How To Build An Audience Without Creating Content
Write the words that actually make people stop scrolling.
I spent my early twenties getting seduced by gurus.
It started back in 2016. I was supposedly doing my Master’s thesis in computer science at a software company. In reality I was slowly dying of boredom while writing a highly technical academic paper that absolutely no one on earth was ever going to read.
Right around that time a friend sent me an article about digital nomads. I took one look and fell straight down the rabbit hole. It was my introduction to entrepreneurship and it instantly clicked. It felt like the thing I was born for, but nobody ever told me that this is viable career path (thanks social conditioning).
Then came the moment my whole life changed. Really.
It was Saturday morning, ridging an elevator to a completely empty office. Because who works on Saturdays? Well me apparently.
My reasoning was simple. The faster I get done with this thesis, the faster I can figure out what to do next and build my business.
As I walked through the empty office I had sort of an epiphany. I don’t even know the CEO of this company. He definitely does not know me. In fact, nobody here actually knows what the fck I’m doing. The only guy who knew what I was doing was my overworked advisor who dumbed me off to co-worker who didn’t gave a shit.
My decision was made. I just had to figure out how. After buying a one-way ticket to Thailand and trying to find enlightenment in a monastery (spoiler: I didn’t), I eventually ended up on a beach in LA.
LA had always been a dream of mine. I thought it would be a great place to find some real inspiration.
Instead I found an Instagram ad.
Why You Need To Break Things
I was scrolling through my feed, when it suddenly appeared. I don’t remember the exact phrasing but it said something along the lines of: “How to build a seven-figure online fitness coaching business in 12 weeks.” The guy in the video was named Sterling. At that moment, it sounded like God himself talking to me: My son, this one is for you.
I didn’t even have the money to pay for the course. But conveniently, it was payable in three monthly installments. I figured by the time the second payment rolled around I would have made all the money back anyway. Sterling projected absolute success. A million followers and financial freedom while traveling the world. It was a masterfully presented image. He was a textbook guru perfectly engineered to exploit my deepest psychological needs.
A month and a half later the dream didn’t materialize and I ended up broke in the basement of my parents house.
I bring this up because if you spend any time on Substack or Twitter these days, you are completely surrounded by the digital descendants of Sterling. They are everywhere: “How I gained 10k subscribers in 30 days,” and “Drop your link below so we can support each other!”
After almost 10 years of running my own business and getting burned by a dozens of gurus, I can tell you that the people doing this aren't necessarily bad people. They’re just responding rationally to the incentives of a broken system. The algorithm rewards noise and engagement bait.
But as someone whose lifelong strategy has always been when everybody goes left, I go right, I can tell you that great work doesn’t come from conforming.
You have to smash a little mud on the perfectly curated status quo.
If you want to survive the current creator economy without losing your soul, you have to be an outlaw. You have to reject the rules of the broken system and start writing your own. Literally.
Learn to Love the Crickets
Let’s get one thing straight. This is a tough gig. Writing something truly great that changes how a stranger feels, is incredibly difficult.
Most people in the growth cult will tell you to just post consistently. “Consistency is King!” But consistency is a metric for factories. An apple tree that tried to produce fruit every single day of the year would die.
What you really need is devotion.
When you sit down to write a piece and you hit publish with a trembling finger... and you get exactly four likes. Two from friends. One from a bot. And one from your mom.
That hurts. It feels like you’re shouting into the void. But it’s the part of the creative process where your muse is sleeping off a bad hangover behind a dumpster, the crickets are chirping, and tumbleweeds are rolling through the vast, empty space between your ears.
You think the market has rejected you. It hasn’t. The market is just busy. You are speaking to what I call the “Ghost Economy.” They are silent introverts and deep thinkers who actually read your stuff, nod quietly, and never leave a comment. The deepest waters are often still. You aren’t building a massive audience. You are building a small village. Outlast the crickets. Write for three years to absolutely no one. Sucking is the first step to being great. Make friends with sucking.
Don’t Set Out to be Famous
If you want to know what your Substack is about, don’t look at your analytics. Find the conflict.
Every good movie, every good novel, every good ad campaign runs on conflict. What is the bad guy in your story? Is it the hustle culture? Is it superficial marketing? Is it the loneliness of modern life? If you don’t have a bad guy, you’re just writing a brochure, and nobody voluntarily reads a brochure.
Once you have your bad guy, you need to embrace being contrarian. When building strategies for my clients, I always look for what the industry standard is. And then perfectly do the opposite.
If all the growth gurus are telling you to speed up, hack the system, and read 100 books a year at 2x speed, go 180 degrees the other way. Tell your readers to read one great book. To put it down and think about a single sentence for three days. Let it alter them.
Be beautifully unproductive. Share your worst post. Make something so honest and dripping with human imperfection that it stops the scroll. If you treat Substack like Twitter 2.0, you are fighting over table scraps in the dopamine economy. Dopamine fades. Depth compounds. Don’t build your business on a fading asset.
Starve Your Monkey Brain
I’ve met so many writers who are stuck. Their pages are blank, so they open a new tab and read an article about “How to overcome writer’s block,” which leads them to a Twitter thread by some 22-year-old guru about “The 7 habits of highly effective typists.”
You’ve got a bad case of what Buddhists call “Monkey Mind.” It’s your forebrain chattering away, swinging from branch to branch, terrified of doing the actual, unglamorous work of staring at the blank page.
If you want to write about building a creative business, do not read other people writing about building a creative business. You’re just drinking downstream water. Go to an entirely different galaxy.
Read biology. Read the history of the transcontinental railroad. Read a book from 1950. Go outside, build a damn wooden table with your bare hands. Have a difficult, uncomfortable conversation in the real world. Expose yourself to some grit and friction that hasn’t been optimized by a Silicon Valley product manager. Then come back to your desk and bring those weird, unrelated dots together.
That is how you develop an original voice.
Make Art Not Content
In my branding and design studio, I saw brilliant ideas happily murdered over and over again because clients demanded they fit the crappy bullshit marketing everyone else was doing on Amazon. They actively choose the safe and mediocre garbage over the risky and brilliant idea.
You don’t have a client to please. And you do not have to fit a template (really). This gives you ultimate freedom.
Don’t voluntarily cage yourself by trying to appease a mathematical formula or an imaginary audience. You are not a content creator trying to trick an algorithm into making you famous. You are a writer trying to make another human being feel something.
The people playing the Guru Game might rack up higher subscriber counts in the short term. They might wave their screenshots in your face. Let them. Their audience is built on the flimsy foundation of quick dopamine, and dopamine fades.
The future of the creator economy is not written by the loudest voices. It’s going to be won by the most resonant ones. The people who refuse to manufacture generic advice. The ones who treat their work as an offering rather than a funnel.
Greatness requires the sudden cessation of stupidity. Look at the sea of people screaming for attention, step back, and decide to just quietly build a fire in the dark.
Just sit down, stare at the glowing rectangle, pull an idea out of the dark, and make some art that has a positive impact.
Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.
I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.
"Philipp, the synchronicity here is wild. You talk about the 'Ghost Economy'—I actually teach a concept I call the 'Ghost Engine.' After 30 years in the trades and corporate strategy, I realized the daily 'content hustle' is just the digital version of a guy swinging a hammer 60 hours a week and wondering why his margins are leaking. It’s a factory metric. The real power is doing the deep, gritty work in the real world (like building that table) and then engineering that experience into a system that works in the background. 'Dopamine fades. Depth compounds. ' is going up on my office wall today."
I got swept up in the first wave of the digital nomad phase back in 2010 when it went hand-in-hand with minimalism. I threw out my TV and quit my job so I, too, could write blog posts telling other people to throw out their TVs and quit their jobs. I wound up back at my parents' house in short order and had to start my life all over. This is your first post I've read, but I co-sign every word.