How to build an audience in 2025 | Starter Story

College football is back, and Hilton has a "superstition concierge" to make fan rituals a reality. That ad break is a long way from the core of this episode, which is a blunt, practical conversation about how to build an audience in 2025. The guest, a creator who built a substantial following on Twitter before launching a product, lays out a simple but punishing equation: you need an audience to make money, but you only get an audience by creating content for years before you ever ask for anything.

The three-year rule and the five-minute habit

The central mechanism here is patience. The guest says he spent three years creating content before launching a single product. That period wasn't about monetization; it was about accumulation. He describes his Twitter growth as a direct result of "quickly forming opinions around the way the algorithm worked" and expressing those opinions fast. People didn't follow him for polished production value—they followed because he was consistently present, opinionated, and responsive to how the platform actually functioned.