“Building a Digital Audience is Hand-to-Hand Combat.”

Each Wednesday, we bring you a new piece of The Hum’s story as it unfolds. The goal is to deliver you, our readers, an unfiltered, no-BS account of what it is really like to start a business, as it happens. We will be open, honest, and vulnerable in hopes you can learn as we do, both from what goes wrong and what goes (occasionally) right.

We have been running a digital media company for almost 6 weeks now, even though we’ve only known we are a digital media company for the past 2 weeks. We have gotten a grip on producing entertaining content that keeps people coming back each day…at least our open and click-through rates say so. But, we are still struggling to build a wide audience.

When we started this thing, we thought the difficult part would be producing quality content. If we were able to do that, people would find it. It would take off, almost on its own.

We were naive as hell.

And we aren’t the only ones. We learned a lot of entrepreneurs think their companies will take off just because they are providing something of value. It’s the, “If you build it, they will come,” mindset.

It took two learning moments from experts in their respected fields to teach us this wasn’t the case. The first came in an essay we read by Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator.

“One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don’t scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist.

Actually, startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually, it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.”

Paul goes on to discuss the importance of growth rate, even at the early stages, stating you should strive for 10% growth, week over week. When you have 100 users, 10 is the mark. Just get 10 more before the week is over. Those 10 may seem trivial, but that 10% growth rate would result in 14,000 users after year 1. After year 2? 2 million.

But still, we thought, “We are putting out content on the internet every day. We aren’t trying to push a physical product or an app. Subscribers should come easier than that.”

Enter a conversation we had last week with Mark Henderson, President and Co-Founder of The Worcester Sun, a subscription-based digital news platform covering Worcester, MA, the location of our company. Mark has been in media since before we were born. It showed.

We met Mark in a noisy coffee shop downtown on Friday afternoon. I was still munching on a ham, egg, and cheese bagel when he showed up. Professional.

Listening back to the tape (Mark was nice enough to let us record the conversation), Fetty Wap was dropping beats in the background as Mark was dropping knowledge:

“Discoverability and getting an audience base is difficult…To create a big audience in the digital space, because there are no restrictions, everybody assumes that is easy. But the converse is true. There is so much out there that you have to find a way to distinguish, to cut through…Building a digital audience is hand-to-hand combat.”

That essay and this conversation made us finally realize that our subscriber list wasn’t going to grow itself. This is hand-to-hand combat. We need to go get these people 1-by-1.

So this weekend, we started.

Suddenly, we were the people we have always hated — the guys hustling hard as hell to push their business on people and probably annoying a lot of them along the way.

We are now “those guys.” The guys finding emails for college entrepreneurship club presidents on some obscure university webpage and contacting them. The guys infiltrating Facebook groups we don’t belong in and posting about our company. The guys DMing influencers in our space, begging for them to check out our content with an absurd claim that we can provide them value in return.

And, you know what? It felt…gross.

In that same essay, Paul Graham says that entrepreneurs avoid this hand-to-hand combat strategy because they are shy, lazy, or don’t realize the benefits. I would add a fourth reason to that list — they are embarrassed.

It doesn’t feel good to beg people to subscribe to your mailing list or to admit that you need to do that in the first place. It is the opposite of empowering. It freaking sucks.

Most people would say they would do anything to get their company to take off, and I think most people believe they would…until they actually have to do it. But, you have to do it.

So, for the next few months, we will continue to feel dirty, gross, and embarrassed. We will continue to annoy the hell out of people in search of that 10% weekly growth rate.

At the time of this email, The Hum has 212 subscribers. I am happy to say that is up 14.6% from this time last week.

You have to crawl…and email, beg, DM, hustle, and annoy…before you ball.