I was the product before I sold it

I started on the internet with an audience before I started selling anything to one. MySpace, in the years when that was where everything happened. I was the kind of person Exposely now exists to sell.

That's the single most useful thing I bring to this and it's also the reason I get one specific thing wrong.

What it's actually like on that side#

Brands assume the person with the audience is thrilled to hear from them. Occasionally true. Mostly what it feels like is a stranger asking to borrow the only thing you own, for less than it's worth, with a contract about it.

The audience is not a faucet. You can't turn it up. You built it over years by being a particular way, and every promotional post is a small withdrawal from a balance you can't see and can't easily refill. The people who've done this a while know this in their bones. The people who haven't burn the whole thing down in a quarter for money that seemed like a lot at the time.

The offer is almost always insulting and almost never intentionally. Brands price against a CPM because that's the only frame they have. The creator is pricing against "what does this cost me with my audience," which is a completely different question. Neither side is being unreasonable and they still can't hear each other.

Nobody wants to be handed a script. The fastest way to get a bad result is to write the post for them. I know this because it was done to me and I did it anyway, and the post landed like a brick.

Free product is not payment. It's a discount on a purchase they didn't want to make. Every creator knows this. Every brand keeps trying it.

Where it makes me wrong#

Here's the blind spot, and I'd rather write it down than discover it later.

Because I was on that side, I over-identify with supply. When a deal gets tense I instinctively think the brand is being cheap, and sometimes the brand is right — the creator is overpricing a soft audience and has confused being known with being persuasive. I've let deals die that I should have pushed on, because the version of me from five years ago was in my ear.

I also assume creators are more sophisticated than they are. I had to figure out what my audience was worth because nobody would tell me. I project that onto everyone, and most people signing up have genuinely never thought about it and would rather have a number handed to them than be asked to name one. My whole marketplace design assumes a seller who knows their price. A lot of them don't, and "let the market discover it" is cold comfort when you're the one being asked to guess first.

The part that transfers#

The reason I'm building this instead of something else is narrow, and it's not the war stories.

It's that I know the difference between an audience that likes you and an audience that will do something because you asked. I can feel that distinction on a profile in about a minute, and I can't fully explain the mechanism, which is a problem for productizing it but a real advantage for running the company right now.

Everything else about my background is a story I tell on sales calls. That one thing is the actual asset, and the entire business rests on whether it can be turned into something other than my opinion.