In January 2006, I launched a blog with the tagline “How to sell with blogs.” Within weeks, prominent bloggers were calling me pond scum.
Publicly. By name. With genuine contempt.
And here’s the part most people don’t believe: that was the plan.
I knew that tagline would offend the old guard of blogging, the purists who believed commerce was a stain on the internet’s pristine idealism. I knew they’d come after me. What I didn’t know, what I was betting my entire future on, was that the right people would notice the fight and pick my side.
They did. Commercially-minded bloggers were hungry for pragmatic advice about making a living online. The attacks from the establishment were the best marketing I never paid for.
That bet could have failed. It was terrifying. But it taught me the single most important lesson about building an audience:
Leadership isn’t about genius. It’s about courage.
The courage to be disliked
You need the courage to alienate the wrong people in order to resonate with the right ones. You need the conviction to stand behind your knowledge when people tell you you’re wrong, not because you’re arrogant, but because you’ve done the work and they haven’t.
Content by consensus is a recipe for beige. A smooth, inoffensive paste that satisfies no one deeply enough to matter.
Think about it: if your audience is more qualified on your topic than you are, why should they listen to you? Your edge isn’t omniscience. It’s perspective, a point of view shaped by experience, research, and the willingness to say what others won’t.
The feedback paradox
None of this means you should ignore feedback. From day one, I’ve used reader responses to shape the direction of my projects. Some of the best decisions I’ve made came from emails that started with “You’re wrong about…”
But here’s the discipline: all feedback contains a lesson, and the lesson is almost never what the person giving the feedback thinks it is.
Someone says “you’re wrong” and they mean “I disagree.” But the actual lesson might be: your framing revealed an assumption you didn’t know you had. Or: you’ve identified a segment of your audience that will never be yours, which is valuable data. Or simply: you’ve hit a nerve, which means you’ve said something worth saying.
The lesson is in the signal, not the packaging.
The watering-down cycle
Here’s what I see, week after week, from smart, talented content creators:
They publish something bold. Someone on social media misinterprets it, or understands it perfectly and just doesn’t like it. The comments get harsh. The creator backs down. Apologizes. Qualifies. Softens.
Next time, they self-censor before publishing. The ideas get a little safer. The edges get a little rounder. The writing gets a little more “nuanced”, which is a fancy word for “hollow.”
And eventually? No one’s reading. Not because the creator was wrong, but because they became unremarkable. They traded their spine for a wider net, and ended up catching nobody.
The fact is, if no one hates you, you’re doing something wrong. Mass media used to try to please everyone, and even they pick sides now.
You already know this
Some of you are thinking: “That’s easy for you to say. You already have an audience.”
Fair point. But here’s what I want you to understand: I built that audience by being willing to be wrong in public, by being willing to be attacked, by being willing to stand in the fire before there was anyone standing beside me.
The courage doesn’t come after the audience. The audience comes after the courage.
So the next time you’re about to publish something and you feel that tightness in your chest, that little voice saying “maybe soften this, maybe hedge that, maybe someone won’t like it”, ask yourself:
Would the person I’m trying to reach prefer a writer who plays it safe, or a writer who tells them the truth?
You know the answer. Now write like it.