How should a founder or investor build a large personal audience?

Harry Stebbings · Feb 25, 2022

Founders building a Twitter audience should focus on a narrow niche in the early days and make that small group love them

Better to find a specific audience — even something as narrow as cohesion between product design and customer support teams — and win their devotion

Scope: applies to the early days of audience building

38:02 20VC Exclusive: Sahil Bloom on Raising his Debut Venture Fund (SRB Ventures), Why Traditional Venture Firms Are Going to Lose and How Sahil Built a Twitter Audience to 500K+ in 18 Months

Sahil Bloom · Feb 25, 2022

Don't try to be everything to all people online — figure out what you're really good at, own it and deliver it

38:14 20VC Exclusive: Sahil Bloom on Raising his Debut Venture Fund (SRB Ventures), Why Traditional Venture Firms Are Going to Lose and How Sahil Built a Twitter Audience to 500K+ in 18 Months

Des Traynor · Nov 15, 2023

Intercom's biggest marketing mistake was prioritising growing a large blog audience over growing the right audience, which made the demand hard to capture and qualify

The blog attracted designers, product people, engineers and startup generalists rather than the support buyers best served by Intercom, so the audience couldn't be translated into capturable demand

Scope: framed as what he'd trust himself to do better

55:58 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn

Harry Stebbings · Nov 15, 2023

20VC lost its way by chasing the bigger audience numbers of other content producers; the right job is serving the best venture and startup podcast rather than broadening to musicians or sports stars

Know your customer and know your product — a broader audience isn't the job

58:11 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn

Harry Stebbings · Jun 12, 2024

Companies make a mistake building direct channels around the company brand rather than the founder, because it is much easier to build followings with personalities than with companies

People don't follow Scale, they follow Alex

42:24 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's

Alexandr Wang · Jun 12, 2024 · hedged

Very few companies can carry real meaning as a brand in their own right; OpenAI is one of the rare exceptions

42:37 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's

Harry Stebbings · Aug 18, 2025

Lovable's success is driven by the combination of extreme transparency about ARR growth and a founder-led cult of personality

Transparency is everything and people like to follow people, and Anton has combined both by publishing ARR growth in a way most founders don't and fronting it in his own voice

47:07 20VC: Lovable CEO Anton Osika on $120M in ARR in 7 Months | The Honest Truth About Defensibility and Unit Economics for AI Startups | The State of Foundation Models: Long Grok, Short OpenAI, Why | Replit vs Lovable vs Bolt: What Happens

Harry Stebbings · Feb 16, 2026

CEOs should show themselves rather than pitch, because audiences buy the person, not the product

They don't release around 30% of shows because the CEO just sells their product, and those episodes suck

73:13 20VC: SaaS is Dead: Why Systems of Record Will Die in an Agentic World | What Revenue Multiple Will Software Companies Trade At? | From 7,000 to 3,000: We Need Less People Than Ever with Sebastian Siemiatkowski

Sahil Bloom · Feb 25, 2022

The way to grow an audience is to optimize for creating value rather than for follower growth; attention is the return you receive for value given

He never targeted follower counts, only value creation, and people gifted him their attention in return

6:09 20VC Exclusive: Sahil Bloom on Raising his Debut Venture Fund (SRB Ventures), Why Traditional Venture Firms Are Going to Lose and How Sahil Built a Twitter Audience to 500K+ in 18 Months

Sahil Bloom · Feb 25, 2022

Founders who want to build a Twitter following should identify what value they can share and share it consistently

37:57 20VC Exclusive: Sahil Bloom on Raising his Debut Venture Fund (SRB Ventures), Why Traditional Venture Firms Are Going to Lose and How Sahil Built a Twitter Audience to 500K+ in 18 Months

Des Traynor · Nov 15, 2023

Effective followership — engagement from the narrow audience that actually buys — is the metric worth tracking, not general followership or viral moments

Viral tweets are easy to get now and drive almost nothing beyond quote tweets, whereas growth in engagement on narrow support-focused content is what he cares about

57:11 20VC: How to Survive and Thrive in a World of OpenAI, Are LLMs Being Commoditised, Where Does the Value Lie; Infrastructure or Application Layer, How Apple Could Win in a World of AI, How Amazon Could Threaten OpenAI and Why Google Struggle with Des Trayn

Harry Stebbings · Nov 28, 2022

We are seeing the personalization of CEO-ship — CEOs are now public figures

Visible in Elon Musk and others whose personal presence is inseparable from their companies

40:25 20VC: Wolt CEO, Miki Kuusi on Leadership Lessons Scaling to a Reported $8.1BN Exit to Doordash, Building Teams not Families, The Difference Between Trust and Safety Within Companies, How To Use Compensation to Create Culture & Why You Should Not Be Lookin

Harry Stebbings · Jun 12, 2024

The celebritization of individuals within organizations and movements now drives everything; people love the cult of personality more than ever

Sam Altman trends disproportionately more often than OpenAI, and the same pattern shows up with Messi at Miami and Margot Robbie with Barbie

42:48 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's

Alexandr Wang · Jun 12, 2024 · hedged

The pull toward individuals over organizations reflects a deep human need: people have innate circuitry for understanding individuals but no intuitive grasp of what an organization means

Humans have evolved ability to model individuals; organizations have no intuitive representation

Scope: offered as 'probably'

43:12 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's

Sahil Bloom · Feb 25, 2022

At the heart of a creator's process must be a 'content engine' — a systematic intake of newsletters, podcasts and media from which novel insights are logged, so ideas are available when inspiration to write strikes.

It's what allows a creator to produce high-quality content consistently.

25:45 20VC Exclusive: Sahil Bloom on Raising his Debut Venture Fund (SRB Ventures), Why Traditional Venture Firms Are Going to Lose and How Sahil Built a Twitter Audience to 500K+ in 18 Months

Guillaume Moubeche · Dec 13, 2024

Building an audience through content requires consistency over a long period; expecting instant virality is the wrong model

Occasional viral hits happen by luck, but anything built for the long term needs time and repetition; he quit Instagram Reels early several times and shouldn't have

Scope: about building something long-term rather than one-off virality

51:05 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire

Harry Stebbings · Oct 23, 2024

Podcasting is a game of who survives the longest — simply persisting to 50 episodes puts you in the top 2%

90% of podcasts don't reach episode 10 and a further 8% don't reach episode 50; his own show had under a thousand plays per episode for the first eighteen months, when almost everyone would have quit

57:22 20Sales: Biggest Lessons Scaling Slack from $6M to $1BN in ARR | How to Build a Customer Success Machine and Where Most Go Wrong | The Framework to Hire All Sales Reps: Take-Home Assignments, Hiring Panels and more with AJ Tennant @ Glean

Harry Stebbings · Dec 13, 2024

Podcasting is a game of who survives the longest rather than who starts strongest

His own show took 100 episodes and over two years to reach a thousand plays, and only 2% of podcasts make it past episode 50

52:50 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire

Sahil Bloom · Feb 25, 2022

Whether a piece of writing is 'great' and whether it performs are different things: exceptionally researched pieces can reach tiny audiences while broad, 'fortune cookie' posts resonate emotionally — and that emotional resonance is also a form of greatness.

He has published both kinds and seen the outcomes diverge from his own quality judgments.

27:03 Broad emotional resonance outperforms deep research

Nick Huber · Aug 21, 2023

The rule of building an audience is that you must bring a unique perspective; being open-minded and nuanced online is not interesting

People are already surrounded by echo chambers in family, companies and online communities, so echoing the same ideas earns no attention

15:18 Unique strong perspective not open minded nuance builds an audience

Nick Huber · Aug 21, 2023

Twitter has been a genuine competitive advantage in his business, supplying confidence to take big shots, distribution, access to partners and talent, and a network

47:58 Public platform presence like twitter is a genuine competitive business advantage

Harry Stebbings · Aug 21, 2023

The best way to build an audience is to document your work publicly and bring people along the journey while you learn

He knew nothing about venture when he started and people enjoyed watching his development; it's also the best way to learn

49:51 Document your journey publicly while learning builds audience best

Miki Kuusi · Nov 28, 2022

Twitter adds very little value to company building

40:22 Twitter presence adds little value to company building

Harry Stebbings · Nov 15, 2023 · hedged

Content strategy can work either way: going as niche as possible to reach a thousand true fans fast, or building a huge unfocused audience where word-of-mouth, brand and followership validity eventually convert

At scale, distribution and brand effects kick in — but you have to have faith it will convert

56:47 Either narrow fast or broad slow conversion can work given faith in eventual payoff

Des Traynor · Nov 15, 2023

A celebrity guest's followership is not useful to a venture podcast even if they enter investing

The audience it brings isn't the audience that matters

58:33 Celebrity crossover followers dont transfer to a niche audience

Cliff Weitzman · May 9, 2026

Logan Paul's WWE seat is genuinely accretive because it gives him access to a fanbase he could never have built alone, and he has built unusual leverage by blurring the line between person, company and media property

WWE is a top-20 YouTube channel on top of TV and Netflix distribution, and it is the platform that launched The Rock; combined with Prime and boxing, few people are playing the game the way Logan is

67:40 Attach to an existing large institution as the launchpad