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Grow Your Business With Audience AND Community

The Two-Pronged Approach to Scaling Your Business

Lee Drozak
Startup Stash
3 min readJun 20, 2024

photo of a beautiful influencer whole body, standing out in a crowd, to show its uniqueness and to standout
Image generated with AI by the author using Midjourney

If you’re starting or growing a business, the advice is always the same: build an audience. Need to sell a product? Audience first. Launching a newsletter? Get subscribers. Writing on Medium? Rack up those readers.

But is an audience really what you want? What if you aimed for something deeper — a community?

Building an audience and building a community are two distinct approaches with different goals, methods, and outcomes.

Building an audience

When building an audience, the primary goal is to gather followers or readers to consume your content. We are told to create something valuable and then use tactics to reach them.

It’s a numbers game.

Communication is mostly a one-way street — you to your audience. And success is measured by followers, likes, shares, views, reads.

Building an audience makes sense for the following:

  • Getting subscribers for your YouTube channel for ad payments.
  • Traffic to your website to gain sponsors and partners.

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Published in Startup Stash

We share entrepreneurial stories, insights, and ideas in order to help your startup grow

Written by Lee Drozak

They say life begins at 40, but I’m proof it gets even better at 60—because thriving doesn’t have an age limit, and neither does dreaming big.

Responses (5)

What are your thoughts?

Absolutely,
Building an audience is crucial for a strong online presence and a foundation to launch your business.
Beyond the vanity metrics such as the number of followers, it's also about creating a community with shared values that trust and value…

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and forums (community building)

what are your favorite places for that these days?

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100% agree! On any platform its vital to have a relationship with your viewer/ readers.
I take this approach with engagement over publishing. At first building this community/audience is essential for your content to not only get recognition but to…

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