Multiplying Your Followers

Last night, I did a webinar to share the results and lessons from mentoring three independent artists over the past six months. During that time, they doubled their social media following/streams (and in some channels, grew by 500%), secured major endorsement deals, and found ways to pivot their careers during a global pandemic. I was immensely proud because they all did such great work.

There were no secrets. Most of what I taught these artists were concepts I’ve been sharing for years on blogs, podcasts, and conferences. In fact, during the webinar, we broke down their specific tactics step-by-step. I even recorded and published the coaching sessions with the artists on my podcast so anyone could hear exactly what we discussed. I was clear: I didn’t do the work, I simply taught them the ideas and pointed them in the right direction.

But still, I woke up this morning with an inbox of messages from other artists asking how we did it and if I could work that kind of magic for them. It got me thinking about the old proverb, “Give someone a fish and they’ll be hungry tomorrow. Teach them to fish and you’ll feed them for a lifetime.” There are a couple of lessons here that I’d like to explore - not only for musicians looking to build a fanbase, but also for any entrepreneur looking to grow their business or a visionary trying to spread their ideas. 

First, no one wants to be hungry but there are different levels of willingness, knowledge, and effort to actually catch the fish. The problem is that most people don’t know what their “fish” is. They often see the fish as followers on social media, size of music venue/festival they are playing, or Spotify streams, but none of those are life-sustaining in of themselves. If anything, these are more like lines in the water but they aren’t actually fish.

Second, there is more than one way to fish if you’d like to have an income. If you were to approach it like most people building a business, you would probably think of quantity: large numbers of followers, sales, and transactions (or in this case, schools of fish). But to do this, you would need a commercial boat, nets, bait, staff, permits, fuel, and many other expenses that make it difficult to enter the market since you’d be competing against large, established companies who create barriers to entry. Additionally, most of the fish caught this way (cod, tilapia, etc.) have very little profit margins. Most people who work on the boat, like musicians on a record label, don’t own the means of production so they make even less. That large haul might look impressive but it wouldn’t provide much. 

On the other hand, if you decided to focus on a niche, you could focus on quality. With that, you would only need a rod, the right kind of bait to attract the specific fish, and maybe a rented spot on a boat. You would only get one fish at a time but that fish could bring in hundreds of thousands without the same overhead cost (in 2012, a single bluefin tuna got three-quarter of a million dollars at market). The most expensive fish are mostly caught only one at a time. 

Getting the right kinds of fans - or true fans, as Kevin Kelly would call them - happens one at a time. It requires more persistence, skill, and knowing what the fans actually want. No one wants to be caught in a net - literally or metaphorically - and if someone suspects that you’re only treating them like a number to be accumulated, they won’t stick around. Everyone wants to be special, to be treated as unique, rare, and sought after, as opposed to being a part of a bland, generic haul. As a person who is constantly being bombarded with commercials and requests to like pages or to view videos, you get that. But isn’t it funny how we quickly prefer the large net method when we’re on the other side of the table? We want the quick and easy way, even if it doesn’t actually get us what we want. 

The right tools are there, the knowledge is widely available. We just need the courage to drop the line in the water and ignore people with those large, worthless nets. We need the discipline to consistently do the work each day and catch the right fish, one at a time. 

(Fun fact: to earn the same amount as an average commercial fisherman as the one bluefin tuna sale, you’d have to be dropping nets in the water full time for 25 years straight).