The founder who stopped posting

A conversation about walking away from a 40,000-follower audience and what replaced it.

We met in an office that has clearly not been optimised for a camera, which is the first honest thing about this interview.

The decision was made over a weekend, and the reasoning was less noble than the story it later became. Posting daily had produced an audience that was large, engaged and almost entirely made of people who would never buy anything.

\u201cI had built the wrong asset extremely well,\u201d is how it was put to me. \u201cIf you had asked me to name ten accounts in that audience that could sign a contract, I could not have done it.\u201d

What replaced it was narrower and considerably less pleasant to do: eleven months of writing that went to four hundred people, all of whom were named. The follower count went down every month. Revenue did not.

The part I keep returning to is the admission that the audience had been genuinely enjoyable, and that giving it up felt like a demotion for about six months. Most accounts of this decision skip that.