A panel discussion on audience building featuring Shaan Puri, Sam Parr, and Sagar Enjeti (Breaking Points). They discuss what actually drives audience growth (make content people want), personal brand vs. company brand trade-offs, viral tweet breakdowns, and tactical growth strategies including the “red pill” / spiky point of view framework.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host), Sagar Enjeti (guest, Breaking Points)
What Audience Building Means to You [00:00:00]
Shaan: How do you think about audience building, and what does your audience mean to you?
Shaan: Wow, emotional question. I don’t really think about it — it’s the byproduct of what I do. After I sold my company, I said: all right, I could do whatever I want now. Time to face the tough question: what do I actually want to do, what do I actually care about in my life? Those are big questions that scared me. So I trimmed it down — how do I just want to spend my days?
The thing that came to me was: the thing I enjoy doing most is getting curious. I’m generally very curious, and if I have to do work and push my curiosity to the side and hopefully get to it later — that’s not great. But if I could make my work just being curious about things, whether it’s crypto, audience building, some new science and tech thing, or where peanuts grow — I wanted to be professionally curious.
How do you be professionally curious? One way was to turn that curiosity into content. I’ll take these questions, go look into them, package up my learnings, and share them with others. That was my thought process. Audience building and content was a necessary means to an end — a byproduct of the main thing I wanted to do, which was just wake up and dive into whatever’s most on my mind that day.
Sam: I think building an audience is a lot like making money — especially in 2022. You have to provide something that doesn’t exist, and then people will reward it with their attention. The way I built my show and the way I consistently think about growing is to continue to fill niches. You start filling one niche, build niches on niches on niches, put an underlying philosophy underneath it all, and you keep building on top. Which just results in an overall top-line figure that continues to go up.
It’s not that complicated as a concept. It’s just incredibly complicated to execute — which is why not a lot of people do it, and why there aren’t that many people at the very top of the game. All returns in the influencer market are exponential. The top 0.01% of podcasts get so many more downloads. When I found out what was even in the top 1% of podcasts, I was like, “Wait, 20,000 downloads — how do you make a living from that?” And then you compare that to what the top ten have.
Execution is harder than anything else in this game.
Make Something People Want [00:06:00]
Shaan: We did this getaway where we played basketball with a bunch of interesting people, and one of them was Mr. Beast — the number one YouTuber in the world. So if you talk to him, you’re like, “Hey, what’s the trick for getting huge on YouTube?” And he says, “I just want to make the best YouTube videos possible.” That’s it. How did you become number one? “I just tried to make great videos every day. I wake up and ask: what’s a great video? How do I make that?”
Simple. Not easy.
Because when you break it down — something that gets your attention, holds your attention, makes you feel something at the end (laughter, a feel-good moment, outrage, whatever) — you could break that down and add detail, but you’re not going to get some Insight that was never available to you and now you too can go succeed. The best people do the simple thing just better than everybody else.
Sam: So is “make great content” really the bottom line?
Shaan: Well — you went through YC, right? What’s the YC motto?
Sam: Make something people want.
Shaan: YC, the greatest startup accelerator ever, has created almost half a trillion dollars of value from the companies that went through it, and their secret is: make something people want. Don’t get distracted by fundraising and press and growth hacks. Are you making something people want?
Same thing with content. Are you making content that people want? That’s what great content is. When Mr. Beast talks about picking niches and serving that niche — that’s what he’s doing. Making content that people in that category want, doing it better than others, doing it consistently so they build a habit.
Sam: I get approached by a lot of people — “Will this light do it for me? Will this camera?” Your camera’s not your problem, bro. I recently spent $60,000 on cameras, and that’s after three years. Needing 4K cameras was an added benefit for my existing audience, not a prerequisite to start.
A pop filter, a Yeti USB mic, a basic webcam — that’s not a high startup cost. And then yes, thumbnails matter, headlines matter. But Mr. Beast knows exactly how to rank, how retention thumbnails work, how to stack and iterate — he’s figured out how to read the YouTube dashboard better than anybody else. I always ask: is the content good? That’s my number one concern.
Personal Brand vs. Company Brand [00:13:00]
Sam: Both of you have pretty distinct personal brands as well as business brands you’re independently growing. How do you think about personal brand building versus company brand building?
Sagar: Whenever I’m doing something under the Breaking Points umbrella — anything business-related, hiring — it’s not just a reflection of me, it’s a reflection of the ethos and principles that we decided to grow on mutually. Everything under the brand is a reflection of our philosophy. On my personal brand, honestly, I just have a lot less capacity to care. If I’m interested in something, I’m just going to explore it.
Shaan: What’s the question behind the question here? Because I try to figure that out. The surface question is: what’s the difference between your podcast brand and your personal brand? But what’s underneath that?
Let me start with the problem: audience building as a brand is hard. It’s hard to create affinity when it’s not coming from a human face. And personal brands are easier to grow — individuals just have an easier time than company accounts.
Here’s my simple, controversial take: if you’re a company, you should use individual faces to grow. You’ll go faster that way. If you’re an individual trying to grow a media property, you should put it under a brand umbrella — mostly because you can’t ever sell you. If you want this to be an asset and not a job, you need it to grow its own brand.
I grew my personal Twitter from like 10,000 to 300,000 in roughly a year. But then what? I don’t really want to be some influencer, and I can’t hand this off to anybody — it’s my voice, my name, my face. So it’s a job now. I need to maintain it.
But when I created the Milk Road, I intentionally didn’t call it Sean’s Crypto Newsletter — which would have been easier at the start to get subscribers for, because people already bought into the Sean franchise. Instead I called it the Milk Road because one day I’d like to not be the guy writing it. Maybe sell it someday. I wanted it to be an independent asset.
So: if you’re already a company, use human faces because people would rather follow people. If you’re an individual, take a little hit by putting it under a brand umbrella, but get the big benefit of it not being tied to your name and face forever.
Tweet Breakdowns — Shaan’s Metaverse Thread [00:19:00]
Shaan: Let me tell you about what made the metaverse thread work.
It was timely — this was right when Facebook had rebranded to Meta, and everybody had this sneaking suspicion that everybody was bullshitting about this. Smart people, big names, were saying the metaverse is the future — but nobody was explaining what the hell the metaverse actually was or why it’s the future. People kind of smelled it, but didn’t know how to call it.
So I was calling it, which generally is what people want to click into and read. And I backed it up.
The actual point was: when people hear “metaverse” they think virtual reality, living as an avatar. I said no — I think it’s more like The Singularity, but for digital life. It’s this tipping point where more and more things important to you live on the internet. Twenty years ago, you had a computer room in your house and everything else was non-computer. Now the computer’s attached to your body. That trend just continues. At some point we’re going to value our digital stuff more than our physical — we’ll spend more time, energy, and money online than offline. That was the idea.
So the thread worked for three reasons: timely, I was calling something, and I had a good argument that could get you to agree.
Sam: Hudson Minaj was genuinely triggered by this tweet. He called you?
Shaan: He called me. I didn’t know the guy before this. He said, “Bro, I do stand-up comedy with real people, real crowds — that energy is my home, my craft, my favorite feeling in the world.” And I was like, “I don’t know what to tell you, man. I think it’s going in that direction.”
I remember people being like “I love waking up getting the newspaper from my front lawn, the feel of it.” And it’s true, you probably did like that. But you liked real-time news that floods into your brain even more, it turns out. That turned out to be more addictive.
Sagar’s Viral Strategy: Timeliness and Facts [00:25:00]
Sagar: My most viral content just speaks to facts and contextualizing them in a way that feels useful to people’s lives. One of my most viral posts was about gas prices. The average American nets X amount after taxes. At five dollars a gallon, they’re spending approximately 10% of their take-home pay on gas. When you include food and housing, it gives you a picture of how bad things are. That’s not a political statement, just a statement about where things are.
People screenshotted it, shared it on Instagram — both ways. People used it for “oil companies need to stop profiteering” and “Biden needs to start drilling.” I can put it any particular way you want.
Sam: You handed them a hammer and said “go beat up whoever you want.”
Sagar: Exactly. You can use it to serve your agenda. Which is kind of the cynical take on content creation — you will blow up faster if you feed an audience around something they already have a bias about and you keep feeding that. But a more useful way of thinking about it is: what worldview do I like and respect and maybe share? That’s the worldview I can serve by producing well-packaged nuggets, because I know what will hit with that audience.
Shaan: Timeliness. Is there anything in this conversation that wasn’t about timeliness as the driver?
Sam: I learned this the hard way. When Luna collapsed, I had an interesting take and I decided to make a video — almost like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight format. I did this rant, hired an editor, we iterated, we made great content. We put it out two and a half weeks after the news. The video got maybe 17,000 views. A flop.
The smarter thing would have been: if I’d opened my phone, typed the whole thing out in notes, screenshotted it, and just posted it immediately when it happened. It would have been less great — the jokes wouldn’t have been as good, no video production — but it would have been on time. And on time matters way more than great when it comes to this type of reactionary content. Three weeks later, nobody cared about Luna anymore. The world had moved on.
Good enough at the right time is better than great at the wrong time.
Shaan’s Growth Tactics [00:33:00]
Shaan: I’ll go through a few more of mine quickly.
The Elon on Clubhouse thread — that was purely a service. Clubhouse was overloaded, invite-only, and Elon had popped on. I just live-typed and transcribed everything interesting he was saying in real time. I was the only person doing it. And I felt a little silly — I’m like, I’ve become a professional note-taker on this beta app, what has my career come to. Then it was getting 7,000 likes. Okay, never mind.
You can build a huge audience as simply a curator or remixer of content. You don’t even need to be an original content creator.
The other thread I’ll mention: I said “I fixed education” in one tweet. I knew I could trigger everybody. Classic tech bro thinks he can fix education in a tweet. But what I actually believe is that when people want to learn something, they’d be better off just going and trying to do the thing, and then when they get stuck going to look up how to get unstuck. I do believe that. But if I’d just said that, it would have gotten a tenth of the likes. By adding “I fixed education,” I was able to trigger a bunch of people.
Sam: You relate to Twitter as a game.
Shaan: Don’t take it too seriously. Twitter’s not my real job. I’ve been successful outside of content creation, so I have the security to just mess around with it and do what I think is interesting. Once you get to a certain size — whether through content or outside of it — you can start playing much looser. Your life is short, just do whatever you want to say. It’s a lot more rewarding that way.
Sagar’s Growth: From 0 to 100K [00:39:00]
Sagar: Zero to 10K on Twitter is actually not that hard — you just need the few accounts that everybody follows to follow you and retweet you. That’s the secret. Find what your niche’s 0.01% needs in their feed that they’re not getting. Provide that service.
For me, I was the first guy tweeting transcripts, which means those power users were all following me, all retweeting me, exposing me to their millions of followers.
10K is a big inflection point — that’s where you start to get exponentially more followers. 50K is an even bigger one, where things really go vertical.
Shaan: Mine was slower and stupider, but same principle. The first 25 people mattered a lot — not the number, but who they were. I had built relationships in person with Ryan Hoover and about 25 important people in tech who were already well-known. Once I started getting active on Twitter, they’d share things I said. I never asked — they just thought it was interesting and shared it with their audiences.
The key things I’d add: get tight on the domain you’re building authority in. Tighter the better. Very tempting to be broad. Also — know whether you’re an expert sharing knowledge or a curious novice. A curious novice just types out transcripts, finds interesting clips, remixes and curates content from a beginner’s point of view. That’s fine. You can build a huge audience that way.
The “red pill” concept: one of the guys from Wait But Why told me you need your red pill — the truth that most people aren’t saying but that, when they hear it, they nod vigorously. What’s your thing? Your spiky point of view. You can base your whole brand around that for a period of time.
Also: speak from the “I.” A lot of people, as they get more successful, keep saying “you” — “you gotta do this, you gotta do that, when you feel this way…” It’s much more powerful when you say, “I was feeling this way, I was going through this, and this made me think…”
And don’t quit. Go viral. If you remember only two things: don’t quit, and find ways to go viral. If you just don’t quit and you go viral occasionally, you will grow.
Sam: That’s great. Thank you both — this has been a ton of fun.