the guy with 200 followers who out-earns the guy with 20,000

Author

Kevin Szabo
March 08, 2026

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I know someone on X who has just under 200 followers.

He is not verified.

He does not go viral.

His posts get maybe a handful of likes on a good day and he has never once been featured in anyone’s roundup of accounts to follow.

He also made more money from X last month than most people with 20,000 followers will make this year.

I want to talk about why, because I think most people are chasing the wrong thing entirely and it is costing them real time and real money.

The guy with 200 followers is not trying to build an audience.

He is trying to reach a very specific type of person, and his content is written directly for that person.

Every post he puts out speaks to one problem, one industry, one outcome.

There is no ambiguity about who he helps or what he does.

When the right person lands on his profile, it takes about thirty seconds before they understand exactly why he is worth paying attention to.

That clarity is doing more work for him than any follower count ever could.

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Compare that to the person with 20,000 followers who posts motivational quotes on Monday, business tips on Wednesday, personal opinions on Friday, and the occasional meme in between.

Their numbers look good on the surface.

Their engagement is decent.

But their audience has no idea what they actually do or how to pay them for it, because the content never tells them.

It just entertains them.

Entertainment builds followers.

Specificity builds clients.

This is the thing that took me a while to fully understand. A large following feels like proof that something is working.

And in some ways it is.

It means people find you interesting enough to stick around.

But interesting and trustworthy are not the same thing, and trustworthy is what actually moves someone from a passive reader to a paying client.

Trust gets built when someone reads your content and thinks, this person understands my situation better than I do.

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That thought does not come from a motivational quote.

It comes from content that is specific enough to make someone feel like you wrote it about them personally.

The guy with 200 followers writes that kind of content.

Every single time.

And because his audience is small and concentrated, the people following him are almost all exactly who he wants to reach.

His conversion rate is absurd compared to most people with ten times his following, because he is not trying to appeal to everyone.

He is trying to be undeniably relevant to a few.

Most people do the opposite.

They broaden their content to try and reach more people, thinking that more reach means more money.

What it usually means is more followers who never buy anything, and a growing sense of frustration that the numbers are going up but the income is not following.

Reach without relevance does not convert.


The practical takeaway here is not to stop growing your audience.

Growth still matters.

But the quality of the audience you are building matters far more than the size of it.

One hundred followers who are all founders struggling with the exact problem you solve are worth more than ten thousand followers who vaguely find you interesting.

So the question worth asking about your own content is not how do I get more followers

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It is whether the right person would land on your profile today and immediately understand what you do, who you do it for, and why you are the right person to help them.

If the answer is not immediately yes, that is where the work is.

The guy with 200 followers figured that out early.

He stopped optimizing for applause and started optimizing for relevance.

His audience is small enough that most people would not take him seriously at a glance.

But the right people take him very seriously, and that is all that has ever mattered.

Followers are vanity until they are not.

The ones that count are the ones who see your content and think, this is exactly what I needed to find.

Talk soon,