Audience Builder Spotlight: Toby Howell

Hey friends,

At Story Alley, our goal is to consistently deliver content that makes you a better and smarter audience builder. And what better way to learn how to do this than take some advice directly from the pros?! So, instead of giving you our take, this week we’re teaming up with Toby Howell who has built a Twitter audience of over 29K in a little over a year.

You may know Toby as the content lead for Launch House and author of Homescreen, a newsletter read by 18,000 founders that covers the tech and startup ecosystem. Before joining Launch House, Toby cut his teeth at Morning Brew where he helped write the eponymous newsletter for 1.5 years.

He posts about everything from newsletter growth and content creation to drops and community building.

Fun fact: he grew Homescreen from 0 to 18K in less than 5 months!

It’s safe to say Toby has some serious audience building chops. Let’s see what advice he has for the rest of us.

Tell us about your audience building journey: how and why did you decide to do this? I built an audience by accident. I was working at the Morning Brew at the time running their Twitter account and kinda on a whim I just wrote down a bunch of the tactics I was trying out to grow the account. I turned it into a thread and posted it on a random Tuesday afternoon to my 600 followers at the time. The next morning I woke up to 8,000 new followers and I was well on my way to building an audience. That’s great. What impact has audience building had for you? Too many to count. After that initial thread I was probably receiving between 2-3 job offers a day, no joke. I still get a steady stream of job offers to this day which is how I ended up at Launch House, actually. Plus, I have tons of Twitter friends now that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Now, let’s get in the weeds. What were the tactics that helped you grow the most? Why? I think being original helped me grow. There is so much garbage being posted on Twitter these days—click bait wikipedia page regurgitations—that anything that is original stands out. Being consistent is obviously important but I think originality is just as important. Don’t settle for the easy click bait-y stuff if you want to build a truly engaged audience. What is one piece of advice you wish someone gave you in the beginning of your audience building journey? Drown out the little voice in your head that tells you your content is cringe. Fear of being cringe has destroyed more content creators than anything else. Be bold, share your ideas, and silence that voice in your head.

As you can see, audience building has many perks. We hope that some of Toby’s tactics would be helpful to you. If you try any of them, we’d love to hear about it. Hit the reply button and let us know how they worked for you.

What is Salley?

Salley lets you stay accountable and earn rewards for building an audience. What if you get a free fitness class or a massage just for posting content?!