for each new social media follower… even though we’d rather just send a scalable automated message.

Much like tossing a whole log on a fledgling fire will smother it entirely, so too will offering our fledgling audience members only large, in-depth, content that requires more time and trust than they’ve built up with us so far.

If we want to deepen that trust and build the fire, we have to meet each audience where they’re at and offer them a steady supply of fuel appropriate to what they can consume at that moment.

Over time the fire will grow stronger. As it does, it will become capable not only of consuming larger sources of fuel but also of sustaining itself without our constant attention.

Continue to build the fire and soon it will begin to naturally throw off sparks, each of which has the potential to help the fire jump and spread as our people talk about our work.

Build the fire long enough and we create a searing bed of embers that are capable of retaining heat for an incredible amount of time.

The embers are our superfans.

They’re the people who’ve been with us the longest, have consumed every form of fuel we could feed them, and are capable of smoldering for years even without the regular addition of new fuel. When new fuel is finally presented, however, often all it takes is a simple stoking for the flames to jump back to life.

Not every fire we start will develop into a bed of embers, but this is ultimately the most powerful form of fire we can hope to build.

It also takes the most time and attention.

While a grass fire might light easily and spread far and fast, there’s little retained heat once it burns through the landscape and may fizzle out when it reaches a tree line filled with fuel it’s not hot enough to consume.

Create a focused fire, however, and nurture, feed, and attend to it carefully for years at a time, and it will grow to become capable of consuming whole anything you present to it.

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This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.

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