the advantages of starting small (without a big audience) | ep 9

28 May

In this episode:

why there are advantages to having a small audience
why the early stages are so crucial to future growth

Freedom to experiment

For a lot of people, the struggle in the early stages of their business journey is the result of the difficulty of building a following or community. Without going into too much detail about why this is a dangerous mindset to have (I’ll save that for a future episode), instead of seeing your small audience as a negative or embarrassing thing, see it as the perfect opportunity to experiment creatively and to improve.

With less eyeballs on your work, you have the freedom to explore what you like. Unlike big creators and brands, who are expected to show up in a certain way and deliver to their audience to an extent, you don’t have to answer to anyone, except yourself.

Now is the time to publish that terrible first podcast episode or YouTube video, and then the next one, and then the next. Because with each one, you’ll learn and improve, and hone your skills and craft even more. Delight in the opportunity to be terrible at your first attempts, knowing that you will get better and better as your audience slowly grows. They will come when they’re ready. But let’s focus on you for now. Let’s focus our efforts on improving and growing so that by the time we do have an audience, we’ll be ready.

“Clarity comes from engagement, not thought.”

Marie Forleo

A lesson in patience and gratitude

From personal experience, my years of snail slow growth actually taught me incredibly valuable lessons. Not only do I value my customers so incredibly much (because I remember all too well what it was like without their support), but it strengthened my resolve. Without the external validation, I had to turn inwards to keep going. I got better at trusting my own voice when it came to creativity and had a strong belief in myself and my work. I relied more on myself and less on others - and that was an incredibly important lesson for me to learn, especially in the context of social media.

0:00
Hi and welcome back to (un)planned - I forgot the name of my podcast - (un)planned by Jysla. A podcast where I talk about business and life and everything in between. Hopefully these are little motivational pep talks - I really don't know what else to say about the podcast but I'm going to work on an intro. So this episode is all about the advantages of starting small. There are two key advantages that I want to talk about and if you feel like you're in the beginning of your journey and that you're really frustrated with your progress, this one's for you.
If you're watching me on YouTube and you see me looking over to my side, it's because I have my laptop here with my notes because I am not the type of person that can memorise everything and come up with ideas on the spot so I definitely do plan out these podcast episodes if you were curious.
1:06
But this episode is about when you're doing something for the first time, so if you're launching your Etsy store or just learning a new skill in general, it's really easy to get impatient with your progress - I have an episode about that - but also frustrated with your progress or your lack of progress. And I plan on recording a separate episode all about changing your mindset and your expectations when it comes to followers and likes and what I call, and what other people call, vanity metrics but in this episode in particular I want to talk about why there is, I believe, a real advantage to starting small and to not treat it as a negative thing to not have a big audience or much engagement when you're starting out.
So I'm drawing from my own personal experience here because I feel like in a lot of areas of my life it took a really long time, it feels like, to figure out what I liked and what would work for me and what I enjoyed doing. I like to say this all the time, I bring it up, my patrons know, I bring this up all the time, but I think it just helps give people more perspective and it doesn't hurt to hear it again because again we tend to forget someone's struggle before they've reached this period of success.
I don't know why I'm using air quotes but basically for the first two to three years of my business I was barely making any sales and that used to be so embarrassing for me to admit because I felt like you had to portray yourself as a successful business in order for people to like you but after a while, after making studio vlogs, I realised that there is a real positive to showing the hard sides of a business and that is definitely more in line with what I want my studio vlogs to be about. I love showing the nice, pretty sides of business but I also want to make it seem very real. I want to show the nitty-gritty, tedious work of everything that I do as well because it's important not to romanticise only the good parts but to really understand what running your own business is really like.
3:20
So for the first two to three years of my business when I first launched I didn't really have an official launch, I was just kind of lost and trying to figure things out just through constant trial and error, I was making barely any sales, maybe two orders over those years and I didn't launch my business and instantly get orders. That's not how it worked for me and I know there are some, it seems like there are some businesses or some creators that launch a business and they instantly get sales, and I'm just— I want to put it out there that not everyone— that's not the reality for everyone and it certainly wasn't the case for me.
I didn't have an existing customer base, I didn't really— I was starting from scratch. I really didn't have anyone I could market to and my brand was really new and I know that's something that can be really discouraging and I'm not going going to lie and say that it was it was all fine and it was all fun. In retrospect, I can really appreciate that time of my journey but in that moment, in that period I was struggling so bad but as I'll go into it proved to be a very valuable and important experience that has shaped who I am today and how I run my business.
So like I said, I very much started from scratch with no following. I didn't really promote it on any of my other existing social media channels. I really wanted to just start this business from scratch. In a way I think I was trying to prove it to myself that I could make it work without relying on anything (which is kind of self-sabotage we'll go into that in a future episode). But it was definitely really tough to continue working and to continue creating when it feels like nobody is seeing your work, nobody is engaging with your work, nobody is buying from you, but I really did stick with it for two to three years with barely any progress because I really believed in what I was doing.
5:21
I really loved it that really drove me and for a long time I was doing a lot of side hustles to try and keep my business afloat because running the website, creating products, buying supplies, all those things are really expensive but the first reason why I think starting small is a huge advantage and slow growth is because you have the freedom and the time to create and experiment with different things.
When I had barely any followers my precious 100 followers on instagram and my first 10 YouTube subscribers, I remember that so clearly, it was definitely nerve-racking to post something because it's the first time you're putting something out there in the universe for the world to see and it feels really nerve-wracking even though I've been creating content for years, this felt like a totally different game but really I can see it clearly now when I had like those 10 subscribers, those first 100 subscribers, I actually had so much freedom to figure out what I liked with the videos that I was creating.
I had so much creative freedom to experiment with different things because there was no set expectations yet and the more you create, the more of an audience that you build up those expectations they are self-imposed but they do start to increase a little bit. When you build up an audience, no matter how big or small, it can feel like there is a pressure to create or to show up in a certain way.
And this probably doesn't sound like a surprise at all and I'm sure you guys know of this that when creators get really big they feel like they're boxed into this certain type of content and they feel like creating any other type of content and veering away from that what they normally create is a big blow to their audience and they can lose people or they'll just get a really negative reaction so I think it's that fear of the loss of an audience or people not liking what you're doing that's what creates that pressure for creators with somewhat of an audience.
7:28
So in a way, starting out small starting out with 10, 20, 30 YouTube subscribers, less than 100, less than a thousand, you have that freedom to create for yourself to really figure out what you like and to take that time to try a whole bunch of different things until you're satisfied with the direction that you want to take.
When we start to become more aware that our work is being seen it can get harder to create freely or to try something new because then we start to feel a little bit more self-conscious about what we put out there but when you're first starting out without a big audience or a following without anyone really knowing what you do or who you are, you have the creative freedom to take the time to figure out what you like and not just what sells or does well.
So I'm still a relatively small creator and business I have 5000 on youtube which I think is a lot and I'm really proud of but in the grand scheme of things it is quite small but even with my 5000 followers, I feel like I'm expected to create a certain type of content, already with my 5000, and I can't even imagine what it's like for people with a few hundred thousand or a million, that feeling of them wanting to try something new but not really knowing how their audience will take it and it's it just feels like more of a risk.
8:52
It feels like there's less freedom to experiment with new things because you don't want to ruin something that's already working and yes if we go more into it, it is a psychological thing a mental obstacle but it is still a very real fear that a lot of creators have and I just want to kind of put a twist on it and to reframe your mindset and maybe put out a different perspective that like if you only have 10 subscribers on YouTube, 100 subscribers on YouTube, that is honestly the best time to be putting out a bunch of videos because your first one is almost guaranteed to be bad.
I feel like that's a universal truth that we all know but we still can't accept for ourselves for some reason. We know that the first time we try something, we're going to be terrible it's it's just a given and I think we should just accept it and not put so much pressure on ourselves and not judge ourselves so harshly for that first piece of content that we create.
We cannot judge our entire skill set or our value based on this first piece of content that we're trying to put out and for example, I'm going all over I'm ignoring my notes right now but for example, with these podcast episodes um this is the ninth one which is really not much at all it's it's still very, very early on in the journey for me and if you look at the numbers, these videos are not getting as much views as my studio vlogs are so if I was really focused on the views, again I'm not going to go too much into the vanity metrics but if I was really focused on how people are receiving it how people are engaging with it then it wouldn't seem like a good thing and that I shouldn't spend my time on it but because it's something that is really important to me, I really enjoy doing these, I feel like the things that I talk about need to be said, the things that I share I want people to know.
10:49
The reason for me doing these podcast episodes is more important than the views right now and like I said nine videos that is way too early to be judging myself like if I've made a hundred and I see zero growth then maybe that's a sign that I need to switch something up or try something different but when you're at the beginning of your journey, it is way too early to be judging how good you are — I said that weird how good you are — at something because you're you need to allow yourself to adjust to this new skill or to to just ride out this beginner wave this learning period the growing pains of it.
There are things that you need to learn in order to become better and honestly we are all bad at something the first time we try it. I'm sure that's not groundbreaking news to you that's not some sort of epiphany because I think we all know that that that's a universal truth.
If we haven't done something before, it's almost guaranteed to be terrible, that's just the nature of trying new things but the key is to not judge yourself in that moment or to be disappointed that you only got five views on that video. It was your first video and unless you give it a proper shot it is way too early to be judging yourself and the thing that keeps me going all the time is I know if something is really crap the first time I try it, I know I'm just going to get better at it and that just makes me more excited and that makes me more excited to keep churning out content because I know I'm just gonna learn something every time I do it — did that make sense — the more I do something I know I'm just gonna get these new tidbits of learning every single time.
So you really need to take a step back and not see this beginning part of your journey as something really discouraging because you're comparing yourself to creators who are at a totally different part of their journey you need to see this as your learning period. This is your your growing stage, you're going through the emotions of learning what you like.
This is an opportunity for you to really figure out what you like and what you want to do. My first studio vlog — don't watch it — was, it was really terrible actually but like I it's terrible in its own right and I don't regret it because the most important thing was that I did it and if I didn't start with that number one video, I wouldn't be here with I don't know what number I'm on a hundred and eight hundred and nine I'm gonna guess I'm on my 100th hundredth and 109th — what am I saying — video and that's just the way I see it.
13:35
I just I think where I was able to make progress was that I just assumed my first one my first attempt at anything was going to be crap but I never focused on trying to be perfect instantly, I always focus on just making a start, just start before you're ready, and then to just focus on improving slowly a little bit over time and if you watched me from the beginning — thank you I love you — you would know that my, maybe you forgot, that my videos now look totally different to what they looked like when I first started.
The content that I produce, the way I talk in the videos, the editing style, like everything is completely different but the key is that it would not have progressed as much if I didn't give myself permission to fail in the beginning and to use that beginning stage to just figure out what I liked. I try a lot of things even now I try different snippets of my week and I might think that it's a good idea in that moment and then watching it back I'm like, no I hate this I don't want to do it again.
So even now I'm still trying to figure out what I like and what I'd like to include in my studio vlogs. It's a constant journey but now I feel like there's a little bit more pressure, I can't be as free I mean I should be, but but just because I have a bit more of an audience now there's more of an audience if I fail at something and that's something I'm constantly pushing back against and that I should just ignore the followers and just create what I love.
For example, creating and posting the journal with me video for the first time on the channel that was pretty nerve-wracking because I thought people would hate it, people would see me differently, you know the classic negative self-talk and that felt like something really new that I hadn't done before, I mean it's not that different if you follow my instagram, it's all in line with what I do but it still felt scary. Much scarier than if I only had a hundred subscribers and I was posting a different video.
15:36
So I want you to see, basically all of this to say, I want you to see this beginning part of your journey as an experiment — what am I saying — as an opportunity to experiment and to create different things and to just try all of the things because that pressure isn't there. That pressure that you feel is just yourself.
You just need to overcome that fear of publishing for the first time but once you get the ball rolling and you start to get more consistent — consistency is so important, I think I need to do another podcast episode on that just that topic in general — but once you get the ball rolling once you get started once you allow yourself to just be bad and just to create for the love of it you will get better and you will have a better idea of what you like.
You cannot sit there and just think about the perfect ideal video and then execute on it. Well I mean, maybe you can but most of us, most of us learn through doing we won't know until we try something. There's a quote that I really love that I'm trying to remember. I'm really bad at remembering quotes like word for word, I don't know how people do it that's a real skill.
16:49
Clarity, I remember, clarity comes from engagement aka taking action not thought that quote comes from Marie Forleo and it's a really good quote because when I first heard that, it shifted something in me because as an overthinker and as a perfectionist and just a type A everything, I want to plan everything out to the tiniest detail before I take action but obviously that's bad because I spend more time thinking and deliberating and planning for the worst case scenario rather than just doing failing and learning from it.
So it comes through practice but it can definitely be done so don't think that it just comes naturally to me that I just post without fear because like I said I am a serious overthinker. I am really afraid of putting myself out there and it doesn't seem like it now because I have worked that muscle. I have kept working at it until it feels comfortable.
It's not something I really have to think about anymore, there's still definitely that tiny fear there — that's another podcast episode — but my point is, this applies to anything in life any sort of thing that you're trying for the first time, any sort of new skill that you're learning, rarely anything is perfect or even great the first time that you try it.
If you have learnt an instrument, you should know exactly what this is all about. If you have a small amount of subscribers and you're still worried about putting out videos let me tell you that that feeling gets worse and not better. Not to scare you but to encourage you to see it as the perfect practice opportunity to test out all of your ideas, no matter how bad they are, because less people are seeing it now as opposed to when your channel will grow so have a real think to yourself about what your fears are around your YouTube channel, if you have one, if you're trying to grow one or if you're struggling to be consistent. I mean it could be a time management thing but a lot of the time it's a mental obstacle, where we stop ourselves from posting because we're afraid of something.
19:05
These reasons are all very personal to us but I want you to reframe it as an opportunity to really try new things and really it's an experience that you can only have at the beginning of your journey, you can't have that experience again so it's really quiet, it's really quite a precious and once in a lifetime opportunity so don't get impatient about the fact that you're not progressing or that you don't want to create content because you don't have subscribers.
This is your playing ground, this is your chance and your opportunity to try a whole bunch of different things to figure out what you like because you don't have that pressure now of knowing what your audience likes and needing to cater to that — not that you need to but but what I'm trying to say now is that, this is your time to focus on you and to focus on your craft and to focus on what you enjoy.
This is your time to figure all of that out and that is a huge advantage because it doesn't matter how long it takes you, I mean it could take you a year to really build up an audience, it could take you two to three years like me but those two to three years as painful and as much of a struggle as it was it really taught me some really important lessons and the skills that I developed during that time were so crucial to what I do today whereas if I exploded overnight not to discredit anyone that has grown really quickly but that time that I had to learn about myself and what I like and my business plays a really big part in what I do today and I'm really thankful for that time, in retrospect, to figure things out.
So if you ever think that I have things figured out and things just came so easily to me, just remember I had a few years of nothing to figure things out so when I finally started to gain traction, I had these years behind me of of learning and experimentation to really hone in on my skills and my craft. It gave me the opportunity to figure out what direction I wanted to go in so I really took advantage of those years and I think you should as well.
21:20
Don't see it as a negative thing, don't see it as you being behind, again your journey is your own journey, you shouldn't be comparing with anyone else but use it as an opportunity because the advantages that you have at this stage of your business is unique to this stage of your business and you will encounter more problems as your audience grows. Those problems don't go away.
So the second advantage to starting small or to slow growth is that it teaches you to be more patient and grateful and I know in the moment that is not something that you want to hear because you get impatient, if you're anything like me, you get really impatient, but from my personal experience, I really really value those years of slow growth.
So I'm not saying that people who got popular or really successful quickly aren't patient or grateful but slow growth does give you a unique chance to see your business and your customers and your growth with a different perspective, from a different perspective, and when I get a sale or a message now I am ridiculously grateful and overjoyed because I remember very well and I remind myself all the time so that I don't forget, what it was like to not have that and I'm really big on the lack of something teaches you to appreciate it when you have it.
Not in every single situation but for example if I didn't have that slow start and if I started putting content out there and it gained a lot of traction really quickly, I might assume that that's normal and that's to be expected or that I'm special in some sort of way, which is definitely not the recipe for patience and gratitude but starting small and growing really slowly teaches you to be grateful for where you are in your journey and how far you've come already and to really make sure that you're doing this work because you love it, that you're doing it for the right reasons.
23:30
Because when you have plenty of time to work on your business with zero progress to really show for it, it really challenges you to think about why you're doing what you're doing, it really forces you to confront your reasons why you're doing something because the reality is business is really hard. Running a business by yourself, even micro businesses, is extremely hard and there's so much that goes on behind the scenes that if you don't love what you do and you're not doing it for the right reasons and it doesn't fulfill you then it makes it a lot harder to continue doing what you're doing and to get through the really tough moments in business every single day.
And I actually did a podcast episode on it episode 7 building a sustainable business that you love, but this moment of slow growth and slow progress really forces you to evaluate your business and to evaluate what you're doing because if you can stick through these really quiet moments of zero progress and to just focus on your craft and to focus on getting better at what you do then you know for sure that you're doing it because you love it not just for the sales and I know it seems like there are some businesses and creators that look like they exploded and they're doing really well and they just launched and are instantly successful but I guarantee that most of them or a good chunk of them went through periods of struggle and growth where they had to build up their audience from zero.
They had to put in the work in order to get to where they are today. So what you're comparing is where they are now after years of work or maybe one year of work but a lot of the times you don't see what goes on behind the scenes and what it took for them to get to where they are and we know this, we know these stories, we all know about it but it's so easy to forget when it comes to our own journey.
25:31
So we need to let go of any expectations that you deserve more followers or you deserve more sales and to bring the focus back to your work into why you're doing it and to why you love it because if we only focus on external validation as a reason why we should continue creating then that's not really the right reason to be continuing to create we need to bring that focus back we need to shift our perspective back towards why are we creating this thing.
So I feel like for those of us who have had really slow growth in our business, that period of struggle really teaches us to be patient and really encourages us to believe in ourselves and believe in our work even when we are getting crickets when we put our work out there and it really tests whether we love what we do regardless of whether people like it or not or how well it's received.
So if you really love what you do let yourself completely fall in love with the process in this journey that you're on and the sales and the followers will come later if you continue to work at it and be consistent and really believe in what you're doing. But use this time at the beginning of your journey, this really slow period, to focus on you and your craft and as a way to hone your skills and to get better at what you do.
26:58
It's the perfect opportunity to do that and it's just a chance for you to really connect with yourself to figure out if this is really what you want to do and if you're doing it for the right reasons and if you can weather all of these storms because like I said business is not all fun and games and roses the entire time that's rarely, that's rarely fun games, most of the time it is tedious and really hard and really discouraging but what gets us through those moments is really loving and believing in what you do.
So like I said with these podcast episodes that I'm doing, the first one was different to this one because the first one was short and I thought that I would want to do short episodes and then I realised it wasn't really working for me and I prefer this long form style of rambling because this is more in line with how I communicate and so I had to figure it out as I went along and it's still only my ninth episode and who knows in about five episodes this might look completely different as well the thumbnails have already changed so much and I even though it's not getting as many views as my studio vlogs, I'm using this time to work on my craft I'm using this time to figure out what I like about these episodes to figure out a way for me to be more consistent about it, to figure out a way to make it more sustainable so that I can keep doing it every single month and nine episodes is way too early for me to decide that these episodes aren't working or they are working.
So all I can do right now is ask myself do I enjoy this and do I really want to do it and is this the direction that I want to take my business, the answer is yes so I'm going to keep doing it and keep ignoring the views for now until I get to the point where I really have to take a step back and evaluate if this is working for me and if this is working for my business. So don't judge yourself so harshly in the beginning, give yourself some time to learn and to get better at things.
29:00
Give yourself permission to be bad because we are all terrible at the very first thing we try. Like my patreon, my patreon is completely different to when I first started but I when I first started recording podcasts for my patreon, I did not talk like this, I think I talked like this like really gentle and scared because I was terrified of talking into a microphone I wasn't used to having my voice as the center of attention and now, two years later, this is how I talk not even the way I talk but also the content that I say.
So learning to formulate sentences and to be able to talk like say I can't talk now but being able to communicate a full and proper sentence without a script is a skill that I'm still working on but the progress that I have made since I first started is ridiculous. I used to have so much notes for my workshops.
I used to have a full-on script for my workshop, I used to have to mentally prepare to talk on camera for studio vlogs and if I judged myself really harshly in the beginning I would say, talking on camera doesn't come naturally to me so I don't think I want to do it but I I focused on why I wanted to talk on camera and I feel like I communicate the best through talking and writing so it was a skill that I wanted to develop and yes I was pretty terrible in the beginning and I wasn't fully comfortable but I kept working at it because I believed, maybe naively, that I could get better because I felt inside of myself that this is something that I really want to develop and to really work on and I am living proof that you can start off as a terrible podcaster and get better with time and to get comfortable talking on camera.
It was extremely difficult for me and I'm still not perfect to look into the camera as I talk I cannot even explain how much I would just talk off to the side because I didn't want to look into the camera. It is such an odd sensation to stare into the lens of a camera but now I barely even think about it and I still look away, that was really long eye contact, I still look away from the camera every now and then because that's just my natural habit but I know in about a year from now I'll be even better at that.
31:27
So the point of this all is to embrace the early stages of your business. Do not expect a crazy amount of sales and engagements and followers straight away because that is not why you're doing what you're doing, I hope. I hope you're doing this because you love it so think of this as an opportunity to really figure out how you can best express yourself and what is most true to you.
What kind of content that you make and how you make it that is really true to you and what aligns with where you want to go. So my final words to you are this is what I'll leave you with: to create even when no one is watching especially when no one is watching is what I would say because your art and your work is about you and how you feel about it. Its value is not defined by the views or the followers or the likes. Those are vanity metrics.
Rupi Kaur, I hope I said that right, Rupi Kaur captures this sentiment beautifully in her poem one of my favourites from milk and honey so I'm going to read this out to you: your art is not about how many people like your work, your art is about if your heart likes your work, if your soul likes your work, it's about how honest you are with yourself and you must never trade honesty for relatability.
I love that poem and I hope that resonates with you.
Thank you so much for making it to the end of this podcast episode. I hope I was clear with my thoughts I feel like even if I write notes there's so much I want to say that I can never really capture it all but I hope this resonated with you somewhat if you're in the beginning of your journey and that you learn to reframe your perspective about feeling discouraged that you don't have much of an audience yet, to seeing it as an opportunity to really just work on yourself so that when your audience grows you've got this toolbox or backpack your bag of choice tools and skills and knowledge and learnings and everything you've accumulated throughout this slow growth period, I forgot my sentence, but you're equipped with everything that you need once your audience does eventually grow and it's just important to remember that it's a lifelong journey you're going to be bad when you first start out we were all bad there are some people that are great but we're not talking about them, the majority of us are terrible at things we do for the first time and that's okay, that's part of the learning process and you will get better the more that you do it. So just give yourself permission to be terrible.
Okay bye guys, thanks for listening.