I think people overvalue audience and undervalue the ability to get attention.
Those sound like the same thing.
They are not.
An audience is a pile of people currently attached to an account, person, page, newsletter, channel, whatever.
Attention is knowing how to make strangers stop.
The second one travels better.
You see this every time somebody with a huge following starts a new project and absolutely nobody cares.
Same person.
Same follower count.
New thing gets 41 likes.
Their audience was real. It was just attached to a very specific reason.
Maybe they followed for gym clips.
Maybe for memes.
Maybe for one token.
Maybe because the person was briefly involved in some drama six months ago.
Follower count makes all of that look more transferable than it actually is.
Then there is the opposite person.
They start a page from zero and somehow get traction.
Then another one.
Then a product.
Then a newsletter.
Then some random side account they made as a joke gets 30,000 views in a week.
At some point you have to admit they might not be "lucky" in the normal sense.
They understand attention.
They know how to package a thought.
They understand what a native post looks like on the platform they are using.
They can feel when something is too explained.
They know which screenshot matters.
They know a hook is not necessarily a giant text overlay screaming WAIT UNTIL THE END.
Most importantly, they can do it without dragging the previous audience everywhere with them.
That is a useful distinction for anonymous internet projects because accounts are disposable in a way skills are not.
Platforms die.
Accounts get banned.
Niches get boring.
Audiences stop caring.
Sometimes you just want to build something that has absolutely nothing to do with the last thing.
If your only asset is 200,000 followers, that can be scary.
If your asset is "I know how to make the internet look at something," you are in a different position.
Of course, a real audience is still valuable.
Distribution is valuable.
Email lists are valuable.
A group of people who actually trust you is extremely valuable.
I am not pretending a fresh account is secretly better than having all of that.
I just think people confuse the visible asset with the underlying skill.
The follower count is visible.
The instinct that created it usually isn't.
One can disappear overnight.
The other can build again.