This venn diagram illustrates it pretty well. “If you’re not good enough to get paid from your passion yet, get better.” This is a prerequisite. You’re ready to solve your Audience Problem when you’re good enough to get ONE person to pay you for your work. Until then, keep your head down and continue to grind. The box I want to focus on is “learn to monetize,” which assumes your level of talent is undeniable.

Jay Abraham argues there are only three ways to make money in any business:

1. Increase the number of people you sell to 2. Increase the size of each sale 3. Increase the frequency of purchases

The Audience Problem has been solved by “increasing the number of people you sell to” for the last hundred years. This is how Taylor Swift solves her Audience Problem — selling relatively low priced items to the masses once every album cycle.

But, as the internet continues to mature, we’re seeing it increasingly being solved by combining the second and third ways. It’s actually a throwback. Mozart solved his Audience Problem not by increasing the number of people he sold to, but by increasing the size of each sale and the frequency at which these sales took place.

He did this by relying on a small group of patrons throughout his life. One of the most well known and respected musicians ever didn’t have millions of people paying him for his art, he had nine at one time or another.

“If the twentieth-century entertainment industry was about hits, the twenty-first will be equally about niches.” Chris Anderson

The internet is small. Despite the 3.17 billion people online, we as individuals tend to congregate same the digital spaces. Day after day, we return to the same subreddits, retweet the same followers, and like the same people’s photos.

Previous generations were forced to group themselves by geography. We now do so based on interest, by way of the web. What we’ve learned is, just like the real world, the natural state of behavior on the internet centers around small communities. Unlike the past though, these communities are based on a common interest, not on the location in which you were born.

That’s why solving your Audience Problem by focusing on a core group is actually a more natural way to do it. It’s never a good bet to align yourself against human behavior. It seems better to open your sails behind a growing wind, instead of trying to swim upstream against the current.

The popular myth of, “I need an insanely large scale of fans before I can attempt to monetize,” seems to permeate the creative class. And it is just that, a myth.