Warm and mighty: why a small audience beats a big one

Nearly everyone who comes to me thinks they’ve got an audience problem. Not enough followers, not enough people. They believe it so completely they don’t even notice it’s a belief.

So let me show you my numbers first, and then tell you what I think is actually going on.

My numbers, including the unflattering ones

Between January and the end of May 2026, my YouTube channel had fewer than 1,000 subscribers the whole time. I started January on 354 and finished May on 733.

I’m giving you both money figures, because a signed deal isn’t money in your account yet, and I’d rather you trusted the smaller number.

That’s not a lot over nearly five months, is it? But it is if you consider it’s less than 1,000 YouTube subscribers.

Both halves of that are true. It’s not a massive number. For the size of the room, it’s a really good one.

Even smaller: eleven people

My podcast had been on Spotify for a year or two and I’d basically ignored it. Episodes went up unedited. Then Spotify Wrapped told me I was in the top five shows for eleven people.

Eleven! That’s one football team, as long as nobody’s off sick. But eleven people chose to spend hours of their life listening to me think out loud, and I’d make it for eleven people again tomorrow.

What your follower count hides

Organic reach is so much lower than anyone admits.

So 1,000 followers is about 20 people seeing your post. A handful of those do anything with it. And a decent chunk of that handful is your mum and two people you know from the school gate.

Your follower count is a list of people who once pressed a button. Whether any of them would notice if you vanished is a whole other question.

Warmth is the number that matters

I really dislike the phrase “cold to sold”. It makes people sound like a chicken you’re defrosting for Sunday lunch. The idea underneath it is right though, so here it is in human words.

• Cold: I don’t know you, so I don’t trust you. I might know I’ve got a problem. I’ve got no idea you can fix it.
• Warm: I’ve heard you think. I know what you care about, and roughly what you do.
• Hot: I’ve been around you a while, I like you, and honestly I’m sat here waiting for you to sell me something.

Here’s the maths I use. Say you’ve got 1,000 people and a £1,000 offer. If they’re cold and you convert 0.6% of them, that’s £6,000. If those exact same people are hot, it’s more like £100,000.

Same people. Same offer. The only thing that moved is whether they already knew you. Which is why 1,000 warm people and 1,000 cold people are basically two separate businesses, and only one of them pays the mortgage.

I’ve seen it work at the other end too

This isn’t a one-off. Back in 2020 I built a business community from scratch. Within the first year of launching it, we’d done six figures in sales that came directly from that community. It had 550 people in it.

I’ll be straight with you. That was a while ago, and it was a different business with a different name, so I’m not pretending it’s this year’s figure. Take it as proof the idea works. But 550 people. Six figures. I’ve watched this work at both ends, and the small end is the one nobody believes.

And it kept working. I made my first half a million pounds in sales from fewer than 2,000 people on my email list. Two thousand. That’s a small list. I go through exactly why that works on the cold to sold page, slider and all.

So why does everyone chase followers?

Because finding new people feels safer than asking the ones you’ve already got.

I’m not saying that to be mean, and I do it too. Posting into the void means no specific human can say no to you. Messaging the woman who’s commented on your last six posts to ask if she’d like to work with you? Terrifying. So we pick the one that feels like work but can’t reject us, and we call it growth.

I once asked someone in the networking world whether she had an email list. She opened a drawer and showed me roughly 600 business cards. Six hundred people she’d met, chatted to, and then shut in a drawer.

Six hundred warm-ish people, living in a drawer.

The people who already know you are the cheapest opportunity you’ve got, and the one you’re least likely to use:

• Old clients. The easiest people in the world to sell to, and we just... don’t.
• People who’ve bought something small from you. They’ve already proved they’ll hand you money, which makes them the warmest people on your whole list.
• Anyone who replies to your emails.

What warm and mighty actually means

It means picking a few hundred of the right people and getting properly known by them. Your job each week becomes warming people up. And you need something that does that every single week, because crossing your fingers is not a plan. That’s the whole case for a weekly live show, and it’s why my week is built around one.

You don’t need millions of people vaguely aware you exist. You need the right people to know you well enough that your name means something to them.

That’s a much smaller job than the one you thought you had. It’s harder in one way, because you have to turn up and be a person. But it’s smaller. You can actually do it with one pair of hands.