Packing snowballs

I was really struck by something I heard today on Cal Newport's podcast by guest Jordan Harbinger. The discussion was around what it takes to build a successful podcast, as Jordan has by all measures, a long-running and successful one. His advice though, seems a bit counter-cultural to me and that's why it stands out.

In giving advice to someone trying to break through with a new podcast, he said you should focus on getting your product right before going for exposure. Like if you go viral somehow and get a ton of people to your podcast when it's not yet well-formed, not only are you not going to retain any of those people, you will probably never get them back again. Instead, it's all about retention and building your followers organically brick by brick. And then once you've reached a certain level of quality, you can feel comfortable about getting more exposure.

The metaphor he used to describe this was packing a snowball: you want to make sure it is tight (e.g. the product is solid and retains people) as you are rolling it, and as long as it stays tight you can gradually build it up bigger and bigger. This type of thinking makes a lot of intuitive sense to me and is how I've thought about building my business in a slower, more deliberate fashion. It goes against the grain of a lot of Twitter business experts du-jour who advocate building an audience over everything else. But most of them have courses to sell on building an audience, so go figure.