Pick the Medium You Would Do for Free
Match the marketing channel to what you would happily do with no audience
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 70%
Marketing is an open problem: some people make videos, some write or tweet, some literally stand outside with a sandwich board, some make a lot of friends and throw parties. One of those may genuinely be better for your business, but the more important variable is picking a business congruent with the one you like doing. The selection test is what you would do with no audience at all, because being top at anything requires enjoying it far past mild interest. Enjoyment is not private; listeners and readers pick up when someone is just asking questions and doing the podcast equivalent of looking at their watch. The mapping is direct: enjoy talking, try podcasting; prefer conversation, try a live network like Twitter spaces; like long-form writing, Substack; short-form, X; really long-form, blog posts that turn into a book; enjoy video, use one of the latest AI models. Then close the loop by picking a business, a role within it, or a co-founder where your natural medium lines up. It is a fit problem, a matching problem.
Origin
Naval answers the friends who keep proposing they start a podcast together, and contrasts them with Joe Rogan, who was doing it for no audience on Ustream.
Core principles
- 01Marketing is an open problem with many valid solutions
- 02Channel choice is a matching problem, not an optimisation problem
- 03Audiences detect the person doing the equivalent of looking at their watch
- 04To be top at something you have to enjoy it almost psychopathically
- 05The modern world offers unlimited venues, so the constraint is fit, not opportunity
How to run it
- 1
List the mediums
Write out what is actually available: video, long-form writing, short-form writing, live audio, podcasting, in-person word of mouth.
- 2
Apply the no-audience test
Ask which of these you would still do if nobody was watching. That is the enjoyment level required to be top at it.
Pro tip Answer for the process, not the outcome; enjoying having a podcast is not enjoying podcasting.
Watch out Enjoying it a little is not enough; the bar is being almost psychopathic about how much you enjoy the thing.
- 3
Strike out the borrowed choices
Remove any channel you picked because it worked for someone else or because it is what marketing is supposed to look like.
Watch out This is where most people are, and it is why they drop off after two or three episodes.
- 4
Map preference to format
Translate the preference into a specific venue: talking to podcasting, conversation to live audio, long-form to Substack, short-form to X, video to AI-assisted video.
- 5
Run a real test
Publish enough in the chosen medium to see whether you keep wanting to do it, and whether the audience responds.
Pro tip Track whether you look forward to the next one; that is the variable being tested, alongside reach.
- 6
Fix the mismatch at the business level
If your business cannot be sold through the medium you love, change the business, your role inside it, or bring in a co-founder who owns that channel.
Pro tip Founders forget the co-founder option and grind out a channel they hate for years.
- 7
Commit
Once the match survives, lean into it hard. Fit is what allows the volume that any channel requires.
In the wild
Naval treats Rogan as the clean case. He is so immersed, so into talking to all the weird people he has on, that he would be doing it even with no audience, and he was doing it with no audience, live streaming late at night on Ustream from one random website. Naval's conclusion is that it is no coincidence he ended up the top podcaster. The enjoyment came first and was visible before any of the distribution existed, which is exactly the signal the no-audience test is trying to surface in advance.
→ The top position in the medium, arrived at by someone who passed the no-audience test years before the audience arrived.
Friends approach Naval saying let us start a podcast together, and his question back is whether they genuinely enjoy talking a lot, because if not, they will not enjoy the process and will not be best at it. They are trying to market. They record two or three episodes and drop off, first because they do not enjoy it, and second because listeners pick up that the host is just asking a bunch of questions and doing the podcast equivalent of looking at their watch. The channel fails on the fit test before it ever fails on reach.
→ A predictable three-episode flameout, and a diagnosis available before the first recording.
Common mistakes
Copying someone else's channel
A channel that works brilliantly for one person is a bad bet if you do not enjoy the daily work it requires.
Treating it purely as marketing
Doing the medium as a growth tactic rather than something you like shows up in the output, and the audience reads it.
Never fixing the business-side mismatch
If the business cannot be sold through your natural medium, no amount of discipline fixes it; the business, role or co-founder has to change.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and creators choosing how to reach an audience and repeatedly abandoning channels after a few tries.
Not ideal for
Businesses whose distribution is structurally fixed, where the channel is dictated by the buyer rather than chosen.
From the transcript
“If you're going to be the top at it, you have to be almost psychopathic at the level at which you enjoy the thing.”
“He's so into talking to all these weird people that he has on his podcast that the guy would be doing it even if he…”
“It is a fit problem. It is a matching problem.”
From the episode
In the Arena