Do they actually care?

The professionals pulling ahead aren't working more. They're using Claude.

Our free guide will show you how to:

Configure Claude to be the perfect assistant

Master AI-powered content creation

Transform complex data into actionable strategies

Harness Claude’s full potential

Transform your workflow with AI and stay ahead of the curve with this comprehensive guide to using Claude at work.

Get The Free Guide

I want to ask you something uncomfortable.

The thing you have been making. The posts, the newsletter, the video series, the podcast, the carousels you have spent a year putting out. Do the people you are making them for actually care?

Not the polite likes. Not the friends who tell you nice things over coffee. Not the algorithm-pumped impressions that feel like attention but are not.

Do they actually care?

I am asking because this is the single question most creators avoid, and avoiding it is what keeps people stuck. We measure how often we post. We measure if we showed up this week. We measure how the work looked when we finished it. We rarely measure whether the people on the other side felt anything when they saw it.

The gap between "I made this" and "they wanted this" is where most content businesses quietly fail.

Let me describe what this looks like when it happens.

A creator publishes consistently for a year. Twice a week. Sometimes three times. The work is good. The design is clean. The captions are written carefully. The content calendar is full. From the outside, everything looks like it should be working.

But the numbers are flat. Engagement is the same as it was six months ago. New followers trickle in. The DMs are mostly from other creators who want to swap shoutouts. Nobody is forwarding the work to a friend. Nobody is paying for anything. Nobody is reaching out to ask a follow-up question. The work exists, and people consume it in a flat, transactional way, and then move on.

The creator usually responds to this by doing more of the same. More posts. More variety. Maybe a redesign. Maybe a new content pillar. The assumption is that the engine will eventually fire if you just keep feeding it.

But the engine is not the problem. The product is.

Here is what I have learned from watching this play out in dozens of cases. The work that compounds is almost always the work the creator was a little embarrassed to publish. The take felt slightly too sharp. The story felt slightly too personal. The framework felt slightly too obvious. The opinion that risked making a few people unfollow.

The work that disappears into the feed is almost always the work the creator felt safe about. The clean carousel everyone would agree with. The post quoted three other people and added nothing original. The video summarised what was already in the news. Safe content is invisible content.

People do not care about safety.

They care about the moment when you said the thing they were not sure they were allowed to think. They care about the framework that named the problem they had been struggling with, but could not articulate. They care about the time you got something specific and uncomfortable on the table and held it there until the reader felt it.

That is what makes them forward you to a friend. That is what makes them reply to your newsletter. That is what makes them remember your name when someone in their Slack channel asks for a recommendation.

How do you know if your work is doing this?

Run the audit.

The audit has three questions. Each one takes about a minute. None of them rely on the metrics on your dashboard, because the metrics on your dashboard are not designed to tell you the truth here.

The first question is: in the last 90 days, how many times has someone unsolicitedly told you, in their own words, that a specific piece of yours changed something for them. Not "great post." Not "love your content." Something specific. "Your edition on activation made me rethink our onboarding." "That framework you shared got me a meeting with my CFO." "I sent your post to my whole team."

If the answer is zero or one, your work is technically visible but not actually landing.

If the answer is three to five, you have at least one piece that is doing the work. Reverse engineer it. Look at what made that one different from the others.

If the answer is ten or more, you have a signal. Lean into whatever you are doing, because the audience is telling you it matters.

The second question is: when someone discovers your work for the first time, what do they do in the next 30 minutes?

The honest test is whether new readers binge. They land on one piece, they go look for another, they go look for a third, they subscribe, they bookmark, they go check who you are. If new readers consume one piece and leave, your work is producing impressions, not relationships. If new readers consume five pieces in their first session, your work is producing an actual connection.

You can measure this. Look at the session depth on your newsletter, your blog, your YouTube channel, and your Substack. If your average new visitor reads one piece and bounces, the work is not pulling. If they read three or more, you have something real.

The third question is: when you stop publishing for two weeks, who reaches out to ask what happened?

This is the cleanest signal of all. The people who genuinely care about your work will notice when it stops. They will message you. They will email you. They will ask if everything is okay.

The people who do not care will not notice at all. Their feed will fill with other content. Your absence will be invisible to them.

This is the test most creators are afraid to run because they suspect the answer. Almost everyone overestimates how much their audience would miss them. The honest version of this test is one of the most useful diagnostics in all of content.

If the answer to all three questions is uncomfortable, here is the harder reframe.

The problem is not that you are not creating enough. The problem is that the work is not specific enough, sharp enough, or honest enough to make anyone feel anything.

Most content fails this not because the creator is untalented but because they are protecting themselves. They are publishing the version of the work that will not cause any friction. The version that will not get anyone to unfollow. The version that is broadly agreeable, broadly useful, and broadly forgettable.

The work that compounds requires a different decision. You have to be willing to publish things that some people will dislike. You have to be willing to be specific enough that the work means something to a small group and bounces off everyone else. You have to be willing to say what you actually think, in your actual voice, including the parts that feel slightly risky.

This is the unglamorous truth of the creator economy. The people who are still relevant in five years are not the ones who optimised the most. They are the ones who showed up with the most genuine point of view, week after week, for long enough that the audience felt who they were.

I am asking the question because I have asked it of myself many times in the last few months of writing Growth Flywheel. Some editions land. Some are forgotten by next week. The pattern is consistent. The editions where I went sharper, more specific, more honest, are the ones people actually message me about. The ones where I played it safe are the ones nobody mentions, even when the numbers technically looked fine.

You probably have the same data on your own work if you look at it honestly.

So here is the actual exercise this week. Pull up the last 10 pieces of work you have published. Rank them from most honest to least honest. Then look at which ones got real responses, real forwards, real conversations.

The pattern will tell you what your audience actually cares about.

And then the hard part.

Make more of the kind they actually cared about. Make less of the kind they did not. Stop optimising the work that was never going to land, and start spending that effort on the work that already proved it could.

This is not glamorous advice. It is not a hack. It will not produce a viral moment.

But it is the only thing that turns creating into something people actually want, instead of something they politely watch you do.

The question is in front of every creator every week, whether or not we ask it out loud.

Do they actually care?

Run the three tests. See what you find.

If the answer is not what you hoped for, that is not bad news. It is the most useful information you have had in months. The fix is now visible, and you can start tomorrow.

See you at the next edition, Arindam