Thomas Frank talking with Jay Clouse on the Creator Science podcast:
To a degree, I think there’s a lot of platform risk even if you’re not covering one tool. Like, I have platform risk on YouTube. I think if that went away, I don’t know how much I’d be able to leverage Twitter to get the same results.
I kind of think about this like a rocket ship. So, like, if you wanna get to space you need a lot of fuel, a lot of thrust, a lot of power. And that means you have to rely on the work of a lot of other people.
And then you get up there and you, eventually, have to jettison parts of the rocket. You’re never gonna get to space by riding a bicycle you built yourself.
Jay:
I love that.
Thomas:
So, yeah, I guess, like, the philosophy here is, like, platform risk is a necessary evil, but it also often functions as, like, rocket fuel for a business.
And so, your job as an entrepreneur is to constantly survey the landscape— to constantly sort of do that, like, SWOT analysis on your business — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats — and decide, you know, kind of on a moment-to-moment basis, ‘How much platform risk is acceptable right now?’ ‘Should I be diversifying, or should I be totally buckling down?’
I think there was, like, an Alex Hormozi tweet a while ago — this was like— this is stuck in my head a lot — he said, ‘You don’t get rich by diversifying. You stay rich by diversifying. You, typically, get rich by striking it out of the park on one really big thing.’
So a lot of opportunities we have these days are building one really big thing on top of another platform, and it’s just part of the risk that you take on as an entrepreneur. That’s what we do — we take risks, right?
One of the most confounding human vulnerabilities in existence is our susceptibility to eloquence.
Example:
“You’re never going to get to space by riding a bicycle you built yourself.”
It’s an analogy so delightfully musical sounding, I wanted it to work, even thought it obviously doesn’t.
The fact is, accepting the risks that come with relying on the big platforms to grow your audience simply isn’t the unavoidable path creators have been convinced to believe it is.
To be fair, Jay’s question was geared toward the SAAS tool Thomas has decided to hang his content hat on for the foreseeable future. But since reliance on YouTube was included in the response, I think it’s important to make this point:
- When you have an effective audience capture campaign in place, perpetually sliding the best of your fans toward a platform you own, you remove a great deal of your platform risk — eventually all of it, if you so wish.
Platform risk is neither evil, nor necessary. It’s an option — one most creators choose to go with.
However, creators who choose to prioritize building a relationship with the best of their audiences on their own (owned) platforms mitigate that risk, if not eliminate it, entirely.
— Tang
Thomas Frank’s owned platforms include: ThomasJFrank.com and College Info Geek.
Jay Clouse’s owned platforms include: Creator Science and Jay.blog.
