The Magic of the Minimum-Viable-Audience Milestone
You can succeed with an audience much smaller than you think.
If you’re building the base of your personal enterprise, you’re focused on attracting an audience to build a powerful solo or small company.
So far, you know you’re building a tiny digital-media company that mentors people to help them achieve their version of success.
You also know that the topic you choose has to satisfy your sense of purpose if you’re going to be equipped to lead.
And finally, you know that you have to look to your core values when choosing your ideal audience.
You’ve factored all of that in before creating any content. You’ve worked to position your brand in the minds of those ideal prospects before you’ve even created a website.
But the entire time, a question burns in the back of your mind:
How will I get traffic?
Traffic is the topic that everyone typically flocks to first, because:
It’s something a lot of people struggle with; and
Many of those people think if they have it, their problems are over.
This first part is true, and you have to get in front of the right people so they’ll become a part of your audience. But what precisely do we mean by “audience”?
These days, many people tend to think of an audience in terms of social media followers, along with “likes” and “shares.” But not all audiences are created equally, and social media is seriously outclassed by a much older audience vehicle that your business can actually own and control.
And that’s email.
This explains why so many media and marketing people have gravitated to the Substack ecosystem, which places email right where it belongs — at the center of it all.
The Power of Email
Email remains the online king for businesses of all sizes.
It’s the one digital marketing and sales channel that’s indispensable. And that’s why we need to take an “email is the value proposition” approach as the vehicle for our audience-first strategy.
Email was the original “killer app” that everyone used, starting back in the 1990s. Over thirty years later, everyone uses email even more, and that’s why it remains the absolute best channel for digital marketing and sales.
This is also why Substack has emerged as a new ecosystem that is entirely centered around getting people to opt in to your email newsletter. Let’s quickly look at some key data:
For every $1 spent on email marketing, you get $36 in return. That’s probably because people spend 5.6 hours per day checking email — up almost a half-hour since 2017.
Plus, email remains 40 times better at converting people than social media. You are six times more likely to get just a basic click from an email than from a social media post.
And finally, 58% of adults check their email as soon as they wake up. The medium is woven into the fabric of our lives, especially at a business level.
But we’re not talking about email marketing as it’s often practiced now, where businesses use it to blast out occasional offers that feel like spam.
We’re talking about providing original and curated content best suited for a specific type of person and related to a particular topic — both of which you’ve already carefully chosen based on your own values and purpose.
Again, if you hang out on Substack, you understand this. And while some are on Substack to simply express themselves, those building businesses come to realize that fundamental marketing and persuasion principles that predate the internet are what really matter, regardless of platform tactics.
So before you start dwelling on traffic, you need to understand that your primary objective is to get people on an email list. In other words, general traffic, likes, and shares that don't result in an email subscription are a lost opportunity.
And it’s certainly not about pageviews. We’re circumventing the entire world of ad-based digital media, and that allows us to immediately contrast the horrid experience provided by most media sites with a clean, uncluttered experience that’s 100% focused on the right visitors and one objective.
Truth is, a small amount of the perfect traffic is much more valuable than large amounts of the wrong traffic. This is why we spend so much time formulating our initial audience archetype for our topic.
In other words, we want to be able to laser focus on attracting the right people. And we want to avoid (and even repel) the wrong people. Don’t worry; you don’t have to be nasty. You just have to understand who you’re serving and communicate that very clearly, which naturally pushes away the wrong people.
And one more time so you don’t forget: email is the thing. You’re not generating traffic and attention for any other reason. Later, you’ll drive traffic to the product and service pages of your site from your email list. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The Minimum-Viable-Audience Milestone
Once you have a certain threshold of audience, cool things start to happen. So what’s the threshold? Well, this is where we come to the idea of the minimum viable audience.
Over the last 20 years, I’ve been in a position to coin a few vital terms related to the evolving world of digital marketing and entrepreneurship. Terms like “cornerstone content” and “audience-first.”
The one that has gotten the most recognition, though, is the minimum viable audience or MVA. It was attributed to me with a profile in the book The Lean Entrepreneur, and people like Seth Godin have adopted it as a term of art.
An MVA exists when:
You’re receiving enough feedback from comments, email replies, social media, and community forums to adapt and evolve your content to serve the audience better.
You’re also growing your audience organically thanks to various forms of online sharing by existing audience members and earned media.
You’re gaining enough insight into the audience’s needs to solve their problems or satisfy their desires beyond the free value you’re providing. In other words, you discover what they want to buy.
So how many subscribers make an MVA? Well, it’s not the total number of subscribers that counts. It’s the number of truly engaged people you have within the total number.
As a rule of thumb, 10,000 is the number that many digital entrepreneurs report as the threshold for an MVA. This subscriber count almost always leaves you with at least 1,000 true fans, a concept coined by Kevin Kelly that has become a core principle of the creator economy.
When you think about people who are giving you feedback, sharing and praising your work, and in the process are telling you their pain points, these people can truly be called fans. Again, it’s not the actual number that matters; there are plenty of soulless big lists that don’t ever engage people at the level of a true fan.
So your true job is to attract enough highly engaged people among your subscribers to get you over the hump. And your email list size can be smaller than you think — much lower than 10,000.
Let me give you an example.