Your content will outlive you. Your records will outlive your actions. And they will make more money than you ever will. But the prerequisite for that is an audience. The true leverage is having your work fetch value infinites even when you are not performing that work more than few times.

Lets take this for example:

You see this book? Their audience spans across multiple platforms with accounts targeting different niches and genres. They are going to make Rupees 90 lakhs off this book in 1-2 years (in my conservative estimates). This is why audience is necessary. Book writing is not their primary business but still they will make more than someone whose main business is book writing, all thanks to audience and the content.

Building an audience builds wealth because it shifts the probability distribution of your work. Every piece of work exists in one of three distributions: concave, linear, or convex, defined by how much you give and how much you take in return.

Concave work is the worst—high effort, negative or low or diminishing returns. You give more than you take. A labor-intensive job where exhaustion increases but pay stays the same is concave. Or maybe even participating in trends that die out. The more you do, the harder it gets, yet the returns barely improve.

Linear work is predictable—one effort, one return. A salary job, freelancing, or any direct exchange of time for money falls here. You give and take in equal proportion. There’s stability, but no leverage. The moment you stop working, you stop earning.

Convex work is where wealth is built. You give once, but the return keeps accumulating. A book, a piece of software, a viral post—these keep paying over time with no extra effort.

The difference? Audience.

Without an audience, even convex work acts like linear work or even the spooky scary concave work. A great book with no readers earns nothing. A well-built product without distribution gathers dust. Audience forces convexity, ensuring the return on your work scales disproportionately over time.

That’s why someone with an audience can write a book as a side project and make more than a full-time author. The work isn’t necessarily better—the system of take is optimized. Audience turns past work into an accumulating asset rather than a one-time exchange.

If your work isn’t taking more than it gives, it’s a bad trade. You can only work so much. Audience is the force that flips probability in your favor, ensuring you always take more than you give.

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Convexity and Business #1