Single Person Audiences

Single person audiences

I ran an experiment with my video this week.

I wanted to make content about Sunday. It’s an innovative creative agency meets venture studio that helps companies (e.g., Last Crumb, Friday Beers, Brazzers, etc.) launch high quality apparel brands. They also create their own apparel brands (e.g., Bloody Sunday).

Sunday’s founder is Jesse Sebastiani, one of the founding members of the Nelk Boys.

In the past, my thought process to make this video would have been something like, “What can I make that will appeal to lots of people that like apparel/brand building?”

In other words, take a subject, guess who the audience might be that also likes that subject, and design the content for the widest possible cut of that audience.

This time, I tried the opposite.

What if I didn’t try to make the video for the widest cut of people? What if instead, I made it for one…Jesse himself.

What can I make that will compel Jesse to watch and share my video?

A single person audience.

If I could produce something that was so compelling the founder himself would appreciate it, surely that video would have value for others like him.

And it worked.

Jesse saw my video, reposted it, and the video naturally began to find the target audience. 1M+ views.

The reason I like this framing is because it forces you down a quality path. Rather than try to make content that games an algorithm and baits thousands of people to take an action, you intentionally approach the problem with a completely different lens.

Even if your single person audience doesn’t take the intended action (e.g., see and share), the act of designing the content for them will change the way you tell the story.

— — — — — — — — — — — — —

If you enjoyed this post and want more like it, you should subscribe to me weekly creator journal, Blueprint. Each week, I share metrics, ideas, frameworks, and experiments designed to supercharge your thinking about content & brand building in the modern age.