The Uncut Long-Term Vision
From attention to ownership
Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp major outages underscores the lack of control many creators, who rely on social media sites for their livelihoods, face when running their businesses on platforms they have no control over. It also explains why we believe at Uncut.fm that allowing creators to own their content, audience and business (email lists) is SO important.
Hugo Amsellem recently published a blog post that particularly resonated with me. While reading it, I thought he had just summed up the long-term vision of Uncut. I invite you to read his article and I take the liberty of using and distorting some of the passages to illustrate the vision we have at Uncut. I hope you won't mind, Hugo ;-)
We strongly believe that your most valuable asset as a creator is your relationship with your audience. It is the raw material that you turn into the energy that drives you forward.
The relationship with your audience starts with attention. As a creator, your top-of-funnel goal is to create great content to generate attention and start as many relationships as possible. People will find you on Apple podcast, Spotify or social media. These platforms give you free reach. But you want to help people cross the bridge to private channels. Channels where you can reach them directly. Uncut is that bridge.
If you only meet new people at a friend's parties, your social life is at their mercy. Imagine if they no longer invited you! That doesn't mean you should stop going to parties, but it does mean you should host your own at some point. Uncut is your digital home for hosting your listening parties.
We want to help podcasters move from attention to trust. Just like an IRL friendship. After talking to someone a few times, you begin to trust them. This may be the time to start taking ownership of the relationship by exchanging contacts. For creators, this means creating more interactions to collect emails, create memberships, private communities, better segment your audience, etc.
Moving from attention to trust is what we're going to be focused on for most of 2021, but in 2022 we want to get to the next level. Monetization. Once your audience trusts you, they can buy something from you. I'm not only talking about your audience buying something they discovered through you, but your audience buying YOUR products. Why work so hard to build engaged audiences from scratch, but keep promoting other brands' products or services instead of your own?
We want to help podcasters sell digital or physical products to their audience and we will make a profit by taking a share of the revenue we help them generate.
But that's not the final step in our vision. Once your audience has passed the attention, trust and monetization stages, the final stage is ownership. The goal here is to share the financial benefits with your most engaged audience. What does this mean? Well, you know how when you start a business, a business angel or your family can invest money to get it off the ground? That's what family does, they put their skin in the game. And at that point, for some of your audience, you're also part of the family, and they want to support you.
This is the evolution of Kickstarter-style crowdfunding. Your audience doesn't just donate or pre-order so that you can make your project a reality. They invest in you and your future success. They love you so much that they're willing to risk money just to prove that they were right before anyone else, potentially becoming richer in the process. Just like a business angel.
I know, it's a lot! And to be honest, we're not sure how we're going to turn this vision into reality, but this is the world we're all excited about and we thank you for supporting us along this journey. Thanks again Hugo for the inspiration ;-)
Carlos - founder and CEO