You do not want fame to be the end all be all

Personal brands have spent a decade selling the influencer model

→ reach more people → get more views → optimize for the algorithm → go viral

But founders don’t have to follow this traditional route to make money

They need something smaller and significantly more profitable.

They need to become what I call a “micro authority.”

A micro authority is the go-to specialist in a defined niche. They have a few different qualities

- They’re the most trusted name in their corner of the industry

- They don’t have a million followers

- They target a couple thousand decision makers

- They close deals a dozen times easier than influ-founders

The interesting thing is that this isn't a new idea.

Every serious thinker about audience, economics, and leverage has arrived at the same conclusion from a different angle.

Kevin Kelly wrote an essay called 1000 True Fans back in 2008. His thesis was almost mathematical. A true fan is someone who will buy anything you produce.

If 1,000 of them each spend $100 a year, you have a $100,000 business. If they spend more, you have a much bigger one.

He explained that you don't need to be popular. You just need to be deeply meaningful to a small, specific group.

Meaningful influence = depth x count.

The economics of the internet reward depth. And the founder model that prints for the CRO agency founder who closes 7-figs a year off 4,000 LinkedIn followers, the SaaS founder who runs a category-defining product with 2000 followers on X, the 8-fig ecom owner has nothing to do with virality.

I've watched this play out across our roster. One of our clients joined the agency with 5,000 followers and $20,000 a month. He'd never go viral on any post. 2.5 years later, he's at $140,000 a month with 12 employees and a following that's still small by influencer standards.

He just happens to own the conversation in his exact corner of the market. Every person who follows him is a buyer or a referrer. There's no waste.

That's the micro authority game. And it's available to almost every founder reading this, because the bar is dramatically lower than people assume.

You don't need to be the most charismatic person in your space. You don't need to post the most. You don't need a million views.

You need 50 of the right people in your replies, week after week, until they become 200, and eventually those 200 become the spine of every business decision you make for the next decade.

The influencer model is a winner-take-all lottery where you either break through to millions or you waste years posting to nobody. The micro authority model is a near-guaranteed payoff if you're willing to be specific and patient.

So here's the work this week.

1. Open a doc.

2. Write down the 50 people you'd want to be in a Slack channel with 2 years from now

3. Then look at your last 20 posts and ask one question: would any of those 50 people stop scrolling for this?

If the answer is no, the problem isn't that your content isn't broad enough. It's that it isn't meaningful enough for the people that matter to you.

The micro authorities I work with don't think about audience size. They think about which exact people are now reading them every week who weren't a year ago because they know that’s the only metric that turns into $$$.

— Wiz

P.S. If you want to map out exactly who your 50 should be and the content strategy that would reach them then that's the audit we run with every founder before we ever write a post inside Mogul. Book a call to find out more