504. So, you want to start your own business ... 🤠
Here's where to begin
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
Before I start my usual newsletter ramble, I wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who shared feedback on the content they’d like to see in this newsletter. Based on this feedback, you can expect to see more newsletter posts that go behind-the-scenes of running your own business as well as more playbooks for in-house marketers and creatives, some of which will be distributed in the free newsletter posts and the rest of which will be available in a Notion space that you get access to with a paid subscription, starting at $7/month or $70/year.
The starting point for starting your own business
When I was just a few months into my first real tech job at Buffer, I met a teammate who was in the midst of writing a new blog post every single day for an entire year.
I was in awe. Never had I encountered such a bonkers blend of discipline and audacity, grit and creativity — the goal of completing 365 straight days of blogging (which he accomplished, btw!) was almost less interesting to me than the journey itself, which I found fascinating and, given my then-default state of goal orientation, intoxicating.
I couldn’t help but think …
How different might my life look if I committed to something and did it consistently for a whole year.
Shortly after, I gave it a go. I embarked on a less demanding but equally lengthy challenge to send a newsletter every week for an entire year.
Eight years later, I am still sending weekly newsletters. 😅
Of course, my newsletter habit is more complex than simply an addiction to publishing something every week. I write as a creative outlet, as a way to give back some of what I’ve learned over the years, as a way to build and keep connections to people. Early on, I wrote because I was convinced I would be found out as a startup impostor and would be fired and would need to have something to fall back on. (More on that in a future newsletter, if you want.)
But the newsletter accomplished something that I didn’t anticipate: It built an audience, which therefore made building a business a little less nerve-wracking.
If you want to start your own business …
You don’t need to start a newsletter.
Unless newsletters are your thing!
If you want to start your own business, you simply start by building an audience.
This can be an audience of subscribers on a newsletter, sure. But it could also be an audience on LinkedIn or on TikTok or on Threads. It could be an audience of podcast listeners or blog visitors. It could be Kickstarter pledges or Gumroad followers. There are many, many online platforms where you can build this audience.
My Bonfire co-founder,
, and I talk about this audience-building strategy a lot. There is a LOT to do when starting a new business, a lot of shiny objects, but when we check ourselves and think about what will truly allow us to be flexible and in control of our business future, we always come back to audience. Start with an audience, turn it into a community, and you’ve got an incredible foundation to build from.How many people do you need? 1,000 or so.
You may be familiar with the concept of True Fans. Writer Kevin Kelly popularized the idea, claiming that all you really need to build your business is 1,000 people on your side.
To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.
I’ve worked with early-stage businesses that use this True Fans concept to determine when they’ve achieved product-market fit or when they’re ready to charge for their software. It can certainly work for us non-startup founders, too.
In fact, I’d argue that you can get away with far fewer True Fans these days if you’re looking to launch a business with a high revenue-per-customers. If you’re selling on Etsy, sure you might want 1,000 people on your side. But if you’re going out on your own to run a consulting agency? You just need enough people to introduce you to a handful of quality clients.
So, how do you build this audience?
There are a lot of helpful principles about personal branding that I’ve heard over the years, but more or less, I think that audience-building comes down to these things.
Find out what you value most. A purpose and values exercise can be super valuable to make sure that you’re doing audience-building work toward a goal that you truly believe in.
Pick a narrative that you feel qualified (and excited) to talk about. In our business, Bonfire, we do workshops with businesses to help develop these narratives, and a lot of the principles hold true for personal audience-building and brand-building as well. A helpful starter question: What is something you believe but no one else does?
Pick a channel — one channel! — that you actually like. It’s so much easier if you are building your audience somewhere online where you don’t actually mind hanging out. I was more comfortable on email than on social a few years ago, hence my newsletter.
Be consistent. You don’t have to post daily or even monthly, but you want to carve out a certain cadence in people’s minds so that they are excited to hear from you — whether that’s a calendar cadence or a topic cadence (for instance, they know they’ll always hear from you when X happens)
Be yourself. Talk in your normal voice, and say real things that you believe.
Let me know how I can help!
If you’re serious about starting your own thing this year, let me know. I’d love to cheer you on and to help however I can.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share behind-the-scenes stories from building Bonfire, as well as my real-life playbooks for in-house marketers and creatives. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
Thank you for being here! 🙇♂️
I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.
