​​🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here​.​​
Most people think they need a big audience to make their business work.
Thousands of followers. Tens of thousands of views. Maybe even millions.
Social media has made that look like the goal.
And I get it. When you constantly see people with huge numbers raking it in (at least, that's what they say), it’s easy to think that’s what success looks like.
I’ve thought that too.
But here’s a question worth asking:
Have you ever worked out how many clients (or customers) you actually need?
Let’s bring it a bit closer to home: Say you have a $1,000 offer - a program, a service, etc - and you want to make $10,000 a month.
You would need to convince ten people to buy your offer.
Not hundreds. Not thousands. Ten.
Or maybe your work is higher touch. Fewer clients, deeper work. Then you might only need three or four a month for things to work.
Maybe it's the other way around, but you get the idea.
In my own work, I’ve always leaned more towards fewer clients and going deeper with them.
Which means I don’t need that many clients for things to work.
Now, if I had to pick a rough number to work with, I’d assume something like a 3% conversion rate.
It won’t be exact, but it gives you a sense of scale.
So with that 3% conversion, to get those ten clients, you might only need to reach a few hundred relevant people.
A few hundred. That's doable, right?
Now flip it around for a second.
Imagine you had a million people following you.
And tomorrow, 3% of them reach out and say, “I want to work with you.”
Could you even handle that?
Most solo professionals couldn’t. I couldn't.
You’re creating the work, selling the work, delivering the work, and managing everything around it, so you have a lot on already.
You’re not set up for scale like that.
And most of the time, you don’t even want to be.
There’s another side to this as well.
You can have a big audience… and still not have much of a business.
There are creators out there with hundreds of thousands of followers making surprisingly little money.
Lots of attention, yet very little demand.
I remember James Smith talking about this. He had a YouTube channel with around half a million subscribers. Sounds great on paper.
But when he launched something, hardly anyone bought.
He had built an audience that liked watching his content, but wasn’t interested in paying for anything.
So he started again. New direction, smaller audience, but this time with people who actually wanted what he was offering.
That’s the difference.
If people aren’t willing to pay, you don’t really have a business.
You’re just entertaining people for free.
And if that is what you want to do, by all means.
So before you start chasing a bigger audience, ask yourself two things:
- How many clients do I actually need?
- And are the people I’m reaching the kind of people who would ever pay me for what I offer?
Because audience size ≠business.
Attention ≠demand.
Views ≠revenue.
So what do you do with this?
Start by getting a rough sense of your numbers.
How much do you want to make? What do you charge? How many clients does that translate to?
Then work backwards from there.
You don’t need exact math. Just a ballpark, cause once you do that, you’ll probably realise you don’t need tens of thousands of people.
From there, focus on relevance.
Speak to people you can actually help. Create things that connect to their problems. Have conversations instead of chasing reach.
I’d much rather have an audience of 1,000 people where 30 buy than a 1,000,000 people where nobody does.
Make it a great day.
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