>> [getting a quality audience of thousands of people is non-trivial, costs money, or needs a clever strategy]
>That hasn't been my experience...
It's kind of begging to differ with...yourself? There are some contradictions here.
You say you did it in part by writing books, yet typically writing books is considered non-trivial. If these books are trivial to write that doesn't make them bad. However, it could give the impression that on average writing a book is easy. Special cases withstanding, it is not easy.
>I just put a ton of effort into writing things
Putting in "tons of effort" is also generally not considered trivial. I guess you meant it required trivial skills, rather than a trivial amount of time. Great. However it still conflicts with your thesis because it means some part of this approach is not trivial, and these clarifications matter when the phrase tons of effort is used.
My point is, it can be very hard to build communities from scratch. Many people just can't do it, or can do it only after building the skillset over years of practice. Most pros avoid starting from scratch whenever possible, many accelerate the process through investment.
It sounds like you've managed to overcome a lot of obstacles with gumption, hard work, and some good intuition about the process. That's a nice accomplishment.
However for the purposes of those considering taking on the task, it's worth noting I can't see how it refutes anything I've said. I'm glad you were successful, and it seems you may have a knack for it. For others, I think it's useful to take care to not underestimate it.
Sorry, I guess I glossed over the "non-trivial" part on first read.
I certainly have put a lot of effort into this, but all of that effort went into the thing itself that the audience was consuming. It's not like I wanted an audience for X and then had to put non-trivial effort into Y. By analogy, bands makes much of their money from selling T-shirts, which is effort unrelated to making the music that people want to listen to.
I didn't spend a lot of time making T-shirts. I just made the best music I could and it turned out in my case to be sufficient.
>That hasn't been my experience...
It's kind of begging to differ with...yourself? There are some contradictions here.
You say you did it in part by writing books, yet typically writing books is considered non-trivial. If these books are trivial to write that doesn't make them bad. However, it could give the impression that on average writing a book is easy. Special cases withstanding, it is not easy.
>I just put a ton of effort into writing things
Putting in "tons of effort" is also generally not considered trivial. I guess you meant it required trivial skills, rather than a trivial amount of time. Great. However it still conflicts with your thesis because it means some part of this approach is not trivial, and these clarifications matter when the phrase tons of effort is used.
My point is, it can be very hard to build communities from scratch. Many people just can't do it, or can do it only after building the skillset over years of practice. Most pros avoid starting from scratch whenever possible, many accelerate the process through investment.
It sounds like you've managed to overcome a lot of obstacles with gumption, hard work, and some good intuition about the process. That's a nice accomplishment.
However for the purposes of those considering taking on the task, it's worth noting I can't see how it refutes anything I've said. I'm glad you were successful, and it seems you may have a knack for it. For others, I think it's useful to take care to not underestimate it.