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Hot take: Followers don't pay you.
I spent months posting every day on X.
Built to 800+ followers. Consistent engagement. Felt like progress.
Zero paying users from here (5 honestly but spread on 5 month you know)
That's the trap most solo founders fall into. We optimize for the metric that feels good instead of the one that matters. Followers are visible.
Truth : Revenue is uncomfortable to chase. So we chase followers and tell ourselves it's "building an audience."
It's not. It's procrastination with a good story attached.
Go look at the founders featured on Starter Story. A lot of them had zero audience when they launched. No Twitter audience. No newsletter. Nothing.
They posted in niche subreddits. Sent cold DMs. Showed up in Discord servers and Slack groups nobody glamorizes. Did the work!
Then the numbers moved. Then they shared those numbers publicly. Then the audience came, fast, because real traction is magnetic in a way that "day 47 of building in public" never is.
Followers are a lagging indicator. Revenue is the leading one.
What I do differently now
When I stopped refreshing my X analytics and focused on actually shipping, two things happened.
I won back hours I didn't know I was losing to doomscrolling & being the reply guy. And when I did share something, it landed better because it was real progress, not content for content's sake.
The connections I made during that period were also different. Less "follow for follow" energy. More people I actually liked talking to, who cared about what I was building.
That's what "build in public" is supposed to feel like.
My take
Do the dirty work first: cold outreach, niche communities, manual onboarding, direct messages. Get your first 10 customers before you think about your follower count.
Then share what you did, honestly, with real numbers. That's the content that builds an audience worth having.
Do the hard job first. Get rewarded later. Then share the journey.
That's the shift. Revenue first. Audience second. In that order, every time.
Every issue I send from now on will be at newsletter.jeremylasne.com but will stay the same. Startuphunt.io is now a project itself i’m pushing, starting today, doing the dirty job.
Free issue, to support do check (thanks) :
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