Just over two years ago, on April 12, 2020, I sent out the first issue of this newsletter.

I’d attempted to write several newsletters in the past, but they had always fizzled after a few months at most.

Something about this one felt different however, and now, 100 issues later, it seems that hunch was true.

Over those 100 issues the newsletter has nearly tripled in size, almost all of that growth coming in the past 12 months, and I’ve learned a lot about creating and growing creative projects like newsletters.

And while a lot of what I’ve learned corresponds with the standard advice you can find all over Twitter, for this milestone issue, I wanted to share 10 of the more unconventional learnings I’ve had about growing creative projects, several of which fly in the face of standard audience building advice.

Let’s jump in.

1 // Feed Yourself First

We’re often told to serve our audience above all else.

But in my experience, creative projects have a much higher chance of succeeding when the act of creating them gets us something personally, before anyone else ever interacts with them.

Ironically (or maybe not), this was the topic of the very first issue of this newsletter, which I titled, Focus on What Fuels You.

Feeding yourself first is about structuring your projects in a way that first & foremost scratches an itch you have. Then finding a way to adapt & package it in a way that overlaps with an existing audience’s interests & desires.

This isn’t to say that every project that scratches one of your own itches will have an opportunity to build an audience around it. You need both project-market and project-creator fits to be successful.

But in my experience, it’s easier to find an audience for a project that feeds you than the other way around.

2 // Pay Attention to Signals of Progress

Almost any creative project is going to take several years to grow a significant audience around. But if your work has the potential for growth, you should be getting at least small bits of positive feedback fairly quickly.

Five issues in, I received my first email response from a reader (shoutout to Jason Perrier!) about how they resonated with the issue.

That email encouraged me to lean further into what I was doing, and since then, I’ve received at least 1 similar email almost every week.

If you’re getting your work in front of even a small number of your ideal audience members and you’re not getting any positive reinforcement, it’s a sign you need to make some tweaks.

And if you’re not regularly getting it in front of even a small number of your ideal audience… well you need to start there.

3 // The First Version Won’t be the Final Version

We all want to launch our projects as their fully realized & perfected versions.

But most of the time, we, ourselves don’t know what they’ll morph into once we launch them. Better to get a first draft out and then iterate on it from there, a process I call Thinking in Drafts which I covered in Issue 27.

I wrote the first 56 issues of my newsletter under what was essentially a placeholder name, The Listen Up Newsletter.

I named it with a vaguely audio-related name before I ever wrote the first issue and wholeheartedly believed I was going to be writing about podcasting… which never ended up happening even one time.

It was only after those 56 issues over more than a year that I started to see the through-line in the newsletter & rebranded to the more aligned Creative Wayfinding Newsletter.

If you’re creating a long-term body of work like a newsletter or podcast, you should expect it to go through significant shifts over its lifecycle, none of which you can predict before you start.

Understanding this reduces the pressure you put on the first (or current) iteration to be perfect.

Ship it & then have the faith to keep moving through the fog and follow where it leads you.

4 // Being Unable to Describe What You do Might Mean You’re Onto Something

I often feel sheepish that after 100 issues of my newsletter, I still can’t really describe what it’s about.

But recently, I’ve discovered that this is a common trait of successful creators’ platforms.

The reason, I think is that successful creative platforms are often a blend of ideas that haven’t been paired before. This is what makes them novel and interesting. But it also makes it hard to develop messaging around them because the vocabulary doesn’t yet exist.

Creating that vocabulary is a huge part of our job as creators.

5 // The Things that Work Best Don’t Always Make Sense

We all love frameworks, templates & archetypes that promise to shortcut our way to success.

But the things that work best usually don’t fit neatly into the existing boxes. And they often break all the rules you’re supposed to follow.

My audience is almost entirely made up of podcast creators, many of whom receieve the newsletter after having signed up for one of my podcast-related offerings.

My newsletter, however, has almost nothing to do with podcasting and is about finding your way as a creator of any kind.

This goes against a lot of marketing advice.

There’s a significant disconnect between my top of funnel (podcasting), middle of funnel (Creative Wayfinding) & paid offerings (podcasting).

And yet, based on anecdotal feedback from customers and subscribers, I have a suspicion that this franken-funnel somehow works better than if all my content was tightly aligned around podcasting.

I think there’s a reason…

A highly aligned funnel probably would do a better job converting cold traffic into one-time sales.

But my current creative platform allows people to really get to know a much deeper more nuanced version of me without feeling like I’m just buttering them up to make a pitch (which I’m not).

In the short term, this is likely a less financially successful strategy. But the long-term upside is huge.

For one, it leads to more perfect-fit customers & clients who buy into my philosophy around creative work which leads to better outcomes for everyone involved.

It also moves my product offerings away from being commodities which can be easily compared to other products designed to help people achieve similar outcomes. I’ve heard time and time again from PMA students that the biggest reason they enrolled was because of me.

I don’t know that that would have happened if I was more focused with outcome-oriented, purely instructional podcast content.

Most important of all, however, this approach leads to friends, partnerships, collaborators & deep personal connections that I have a hard time believing would have come from a super-specific, topic-aligned funnel.

I regularly get comments from readers along the lines of, “I found Jeremy through his podcast content, but actually stuck around for his ideas around creative work which I don’t get anywhere else.”

Comments like this are a sign to me that I’m on the right track to building the kind of creative platform I aspire to. One that is nuanced, real, and human.

There’s no way I could have (or would have) planned this strategy in advance, but somehow I stumbled on to it, and it works.

6 // Track the Right Metrics

We all want to see our subscriber counts go up.

But total subscribers/views/downloads/etc aren’t a great way to measure the true impact of quality of our work. Plus, by measuring the wrong thing we’re likely to optimize for it, which is a big mistake.

While I certainly track my subscriber count, my North Star metric has always been reader responses.

These responses, to me, are a signal of resonance, which is the target I’m aiming at with each issue.

With every issue, I hope to get at least 2-3 meaningful emails from subscribers who resonated with the article. When I don’t get any, I have a closer look at why that might be.

I also use the Reactions feature from Sparkloop (which you can see below this essay) and track how many responses I get for each issue using the scale:

👍 Above Average
👊 Average
👎 Below Average

Each issue averages between 5-10 total reactions. Any more or less than that is an interesting data point to look into.

7 // Know Why You’re Doing It

Hand in hand with tracking the right metrics is knowing why you’re creating the project in the first place.

Chances are, it’s not all about audience growth (although that might certainly be one reason). Remembering the true purpose of the project will help keep you on track & avoid distractions.

This newsletter’s primary purpose for me has always been as a sandbox to:

• Hash out ideas that later find their way into other parts of my work
• Experiment with marketing strategies & tactics
• Hone my writing
• Get to know myself better

Reminding myself regularly of the non-audience-growth-related outcomes helps me avoid feeling frustrated when growth is slow as the project is still achieving its other purposes.

It also keeps me focused on creating work that’s aligned with my internal compass rather than trying to guess what other people want.

8 // Release the Handbrake

Last year I took a writing course from The DO Lectures.

In one lesson, David, the instructor, said something I haven’t been able to shake:

“You don’t need to find your voice. You already have it, you just need to release the handbrake.”

Since starting my newsletter, I’ve consistently discovered that the more I release the handbrake & lean into the ideas, quirks & traits that make me unique, the more my work resonates.

This runs counter to a lot of entrepreneurial advice, however.

One of the first rules of building a company is building it so that it can run just as well without you.

But perhaps the first rule of creative work is that the work should seek to fully reflect & embody you as the creator.

Release the handbrake & remove the barriers to resonance.

9 // Define & Reinforce Structure

Creatives are notorious for hating the idea of structure & constraints.

But the more structure you build into your work the easier it is to create while also providing a frame around which to explore your topic w/ more depth & clarity.

Structure for me started with defining the general format of the newsletter:

1. Welcome
2. Announcement
3. Community Shoutouts
4. Feature Essay
5. 5 Currated Links
6. Twitter Feature
7. Sign Off
8. Gratitude/Wins/Excitement

After implementing this structure, it immediately made the newsletter easier to put together each week.

And after my first structural experiment, I decided to take it further by bringing more structure to the 5 Things You Might Dig section of curated links.

As you might have noticed, those links now fall into one of five consistent buckets:

1. Thought
2. Tool
3. Tactic
4. Podcasting Resource
5. Wildcard

Much like more structure made it easier to put together the newsletter as a whole, more strucuture around the links made it easier to source & curate links for each issue while also reinforcing the “brand” of the newsletter by bringing more consistency to the offering.

So far, every time I’ve added more structure, the newsletter has gotten better & creating it has become easier & faster.

Chances are, structure will have the same effect on your work.

10 // You Can’t Do it Alone (Cliche but True)

Find your people who will inspire, motivate & support you.

It’s a long road to building a life around meaningful creative work and you’re going to need all the help you can get.

We all need a steady supply of inspiration, motivation, support, accountability and commiseration in order to keep moving forward with our creative work. There is a long list of people who’ve played one or more of those roles for me and this newsletter whom I referenced in Issue #47 about Acknowledgments & Accompaniment.

In my experience, perhaps more important early on than finding your audience is finding what I call your Creator Cohort, the group of people at roughly the same stage as you, with whom you’ll “grow up” together.

These people will not only help you gain clarity on your audience but also on how you, your work, and your voice fit into the larger conversation taking place in your space.

11 // You’re Not Going to Figure Out What the Hell You’re Doing for a While. And That’s Fine.

Big ideas rarely come fully formed.

In fact, they often take years of steady, persistent excavation.

But the real purpose of a creative practice isn’t to grow now. It’s to slowly and persistently chip away and excavate the big ideas that will lead to bigger things in the future.

I’ve been creating in one form or another for over a decade.

But I’ve got at least 4 more decades of creative work yet to come.

I’m at the beginning, just finding my feet. My best work is so far off in the future I can’t even imagine it yet, let alone see it on the horizon.

The same is true for you.

This work is not for the faint of heart.

It will wear (if not outright beat) you down.

It will make you deeply question your self and your worth.

It will disappoint and frustrate and shatter you more times than you feel you can bear.

It takes a special kind of person to not only put up with all that, but choose to walk further into the Creative Wilderness without a map, following only the subtle tug of your internal compass and the belief that there’s something out there for you.

If you’re here, I think you’re probably that type of special person.

And I’m honoured to be navigating the wilderness alongside you.

Here’s to the next 100 🍻

---

Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters

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.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”

It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.

Subscribe

---

We spend so much time thinking about The Big Break.

We love to ask and hear about the moment things changed for the creators we aspire to be like.

And we spend more time than we might like to admit anticipating, fretting, and wondering about whether this will be the post or episode or newsletter or launch that blows up and puts our name on the map.

Of course, as creators, we’re already well aware that every overnight success is built on years of unheralded work.

But maybe we’ve already put in those years of unheralded work and feel we’re due.

Maybe we are.

Maybe we’re not.

Regardless, it’s worth reconsidering our conception of The Big Break.

Because the singular moment of success we often associate with it is simply an Echo Effect, a result of an earlier action now reflecting back to us.

Which means that what we think of as The Big Break isn’t actually The Big Break at all. It’s simply the echo of it.

So what is the real Big Break, then?

Maybe it’s the point at which we break with the mindsets, beliefs, and actions we’ve relied on so far and set out on a new path.

Maybe it’s the point at which we stop relying on others to guide our work and rely on our inner compass instead.

Maybe it’s not a point of arrival but of beginning.

Which means that our Big Break is within our power to make whenever we’re ready.

---

Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters

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.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”

It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.

Subscribe

---

An echo can’t exist without a gap in time between its source and return.

In fact, it’s kind of central to its definition.

The delay of a clap in a small room may be just a few almost imperceptible milliseconds.

The call and response of a shout across a mountain valley may near a second.

And a radio ping sent out across the galaxy might take years to make its way home.

Creative success is an echo as well.

The delayed result set in motion by an earlier broadcast.

Depending on the scale of our aspirations and the environment into which we are projecting them, the time it takes the echoing results of our efforts to return will vary.

As will the strength of signal required to reach its destination and then make its way back to us without dissipating.

In a way, it’s a comforting thought.

All the work we’ve broadcast, all the noise we’ve made… out there, somewhere, hurtling through space, waiting to collide with something against which to bounce back.

Or perhaps it already has.

And the echo of previous work is at this very moment making its way back to us.

---

Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters

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.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”

It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.

Subscribe

---

A couple years ago I started experimenting with hand lettering as a hobby.

It’s been a while since I’ve practiced, but recently I’ve found myself picking up and flipping through books on various types of lettering, sketching≤ and drawing while browsing bookshops.

As I’ve been thinking about revisiting and expanding on the hobby, I’ve also been thinking about how we might incorporate some of the practices and lessons from sketching into the rest of our creative work.

Every Masterpiece Starts with a Pencil

The first thing I bought when I first got into lettering was a set of coloured felt-tip calligraphy markers, the core tools of lettering and calligraphy.

The second thing I bought, however, was a set of pencils and a good eraser and it was with these that every piece got its start, long before the markers were uncapped.

Using the pencil, I would ever so lightly sketch out the rough outline piece in order to ensure the letters were spaced consistently and that the final image would fit onto the page. Invariably, this would take several attempts to get right, requiring me to erase multiple sketches before finally landing on the one that was ready to be reinforced and brought to life.

Penciling In Your Creative Projects

This step of sketching out our work applies to our creative careers as well.

We’re usually unaware we’re doing it, however, which can cause problems and frustrations down the road.

At this point in our lives and creative careers, most of us have worked in a series of different niches, platforms, mediums, products, businesses, and maybe even careers before ultimately moving on from many if not most of them.

Each of these can be thought of as a sketch of the life we were aspiring toward at the time.

In many cases, what causes us to move on from one of these endeavours is that as we’re sketching out an image, we realize it isn’t going to fit on the page we have in front of us – ie. the container that is our life, or more specifically, the life we want.

Maybe the sketch extends beyond the time we have available, maybe the finances don’t work, maybe completing this image means giving up or compromising on another one.

Or maybe we just don’t enjoy it all that much.

Whatever the reason, we decide that this sketch isn’t the one we want to commit to long-term and so we erase it and start again.

This process of sketching, erasing, and then re-sketching, in order to establish the outline of the image we want to bring to life, is a natural and necessary part of the process of building our creative lives.

Frustration arises, however, when we fail to understand this and we think that we’re supposed to get the image outlined correctly the first or second, or third (or tenth) time through.

Further complicating things for ourselves is that we often get seduced by an exciting new idea and jump in with both feet, starting to draw in the fine details of one part of the picture we have in our mind before first finishing the outline.

As a result, we often find ourselves committing a substantial amount of time and effort to a project… only to unexpectedly run out of space with the image only half-finished.

This is an outcome that could have been avoided if we would have taken the time upfront to roughly sketch out the image we have in our minds and see how (and if) it could fit onto the canvas we have available to us.

This means scoping out our personal projects much like we would for a client.

The excitement of a new idea can quickly be tempered by the realities of what it will take of us in terms of time, energy, capital, and stress to see it through.

And while it might seem counterintuitive, this is exactly what we want.

The ideas that have the greatest chance of success are those for which we’re able to maintain our initial excitement even after we’re aware of all the time, costs, and sacrifices that will be required to bring them to life.

It will likely take us a number of attempts before we land on an outline that meets this criteria and fits squarely within the boundaries of the page we have laid out for it. But taking the time upfront to get the general outline right before committing to the details can save us a lot in the way of frustration, sunk costs, and difficult decisions in the future.

Once the rough outline has been established, it’s time to refine it.

The Outline is Just a Guide

If you’ve ever sketched anything out before (especially if you, like me, are an amateur), you know that it’s incredibly hard to create a clean-looking image with a single stroke of your pencil.

After just one pass, the outline is full of subtle (and not so subtle) wobbles, the lines aren’t quite straight and the corners aren’t quite smooth.

There’s a tendency at this stage, when the sketch looks incomplete if not outright ugly, to give up and walk away, insisting that we’re just not capable of drawing.

But if we persist, and go back over our rough outline for subsequent passes, something interesting begins to happen.

While the first stroke of the pencil didn’t give us much in the way of anything that could be considered “art”, what it did give us was a guide and a reference point to which we can now anchor our future reinforcements of the general visual concept.

In overlaying subsequent strokes with the pencil, sticking to and reinforcing the guide line in some places, deviating from and correcting it in others, the dominant lines become straighter, the curves become smoother and the wobbles disappear.

What’s more, the image begins to take on depth and nuance as pressure gradients begin to appear, creating the impression of light and shadows.

With every reinforcement, the original outline recedes further into the background, either by being buried beneath subsequent layers of graphite or by being overshadowed by the bolder, darker correction lines that now draw the eye away from it.

The lesson for us as creators is that the point of the first draft is not to look anything like the final image.

The goal of the first draft of any of our work–be that a blog post, podcast, product offering, or even business–is to simply provide a guide for future reinforcement and correction.

The initial outline we create will never look as good as someone else who’s been adding to their sketch for years, adding layer over layer of corrections and reinforcements to their image.

The only way we can expect our sketches to achieve the same level of clarity and depth is to keep sketching.

There are no shortcuts here.

Sure, once you’ve developed into a skilled sketch artist capable of weaving magic with your pencil you may be capable of creating a clean and compelling image with a single stroke of your pencil. But achieving that level of skill takes years of dedicated practice.

Until then, the best option we as creators have available is to sketch and erase and sketch again until we land on a rough outline that fits into the space we have for it.

And then refine it, stroke by stroke by stroke.

Using this method, we don’t need to be master sketch artists to create a clear, compelling image.

We simply need to be persistent, and willing to continue sketching until the image on the page matches the image in our heads.

---

Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters

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.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”

It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.

Subscribe

---

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.

---

Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters

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.

A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.

Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”

It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.

Subscribe

---