Stop Fishing Where Everyone Else Is Fishing: How to Find the Audience That Was Looking for You

Somewhere around 2019, a lot of us got the same memo: go viral or go home. The logic seemed airtight at the time. Reach equals opportunity equals success, and reach came from playing the platforms' games well enough to get the algorithmic boost that made the numbers climb. So we optimized. We studied the trends. We chased the formats. We posted at the right times and used the right hooks and made things that were engineered to perform rather than things that were made to matter.

How's that working out for everyone?

I'm not being glib. I've done the optimization dance myself, and I understand why it's appealing — there's a very real feedback loop that makes the whole thing feel like it's working, right up until you look at what you've actually built and realize the audience you attracted was interested in the trend you rode, not in you.

The Difference Between Reach and Resonance

Here's a distinction that changed how I think about all of this: reach is about how many people see your work. Resonance is about what happens when the right people do.

A post that reaches a hundred thousand people who scroll past it in two seconds has less actual value — to you, to them, to the work — than a piece that reaches five hundred people who stop, read the whole thing, feel something, and come back. Not because small numbers are inherently noble, but because resonance is what creates a real relationship between a creator and an audience. Reach without resonance is just traffic.

The creator economy has spent years obsessing over the first metric while treating the second as a nice-to-have. That's backwards.

Who Were You Before You Started Optimizing?

I want to ask you a genuinely useful question: what were you making before you started thinking about what would perform?

For a lot of people, there's a version of their creative work that existed before the platform logic took over — something more specific, more idiosyncratic, more clearly theirs. The stuff you made because you were genuinely interested in it, not because you'd reverse-engineered what the algorithm seemed to reward that particular month.

That earlier version of your work is worth revisiting. Not because you should be frozen in amber, doing forever what you did at the beginning. But because your specific perspective — the weird angle you take on things, the particular obsessions you keep circling back to, the voice that sounds like you and nobody else — that's actually your competitive advantage. And the optimization process has a way of sanding it down.

The irony is that the thing most likely to attract people who genuinely want what you make is the thing that's most distinctly, uncompromisingly yours. Specificity is not a liability. It's the whole game.

A Framework That Actually Works

Let me offer something more practical than 'be yourself' — because that advice, while true, is not especially actionable.

Start with the question your work is answering. Every piece of meaningful creative work is, at some level, a response to a question or a tension or a gap. What's the specific thing your work addresses that other work doesn't? Not in a grand, self-important way — just honestly. What do you make that someone couldn't easily get from someone else? That's your entry point.

Make for the person who would get it most, not the most people. When you're creating, picture the single reader, viewer, or listener who would find your work most valuable. What do they need from it? What would make them feel seen or helped or delighted? Making for that specific imaginary person will produce better work than making for a demographic abstraction, and better work finds its people.

Let the work do the recruiting. The best audience-building strategy is making things worth finding. This sounds obvious, but it runs counter to a lot of platform advice that treats content as a vehicle for distribution rather than the thing itself. If the work is genuinely good and genuinely specific, it will create its own gravity over time. Not overnight. Not virally. But durably.

Show up somewhere with regularity and depth. You don't need to be everywhere. Pick the place where your people are most likely to be and show up there consistently, with actual substance. A newsletter that fifty people read and talk about is worth more to your long-term creative practice than a social account with ten thousand followers who never engage.

The Long Game Is Not a Consolation Prize

I want to address the voice in your head that's saying: sure, but slow doesn't pay the bills, and the people who went viral got the book deals and the brand partnerships and the speaking gigs.

Some of them did. And some of them are quietly exhausted and creatively hollow and privately terrified that the next thing they make won't perform as well as the last thing. Virality is a hell of a treadmill.

The creators I find most interesting — the ones who seem to have built something that actually sustains them, financially and creatively and personally — are almost never the ones who optimized their way to the top. They're the ones who made a specific thing for a specific kind of person, kept making it with enough consistency that people could find and trust them, and let the audience grow at whatever pace the work warranted.

That's not a consolation prize for people who couldn't crack the algorithm. That's a more honest account of how durable creative careers actually get built.

Your People Are Out There

Here's what I keep coming back to: there are people in this country — probably a lot of them — who would genuinely love what you make. Not a version of it that's been smoothed down and optimized for performance. The actual thing, with all its specificity and strangeness and particular point of view.

Those people are not going to find you if you're buried in the algorithmic pile with everyone else who's making the same trending format. They're going to find you because you made something specific enough that when they encountered it, it felt like it was made for them.

That's the whole job. Not to reach everyone. To reach the right ones, with something real.

Start there.