I can see how you'd interpret my argument as focusing on becoming a social media influencer. I should work on clarifying this in future articles.

Being a social media creator is certainly one way of building an audience, but it's not the only way. Heck, you can use some of the "old guard" ways of building audience if you want to (i.e. TV/newspapers/billboars/etc.). My core point isn't so much how you build an audience. My core point is that building an audience is more valuable and efficient than building a product.

To be clear, I don't even mean you shouldn't worry about building great products. I just mean that audience comes first. After all, you can build the greatest product in the world, but, if nobodoy knows about it, the quality of the product doesn't matter.