For the last 9 days I have the same 7 tabs open in Safari. Three are posts by substack writers who serve the exact same audience that I do. Two are paid offers pages those writers are using. And the remaining two are comment sections under the highest performing posts in my niche.
And those tabs aren’t open because I am procrastinating! Well… maybe a little. But mostly because I didn’t have a better way to use my learnings.
Until now of course!
When It Got Serious
I started Table for One with a unambitious mindset.
I had just shut down my startup and I came out of it with almost two years of expensive mistakes and nowhere to put them.
So I wasn’t trying to build a personal brand. I wasn’t trying to build a community. And I certainly had no ambitions for a newsletter.
But somewhere in the last couple weeks that changed. In this time, I have spoken to 23 founders! Helped a few of them with networking. A few with ideas. And every single one of them had something nice to say about Table for One.
So, I started taking this seriously. Seriously enough to study people, other writers and community builders, who are better at this than I am.
A few things I learned:
The audience you think you are writing for and the one that actually engages with your content can be different
Same information presented in different manner can get different levels of attention
Comment sections of your competitors is a goldmine for article topics
But the work I had to do to get the information was insane!
Which is when I found out that there are better ways to do this thing. Cause studying others is a full-time job that I do not have time for.
Hey there! Subscribe to Table for One!
What This Task Gets You
This task that is a combination of 6 skills answers one question deeply: Are the people who show up, the people you write for?
It reads your subscriber list, your inbox, your comments, 3-4 publications in your niche, and their comments. It hands you a deep analysis of who is in your room, the questions they ask, what is winning in your niche, and the questions nobody has answered.
And this is one of the 7 tasks that I have built for Substack!
How It Helped Me
I have three audience segments that I write for but a week of running this task told me how wrong I was.
The Wrong Segment
I write a piece for founders with MVP but the ones who are still building react the most. When I write about go-to-market, I am expecting a founder who has already built something to be interested in this. But instead I have people who are still building react to it more.
One Step Earlier
Most of the people who subscribe to me are people who are still building their MVP. And there is a lot I could write about that topic. But I haven’t written about it because I was aiming for a founder who had an MVP and was chasing their first customers. But now that I know who my dominant readers are, I can add some of the topics that can interest them while trying to chase my ideal reader.
Peers, Not Readers
My second segment of power readers are people writing for the same audience I am. Which makes them potential collaborators and partners, which is a genuinely good thing to have.
Steal It!
If you want to build this yourself, I have linked a step-by-step prompt instructions. It won’t create exactly what I have but it will get you 95% there.
If you would rather just use what I have built (cause trust me it is good!), the link to download is below. It will ask you questions before starting anything and can work with any LLM.
