If you ever want to be a creator, open this
What "growth" really means and the power of "nuance"
When I pushed out the first newsletter, I had 52 subscribers. Thank you for the 29 new ones for joining in. If you’re here you’re really special to me. Either because I directly sent you the link to subscribe or you actually care about what I write.
No matter what the metric, my vision for this newsletter is an exclusive community of people who actually care about “nuance” and putting back the real “creative” in creator.
Growth on social media or personal branding for most people is default. Nobody really stops to wonder why do you want to grow.
If I ask my 19 year old self who was pushing out photo after photo on Instagram, churning out content after content to please the linkedin algorithm, the only plausible answer I get is “fame”.
I never really thought about fame but that’s for another day. After coming on twitter and not caring much about growth, I understood the true essence of this game.
Most people are doing it wrong because their default motivation is the outcome, not the “care”. And care is only possible with “nuance”. Let me explain this…
So, the thing is we work in patterns. It’s very easy to gain distribution, extremely tough to gain stickiness.
Distribution is a product of trends, and hacks and timing. Trying to distribute well isn’t the problem. Only focusing on distribution is.
What’s nuance?
Definition: a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound
Nuance is what brings stickiness.
Nuance is what makes people come back to you.
Nuance is what makes people go beyond what the algorthm suggests and find you from somewhere.
And finally nuance is what builds your brand.
Now you can have a lot of counter opinions on this since many creators who lack nuance have done extremely well. Or according to me have distributed themselves extremely well.
Well, that’s because consumers demand “nuance” less. We don’t ask for more out of our creators. We still want to see their repetitive “unpopular opinions” which are extremely popular and put that way to get a ton of retweets based on relatablity.
But once someone is exposed to non mediocre content, they can’t look back at those things again.
They start finding them irritating. That is why a lot of people who consume twitter threads can’t go back to instagram and find any “value” in their “infotainment reels”.
In this default chase for growth, creators forget something. And this is something I learnt while studying Dunzo’s model. I wasn’t able to understand why Dunzo didn’t zoom like Zepto across cities. I mean they had the model ready years ago.
The reason was simple: they wanted to increase the density of their distribution inside a particular city which would help them give a better service, strenghten their relationship with their customers and improve loyalty.
Increase the density of your connect with people who actually care about you!
As much as growth is about going from 26.7k to 30k (which I really want to help me lol) it’s also about increasing the density of the connect with the existing 26.7k. Not for increasing engagement, or for making them care more to buy your course, but for the simple reason of just “care”.
The more you care for them, the more they’ll care about you.
Otherwise, what do you think is my motivation to write this newsletter on a Sunday night for 81 people to read when I could have posted a thread, muscled it up with a creative and strong hook and made it go viral.
Because it’s all about “exclusivity”. Not all your content needs to feed your distribution and increase it. Your content also needs to be for the ones who are already there and give them something new, something tasteful to devour.
So, I don’t promise (because such thoughts don’t have a schedule) but I’ll try and post more such exclusive pieces here, just for you guys and girls to read, not for anyone else outside this community.
That’s it for today. Hit me up in the comments if you want to discuss this in detail.
Share it with your exclusive bunch of people who you actually think can get some value out of it:
This is my first Aryan’s Newsletter. Tbh it was a great read.
Hell lot of people are stepping into the content creation space, but a majority of them are just riding on a trend. For eg. There were many youtubers posting videos meeting random people on omegle and doing what not (they were at their peak only for a short span of time until the trend lasts).
They are not here to serve for an exclusive community (niche). This will give long term, consistent results (but not guarantying fame).
Even Zerodha started for niche group of people(traders) who were annoyed by high brokerage fees(like the Kamath brothers).
Wow such a great perspective. I actually am starting my content creation journey soon, although i have some pressure but i just want to enjoy the process. I have asked for a year's time so atleast for an year doesn't matter if the growth happens or not atleast no-one will be on my head all the time and i'll enjoy the process and hopefully learn a lot of things.
Kinda looking to revamp my whole life, from small to big details.
Thanxxx for this Newsletter.