Building trust before building scale
Launch library · evergreen read
It is tempting to chase rapid growth from the very beginning, but trust built slowly with a smaller audience tends to hold up far better under the pressure of later scale than growth achieved without any real underlying substance behind it, a small shift that adds up over a long career.
An audience that trusts a creator deeply will forgive occasional missteps and stay engaged through quieter periods, while a large audience with only a shallow connection can evaporate quickly the moment attention shifts elsewhere to something newer, which is truer the longer you keep at it, especially once an audience starts to take shape.
Treat trust as the genuine foundation of everything else a creator hopes to build, from community to income, since scale achieved on top of real trust tends to be considerably more resilient than scale chased for its own sake alone, particularly when the workload starts to pile up, even on days when motivation runs low.