How I'm building an online audience from scratch, month one in review
A transparent insight into building creative side-projects, growing an audience, earnings/losses and next steps.
One month ago today I made the decision to start experimenting with all of the creative projects I always wanted to build. I decided I would share my methods, learnings, and thoughts along the way and as a result I started writing this newsletter.
Part of my original idea was to have recurring check-in points throughout the year where I would give completely transparent updates on each of my projects and how they’re going. This article is the first of such updates! For each project I’m going to cover:
Audience size
Earnings/losses
Current status & next steps (will I keep going, stop, or change something?)
I’ll follow this one with a check-in at the 3 month point, unless you tell me you love this kind of content and want me to do this every single month. (Please also tell me if this is boring and I’ll stop them entirely.)
Active Projects
Writing a newsletter (Roads
Untaken)Starting a podcast (Not yet named)
Running a community (Online Coworking Community)
Founding a coaching business
1. Writing a newsletter (Roads Untaken)
Launched: August, 2023
Audience:
Substack Subscribers: 10
Instagram Followers: 19
Earnings: 0 €
I’m enjoying writing this newsletter a lot. It’s my happy place! It keeps me motivated and I love sharing my learnings and tips. Even if nobody was reading, I think I’d still be writing. As well as publishing weekly articles here, I’ve also started sharing snippets from this newsletter on Instagram just to broaden my reach.
Also, I want to say a huge thank you to all of you lovely people who have subscribed here and have been supportive and encouraging! Thank you!
Next steps:
I’ll continue doing my best to provide valuable content and posting an article every week. This keeps me in the habit of intentionally creating, and I enjoy using this space for thinking and sharing. I’d love to branch out into interviews and provide in-depth articles on particular topics that could be useful to other indie creators (like launching a book and selling it on Gumroad, or how to charge for small side-projects in Germany and deal with tax). If you have particular topics you’d like me to write about, please let me know in the comments.
Growing my audience isn’t my main goal but I do enjoy writing and sharing. I will keep re-sharing snippets of this newsletter on Instagram and I’m also considering to re-share snippets on Twitter/LinkedIn, but as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a huge social media user.
I recently found out about SteadyHQ. As a German company, it seems they may have better handling of earnings & taxes for German residents compared to Substack. Even though I’m not planning on earning with this newsletter, I’ll be looking into it. This will be useful if I allow people to pledge a small fee to support me or if I group this newsletter together with a podcast. It could make sense to have them both under one name and platform.
2. Starting a podcast (Not Yet Named)
Launched: TBD (it hasn’t!)
Earnings: 0 €
I would absolutely love to launch a podcast with a similar vibe and topic to this newsletter. I want to talk with inspiring creatives & entrepreneurs who have forged their own paths and found their way to a life doing what they love.
Next steps:
This podcast has quite a broad topic and vision. I’d like to refine this idea a little, come up with a name, a simple logo, and a short description. So far, trying to find a good name makes me feel like every single good name in existence is taken. If you have ideas or you’d like to help with any of this, please reach out.
I need to get some guests! I have a huge list of guests I’d love to interview. Based on conversations with friends, I suspect I should brace myself for many rejections. Getting guests without having any kind of reputation seems like the hardest challenge to overcome!
Based on the response from guests, I’ll start looking at equipment or rent a podcast studio for a few hours and record some episodes. My goal is to launch the pod by the end of this year.
3. Running a community (Online Coworking Community)
Launched: September, 2022
Audience:
Instagram Followers: 230
Discord Community Members: 15
Earnings: -94 € (Loss)
Last year, whilst travelling within Germany and working remotely, my partner and I were having a lot of conversations about remote work, online networking, coworking, and building something together that could have a positive impact as an online space.
We both love remote work, but it can be lonely. We decided to create a Discord server where people could meet other remote workers, online creators, and business owners. We also host live online coworking sessions where you can chat a little and then get some focused work done on your own projects (it’s easier to work when you’re being held accountable). As a bilingual couple we’re running this in German & English.
Admittedly we haven’t put as much time into this as we planned, however my partner has done a lot of amazing work to kick-off the German half of this community, including setting up a newsletter, inviting founding members, and launching a Discord server.
As far as earnings go, we have made an almost exact 100 € loss. As a community founded in Germany this is because we have a small legal fee setup (imprint) plus the cost of a Zoom license. We’ve now switched to Jitsi which makes running this community much cheaper. As with all of these projects, earning money has never been the goal, which I personally think is a great thing.
Next steps:
Within the next month we are launching our English membership, and we’ll also keep everything free for now. It’s fun to meet people and grow the community. Of course, running this project does take time, energy, and effort - so maybe we’ll change it up in the future and offer paid plans if we put more energy into this project.
4. Founding a coaching business
I love coaching and mentoring people and I can see myself offering paid coaching sessions for at least some hours of my week. Whilst I already actively coach and mentor people every week at my 9-5 as a manager in tech, I would like to deepen my knowledge of coaching and gain a qualification before I go further down this path.
Next steps:
I’ve just started a foundational coaching course this month, which leads directly into accreditation through the ICF (International Coaching Federation) if I decide to continue!
I often find myself mentoring and coaching people who are interested in becoming a manager or levelling up their management skills, so this is a potential niche for me. As I love writing, I’m also considering to start a blog where I share management tips & resources which help to demystify management (especially in the tech industry).
Inactive Projects
YouTube & Photography content
I love the idea of making educational or entertaining content of some kind for YouTube, but as you can see, there’s already a lot going on. For that reason I’m dumping this into the “inactive” category. Whenever I start my podcast I will definitely film each episode, as having video makes it easier to slice up clips and share them across platforms. Some people may also prefer having a visual element rather than just listening.
Other than this, starting a photography-based YouTube account was one of my first side-projects last year which I was super motivated to start and then changed my mind. I will still keep sharing my photography on Instagram and Vero (I’ve been quite inactive lately). I do truly love photography and related photo-content, but it’s a purely creative & fun hobby, nothing I am trying to take “seriously”.
Wrap-up
As you can see, I don’t make any money with any of my side-projects (I actually lose money). However, I do get a lot of value out of them and money was not the motivation to start any of them. The motivation for my newsletter is to write, share, and reflect. The motivation for my podcast is to chat with inspiring people. The community is there to meet cool people. Coaching is because I genuinely love helping people become the best version of themselves and think through hard challenges.
In terms of financial goals, earning through these projects would give me more freedom and “income diversification”, but it remains a nice to have.
I am sure that along the way I will completely change or even quit some of these side-projects, but that’s the joy of it all, I’m learning a lot about a huge range of topics just by experimenting. For that reason, writing this article has been incredibly motivating for me. I can see that all of these things help me to play my infinite game and move me closer to a life where I spend my time learning interesting things and teaching and helping others.
To leave this weeks article with a call to action: please let me know what you think of this kind of “update post”! Interesting? Boring? TMI? If there’s a particular topic you really want me to dive into, let me know.
Otherwise, I’ll see you next week.
-Mike.
✍️ Quote of the week
Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naïveté.
🏆 Highlights around the web this week
📚 Article: The source of this weeks quote popped up in my weekly Readwise highlights - a lovely essay by Maria Popova: “Hope, Cynicism, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves”
📱 App: Speaking of Readwise, I just started using it and so far this seems like a great way to resurface all of my highlights from my Kindle and elsewhere on the web. I am also now using the Reader app to subscribe to RSS feeds, and any highlights I make using Reader also sync into Readwise.
🍿 Video: “I memorized 3,000 digits of pi in 30 days” - another banger from Answer in Progress. A mini-documentary on memory, how to improve it, and “accidentally” learning 3k digits of pi in the process. I love the idea that all we need to do to remember our lives better is to focus on small, meaningful details.