Raymond Hou’s business has not followed a mass-traffic strategy. From writing on Medium in 2017 and founding the Lifehacker TW brand in 2020, to later launching a podcast, paid subscriptions, and online courses, Raymond has repeatedly argued that creators with small audiences should not imitate large media companies and chase exposure. Instead, they should “serve a limited group more deeply.” His public work can be organized into three connected layers: select the right people through shared values and goals (make friends), bring them into a list and community one can reach directly (build a reachable list), and make content a long-term asset that can be monetized repeatedly (the long tail).
Make Friends: Select Through Values and Goals, Not Personality
The foundation of Raymond’s approach to relationships and audience development comes from the “friend model” in his 2017 TEDxTKU talk, “The Power of Sharing,” expanded in a 2020 podcast. The model separates the factors that bring two people together into personality, values, and goals, with money added after entering the workforce. Raymond argues that the order of these factors matters more than which one is most important. Most people entering a new environment first gather around similar personalities because having fun together takes the least effort, but these groups often cannot have deep conversations or work together. Raymond recommends reversing the order: first look for people who share values and goals; personality will naturally follow.
The way to attract the right people is to share publicly. As he puts it: “By sharing, people who share your values will gather around you, and people with the same goals will give you a hand.” 1 This redefines writing and publishing from “building traffic” to “filtering for and calling together people like you.” For a niche business, a creator need not please everyone. They can clearly state what matters to them, allowing the wrong people to leave naturally and the right people to draw closer.
Build a Reachable List: Community Is Not Social Media
Raymond draws a strict distinction between social media and community, and says it was a topic he first discussed publicly in Taiwan. Social media focuses on distribution, traffic, and conversion rates; its audience passively receives content from a bulletin board. A community focuses on “the lifetime value of one user”; its members actively participate and do things for the brand. He condenses the difference into this line: “A community gets users moving; on social media, people only need to receive information.” 2
He adds that not everyone needs to build a community. Large creators who can survive on traffic and trust economics may only need to do social media well. The people who truly need a community are “those in a very small niche who cannot currently survive on mass traffic.” For them, the key action is empowerment: give users some abilities, authority, and privileges they do not have as ordinary fans, turning them from recipients into “prosumers” who both produce and sell. Once users have participated and contributed, loss aversion makes it difficult to leave. Raymond uses this to explain why the Lifehacker TW group has a high bar for joining and does not welcome people who only take without contributing. The same logic underlies “building a reachable list”: gather attention scattered across platforms into relationships and lists one can contact directly and repeatedly, rather than renting a platform’s traffic.
The Long Tail: Content Is the Entrance; the Subscriber List Is the Asset
In a retrospective on the second season of his podcast in 2020, Raymond mapped the product structure as a funnel: the podcast and in-person gatherings were entry points, with the goal of guiding people toward a paid newsletter subscription. He noted that the first season had “no distinctive keyword” and scattered topics, so the second season narrowed its subjects and changed its key metric from episode plays to whether average plays per episode increased. That would show whether new subscribers returned to listen to earlier episodes. 3 This reflects his view of content as an accumulable long-tail asset rather than one-time exposure.
The strategy also echoes his earlier insight about writing: turn tacit knowledge into an explicit asset so that “one block of time can be sold many times.” With a regular newsletter and systematic knowledge content, older work can continue to serve new readers and generate long-term income without depending on a single viral hit. Raymond also points out the cost: subscriptions require regular output and are difficult to sustain. He advises people who want to try, “Don’t charge yet; start for free and try it for a year,” first verifying that they can keep going before monetizing.
A Contrast With the Red Ocean
This niche approach receives outside support from people Raymond has interviewed. In a conversation with He Zewen, He proposed “Don’t go where the crowds are,” and encouraged people to find a niche in a red ocean, emphasizing, “You don’t need a lot of traffic; you only need 100 people to buy your service.” 4 This aligns with Raymond’s position of serving a specific target audience and treating a personal brand as a byproduct of the process: first identify whom one can serve and what problem to solve; income follows, rather than chasing traffic first and figuring out monetization later.
Relationship to Brand Philosophy
Raymond places niche operations under the broader The Super Individual: A Definition for Today’s Professionals (Super Individual definition) and company-of-one framework. The goal of a business is not unlimited expansion, but stability, independence, and long-term flexibility. He opposes pursuing a “personal brand” as an end in itself, arguing that operating as an individual is an action, a personal brand is a result, and a company of one is a model; all three aim to increase one’s control over life. Building a reachable list, making friends, and creating a long tail are therefore not merely marketing techniques. They are part of the same self-management approach as Super Individual: smaller but deeper relationships give creators greater autonomy over their time and lives.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “EP35: We’ve Got Friendship Wrong. Why Do We Have So Many Friends but Few We Can Confide In or Work With?” podcast, 2020-06-17. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Solo Business #15: Is Social Media Different From Community? Subscription Challenges and Talent Shows,” podcast, 2021-04-05. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “A Retrospective on the Raymond Thirty Podcast: Content Strategy, Product Thinking, and the User Journey,” WordPress, 2020-08-07. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Thirties Profiles #8: In an Era When Anyone Can Publish a Book or Launch a Course, How Should We Think About the ‘Personal Brand’ Red Ocean? Interview with He Zewen (Part 2),” podcast, 2021-02-01. View original ↩