The Digital Contrarian

TDC 047: Who Are You Really Building For? The 100,000, The 100, or "The One?"

• Ryan Levesque • Episode 47

Share episode

#047: Who Are You Really Building For: The 100,000, The 100, or The One?

Are you diluting your message by trying to please everyone instead of focusing on your ideal customer?

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Digital Contrarian, host Ryan Levesque explores the strategic dilemma of who entrepreneurs should truly optimize their business for.

You'll learn why chasing scale often leads to diluted messaging, how focusing on "The One" ideal customer creates authentic resonance, and discover why bestselling authors write for specific real people rather than abstract audiences.

Question of the Day 🗣️

Who is the one person in your business or life that you're truly building for?

Key Take-aways

  • When you optimize for scale (the 100,000), you often end up building for the lowest common denominator.
  • The 100 who engage most frequently may not represent your ideal customer who drives your business forward.
  • Building for "The One" real person creates clarity, focus, and paradoxically helps you reach more people.
  • The best books and businesses are designed for specific individuals, not abstract customer avatars.

Timestamped Outline ⏱️

00:00 – The scale trap: Optimizing for the wrong audience
00:37 – An inbox overflowing with thoughtful replies
01:48 – The tension: Scale vs. depth in business
02:19 – Three audience options: 100,000, 100, or The One
03:49 – Who is "The One" in my business?
04:32 – The danger of optimizing for algorithms
06:32 – Centering your business around The One
07:51 – How focusing on depth helps you reach more people
09:10 – A call to reflection: Who is your One?

Links & Resources 🔗

Next Steps & Subscribe 🚀

👉 Enjoyed this? Subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

🎁 Join 100,000+ digital entrepreneurs who get Ryan's "Strategic Insights for Digital Entrepreneurs Who Think Differently" every weekend:
https://ryanlevesque.net/join-the-digital-contrarian/

Credits

Host: Ryan Levesque
© 2025 RL & Associates LLC. All rights reserved.

When you optimize for scale, you often end up building for the lowest common denominator. The 100, the 100,000, and the 1. We're coming off of 10 straight days of rain here on the farm, and I'm not talking about a soft drizzle. I'm talking about the kind of relentless spring rain that turns gravel roads into mud.

It seeps through your muck boots and it saturates everything. So Mother's Day weekend has been all boots and puddles, and it's been the backdrop for a week of reflection here. And it's fitting really, because this week brought with it a different kind of downpour in my life.

I received an inbox overflowing with thoughtful replies to last weekend's newsletter of the Digital Contrarian, issue number 46, Brace for Impact, three converging forces that are reshaping our world as we know it. And I'll make sure that we link to the newsletter in the description with this video. But I spent most of the day on Friday and Saturday personally replying to more than 100 emails from readers.

Now, this is time that I typically allocate to writing my weekly newsletter. But these were very thoughtful notes filled with deep questions and personal reflections, and I wanted to take the time to personally reply. Now, some of my responses took five minutes, others took 10 minutes or more.

And while I know you might be saying, Ryan, this is what AI is for, I can tell you that I received more than one reply that was clearly written with the assistance of AI from multiple readers. And those replies were blindingly obvious and far less impactful than ones that were personally written. And because I believe a human reply deserves a human reply, these emails took time.

But by Friday afternoon, I realized I was six hours in, barely halfway through the stack. And that's when I hit a familiar tension. Do I keep going, writing back one by one by one to the 100 who leaned in? Or do I pull back? Do I conserve my energy and refocus on the bigger picture, on the 100,000 who quietly read that week's issue, but who didn't reply? And that's a question I've been sitting with more broadly.

How do we balance the pull of the few, the scale of the many, and the clarity of the one? And that's what our focus is here today. And I want to begin with a dilemma that every entrepreneur faces. Now, the question that I was running to in my business isn't unique. 

I get that. Every entrepreneur I know personally feels some version of this tension in some form. How much do you focus on the proverbial 100 who are hyper-engaged? What about the 100,000 who are watching silently from the sidelines? Or do you just orient everything toward the one? Your perfect reader, your perfect customer, your perfect client, and let that clarity shape every strategic decision that you make in your marketing, in your messaging, and in your business.

Now, the temptation, of course, is to chase scale. Bigger reach, more eyeballs, growth at all costs. But the reward is often shallow.

Growth without connection, volume without depth, numbers without intimacy, and often without commensurate revenue to match. Then there's the pull of the 100, the ones who show up, the ones who write back, the ones who ask good questions, who tell you how your work is impacting them. These people matter deeply.

But if you begin designing your business for them, you risk drifting from your core. Because sometimes members of this group are in the category of having more time than money, and they may not represent the type of buyer that you want to optimize for. Well, that's where the one comes in.

The one who you're really creating for. Now, in my case, the one looks a lot like my private advisory client, whom I'll call Jim. Not his real name, by the way.

Now, Jim has already built a successful business. Doesn't need more hacks or tactics. Instead, he's focused on strategy, clarity, and purpose.

Ready to step into a different season of life and business. He's looking for one that's defined more by meaning and alignment. Now, the challenge, of course, is knowing how much energy to give each group.

Because you can't give 100% of yourself to all three, and nor should you. But you do have to decide, who are you really building for? Which takes us to something I call the scale trap. Now, most of us have been taught to optimize in our business for scale, for reach.

And there's certainly logic to that. Bigger audience, bigger income, right? But this is often a trap. In fact, many entrepreneurs over-index for the 100,000, in the form of attempting to optimize to the maximum number of likes, shares, and subscribers.

You find yourself tweaking your offers, your message, your content, trying to please the algorithm without realizing that you're drifting away from the core person that you set out to serve. Now, this candidly happened to me in early 2024, when we went down the path of creating a whole bunch of short-form video reels that generated hundreds of thousands of views and a ton of reach, but which drifted from my core message and my core audience. One reader recently shared how this has played out in their business.

They told me, we used to create content for the people who are ready to go deep. Now it feels like we're just trying to keep the attention of people who are barely paying attention. And that line really stuck with me.

Because when you optimize for scale, you often end up building for the lowest common denominator, and it's easy to lose sight of the one in the process. Alternatively, other entrepreneurs burn out, serving the proverbial 100, often in an attempt to respond to every comment, every message, every request. And while the 100,000 becomes a silent referendum, in the meantime, the 100 are offering a flood of feedback.

And if you're a student of the ASP method, it's tempting to take every suggestion to heart. But if you're not careful, you can end up building by committee, and that never ends well. But this brings us to the one.

The one rarely gives feedback. They're too busy living the life that you're helping them build. But when you speak to them directly, they show up quietly, decisively.

And that's when you begin to see alignment. So let's talk about the reframe, centering the one. Last week, I invited Charlie Hohn to deliver a two-hour workshop for members of my strategic advisory group, Mastermind.

I wrote about Charlie back in issue 21 of the Digital Contrarian, The Life-Changing Magic of Strategic Obsession. By the way, this is one worth reading, and I'll make sure that we include a link to it with this video. Now, as a refresher, Charlie has been responsible, in part and in whole, for more million copy best-selling books than anybody that I personally know on this planet.

He's been part of James Clear's Atomic Habits, David Goggin's book, Noah Kagan's book, Million Dollar Weekend, Cody Sanchez's book, Main Street Millionaire, and the list goes on and on and on. Now, one of the biggest lessons that Charlie shared with our group last week is that your book should be written for one specific person, not an amalgamation of multiple people, not a customer avatar that you create in some type of marketing exercise, but a single actual real person, a real-life human being in your life. Now, Tim Ferriss, for example, famously wrote The Four-Hour Workweek for two of his real-life friends, one friend who was trapped in his own startup and another who had taken an investment banking job and had gotten sucked into a bloated lifestyle.

When you center everything for that one real person around their fears, their context, their internal dialogue, your message becomes real, it resonates, and it stands out from everything else in your market. But this principle doesn't stop with just books. You build your entire business around the one.

Now, this doesn't mean that you ignore everyone else. You honor the 100, the one to show up, reply, and share thoughtful feedback. Responding when you can and making space for genuine conversation when it matters most.

And you certainly try to serve the 100,000, not by trying to please them all, but by being consistent and clear in your message, even if most will never reply and some will quietly unsubscribe. But everything you do, your offers, your positioning, your entire strategy is shaped around the one. And by the way, this is something I spent a lot of time dialing in from any of the CEOs that I work with as their personal strategic advisor.

Because that's the only way to avoid the slow drift, the creep toward dilution, the temptation to play to the crowd. Now, the irony, of course, is that when you focus deeply on the one, you often end up reaching the many, but not the other way around. Which takes us to a call to reflection.

As you think about your own work, your own business, your own message, my question to you is this. Who is the one in your business or life? Take a moment to reflect on that question. And I invite you to leave a comment below to let me know.

By the way, to everyone in the 100 who wrote in to me by email last week, your notes mean more to me than you probably will. So lastly, picking up on the conversation from last week where we explored the three converging forces reshaping the world as we know it. If this conversation and the idea of returning to real is something that you want to go deeper into, last week I recorded a podcast conversation that digs into this very topic that I think you might enjoy.

I'll make sure to include a link to it with this video as well. By the way, just as a preview, this conversation is a dialogue with a close friend and we expand on last week's issue of The Digital Contrarian by exploring what it means to build a business and life around alignment and meaning rather than growth and just metrics. You can listen to this conversation at the link below this video.

All right, I'll leave you with that for now. Remember to hug the ones that you love. And if you enjoyed this video or its help make you think maybe a little bit differently about your business, be sure to like, follow, and subscribe to be notified for when the next video in the series drops.

Until next week, I'll see you again soon. Take care.