Happy last day of March and last day of Q1. I have a whoooole lot of updates around my business & work and going to spread those out over the next few weeks to share more about what I’m learning, focusing on & experimenting with. These quarterly reflections are always fun to share!

The TL;DR:

Oh and I’m getting married in ~6 weeks so we’ve officially hit the everything feels like chaos, all the time. So if I get this newsletter out the door, I’ll consider it a win!

Now on to the fun stuff!

-Taylor

One of the things I've noticed from digging into my archive (shoutout to the beehiiv MCP experiment) is that the issues where I take a sharp stance do really well. So here's one I feel strongly about and want to unpack.

In almost every conversation I've had over the past couple months — with creators, with traditional founders, with people somewhere in between — the same theme keeps coming up:

Build your audience and distribution first. Then do whatever you want.

I thought at first I should really coin this tagline… but maybe we need to keep workshopping a bit 😂 what do y’all think?

Now let me explain what I mean by “do whatever you want” 👇

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke with a founder who's building a company in the supplement space. She has the background to pull it off — tons of expertise, the right resources, a product that makes sense. I genuinely think she could build something great.

When I asked her how she's planning to market it and get her first customers, she gave me the answer I hear all the time: run a bunch of ads and see what experiments work.

And it’s not a bad answer; plenty of successful companies have started this way. It's the traditional e-commerce playbook. But I think she's sleeping on her biggest asset: herself and her story as a founder.

She has the knowledge and the credibility to be the face of this brand from day one. If I were advising her, I'd say: start building in public right now. Talk about what you're working on. Share why you're building this. Build the audience alongside the company, instead of after it launches.

Because if she waits, she's going to launch into silence. She'll have a great product and no one to sell it to except whoever her ad budget can reach. It feels like a gamble, an unnecessarily risky one at that. That sounds to me like an increasingly expensive and exhausting way to build a business in 2026.

A traditional startup has to scrape to find people to even test their product. There’s a better way to go about it.

Now compare that to Erin McGoff.

Erin is a creator I recently interviewed for CENYC. She spent years building a career advice audience across TikTok and Instagram — 7 million followers, all by consistently showing up and sharing what she knows. Along the way, she built a newsletter called Hyper Helpful that now has 225,000+ subscribers with a 45% open rate. She wrote a book with Penguin Random House. She landed brand partnerships with LinkedIn and Microsoft.

And then she did something that Person A could never do on day one: she launched a venture-backed tech startup called StupidFish — "the cure for career confusion."

She put up a link, and 15,000 people joined the waitlist (!!)

She had zero need for ads. Didn’t have to even touch cold outreach or scrape for beta testers. The years of trust she built with her audience converted into distribution for anything she wants to build next.

As Erin put it: "A traditional startup would have to scrape to find people to test their product. I put up a link, and I get 15,000 people on my waitlist."

That's the power of building an audience first.

Erin chose to build a tech startup, but this isn't a tech startup story. This is a distribution story. She could have launched a course, a community, a physical product, a consulting firm — literally anything — and that same audience would have shown up. The 15,000 people on her waitlist were there because they trust her and she built something around their actual pain points.

If you're wanting to build an audience, know that it doesn't lock you into one type of business model or industry. Think of it as a launch pad that can work whatever you decide to do next, whether it's a product, service, a book series, or something that doesn't even exist yet. Which takes us to the 3rd type of person.

You might be reading this and thinking that you don't fit in either bucket of people. You're not launching a CPG brand and you're not sitting on 7 million followers. Most people aren't at either extreme, and that's fine.

But here's what I say to literally everyone: building a platform of some kind is insurance.

It protects you if you lose your job. It gives you a launchpad if your business idea fails. It opens doors if you want to pivot directions entirely. And it doesn't expire or lock you into one path. The distribution you build for yourself compounds into more opportunities over time, and it follows you wherever you go.

What I love about this moment is that you have more options than ever to actually do this.

If you love writing long-form, go build on Substack or start a newsletter on beehiiv. If you're the person who's always scrolling LinkedIn and has opinions about everything in your feed — good, start posting them. (I’m biased here because I love LinkedIn unironically 😆)

If you're a natural on camera, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are all sitting right there waiting for you. If you'd rather talk than write, start a podcast.

There are no gatekeepers that matter anymore.

The takeaway I want you to walk away knowing (ideally believing) that distribution is the most valuable asset you can build right now. Whether you want to launch a SaaS product, write a book, start a consultancy, or build a media company — the audience comes first. Everything else comes from that.

This is the gap I really want to explore with Creator Diaries. How creators can think more like founders. How founders can build more like creators. And how both sides have way more in common and way more time to figure this out than they realize.

I’ve been busy teeing up a ton of great interviews to share with you all, and we’ll continue to explore this creator-founder divide. Here’s a glimpse of some Q&As I’ll be releasing over the next month or so:

Would love to hear from you here! If you would like to see a specific person featured, want to throw your hat in the ring, or have a specific topic you have questions about, send them to me 👋🏻

That’s all for this week! 👋🏻