Attention and income are two different economies. Here is why building for applause can quietly starve your business, and how to build for both.
Here is a question that has rearranged more businesses than almost any other I ask. Who claps for you, and who pays you, and are they the same people? For a lot of us, the honest answer is no, and not knowing that is expensive.
Funded by strangers to his content
I once sat with someone whose content was genuinely good, full of real value, all of it speaking to young people who loved him. Then I asked who had actually paid him in the last year. Every name was decades older than the audience he was creating for. He was building for one crowd and being funded by another, and nobody had ever pointed it out.
Two different economies
There is an audience that grows your name, and there is an audience that funds your business. Sometimes they are the same people. Very often they are not. Attention and income are two different economies, and you can be rich in one while staying poor in the other. Applause is not income. A like is not a decision to buy.
Why building for applause quietly starves you
Applause is easier to chase because it is fast. You post, and the likes tell you immediately whether people enjoyed it, so without noticing you drift toward making more of what gets applause, while the people who would actually pay you sit quietly, or are not even in the room. The mistake is not having two audiences. The mistake is building only for one and expecting the other to show up and pay.
Build a lane for each
Map both. Lane one is the audience that carries your name, and for them you ask where they gather and what keeps your name spreading. Lane two is the audience that carries your invoice, and for them you ask who they really are and what they need to see before they trust you enough to buy. Then build deliberately for each, instead of hoping the crowd that claps will also buy.
This is often the first thing I map with the founders I work with, because so much good work is aimed at people who were never going to buy, while the people who would buy are barely being spoken to.
A quick test for this week. Take the last three people who actually paid you, then look at your last ten posts and ask, honestly, were these written for those three, or for someone else entirely?
I write about clarity and positioning every Saturday in The Saturday Clarity Newsletter. Subscribe here: https://open.substack.com/pub/akinyinkaemmanuel