How Do I Make Myself Harder to Ignore Without Becoming a F*#&!ng Influencer?

Filmmakers are being insulted in a new way now.

After spending decades learning how to write, direct, produce, shoot, and edit, you are now being told you apparently forgot to build an audience.

And to a lot of filmmakers, that sounds like something someone on social media does.

“So now I have to become a fucking influencer?”

Make something every single day? Film myself talking into my phone in my car? Cater to the impossible algorithm?

No.

But ignoring the internet because we hate the whole culture surrounding influencers would be as dumb as turning ourselves into influencers because somebody told us Hollywood is looking there.

Oddly enough, however, they are looking there.

The Associated Press recently documented filmmakers including Kane Parsons, Curry Barker, and Dylan Clark. Where did they all come from? YouTube. What they put out was proof they could make something real. Hollywood executives told the AP that they are actively looking on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram for filmmakers already developing a relationship with audiences.

But I don’t want us to take the wrong lesson from this.

The goal isn’t to become “famous” online. Because the people who eventually make you harder to ignore might not even be the people who love your work the most.

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Some of them definitely do. But that’s the keyword. Some.

Five million subscribers do not mean five million real human beings who are strapped to their chairs, eager to see what you put out next.

Subscriber count, and I think we all know this by now, is not the most accurate estimate of an active audience. People subscribe to lots of channels, grow up, stop watching the Let’s Plays they used to watch 5 years ago, and forget they ever subscribed. YouTube tells creators to look instead at monthly audience and at new, casual, and regular viewers (in other words, the people who are actually showing up).

So in many cases, I’d rather have 1,000 people who know what I care about, open what I send them, recognize something of themselves in the work, and want to come back to see what i do next.

That’s called affinity.

There is still a problem in that, though.

A thousand people who love you can still be a closed room.

If they all live in the same corner of the internet, follow the same people, and pass your work around among themselves, then you’ve built loyalty, which is a great place to start. But you haven’t necessarily built movement.

As filmmakers, we spend our lives chasing yes.

Yes is great.

But your strongest yeses are usually already inside the circle of people around you. They understand your taste and how you write. They’re predisposed to care.

I’m increasingly interested in the maybe.

“This isn’t usually my kind of thing, but I know somebody who would love it.”

“I’m not sure how I feel about this, but I want to send it to someone.”

This person is standing near the edge, straddling the line of your audience and someone else’s.

So think about it like this: a “yes” validates the work and cements it, a “maybe” helps circulate it.

And circulation is one of the only ways your work can escape the safe room of people around you.

And this isn’t just a hunch I’m going off. There is actually some serious social-network thinking underneath this too. Mark Granovetter’s landmark research on “weak ties” examined how relationships outside our closest circles can connect otherwise separate groups and help information and influence travel between them.

Your biggest fan might bring a few more people just like them to build the same type of audience you have today. But the “maybe” could bring in a single person who gives you access to a whole world you didn’t have access to previously.

That person matters.

I came across something from fellow Substacker Jon Reiss-8Above that served as a big inspiration for this entire post. He argued that filmmakers need to distinguish between a niche and what he calls the “core within niche.”

A niche might be librarians, horror fans, caregivers, skateboarders, literally whatever. Hell, one of my clients found huge audience for her YouTube series by visiting Spa forums.

But I find the core much more interesting as a filmmaker .

It’s the people and infrastructure that members of that niche already rely on for information or recommendations. Reiss argues that connecting to this trusted core can then help a film expand into larger audience demographics. In a way, it’s going small to go big again.

To understand this, then, it is important to ask the right questions of yourself and your work.

Don’t just ask, “Who would like my movie???” No. Too broad and you probably already know the answer to this question.

Ask, “Who does that audience already listen to?”

You’re looking for more of an intersection and a person with access to a specific subsection of the internet that relies on them.

Once you find that intersection, the next part is even more important.

Putting a share button under something and hoping for the best isn’t exactly the best way to distribute your work.

You need to make it easy for your work to be carried from one person to another.

I like to think of it more as a process; it makes more sense in my ADHD brain. It goes:

Sentence → Something → Bridge → Ask

1. The Sentence

Give people the sentence they’d actually use when sending your work to someone else.

Not the tortured industry logline you’ve refined 50 times.

If someone likes what you made but can’t explain why another human should give a shit, the handoff needs work.

1. The Artifact

Give them something capable of traveling on its own.

Like a short film or a novel piece of research you’ve done.

A “something”.

Something complete enough to elicit a reaction without requiring someone to download your deck and book an entire zoom call to have you explain it to them.

1. The Bridge

Show people where the work intersects with their world. Try not to just ask them for their support because you think they’d like what you brought to the table.

Try something more specific that helps them understand why this work matters to them. For example:

“This film is about families trying to care for parents with dementia, and I thought about the caregiver community you’ve built.”

You’re now demonstrating that the work already belongs partly inside theirs. Again, make it easy for them and soften the beachhead.

1. The Ask

A single effective move.

“Who is one other person who needs to see this?”

“Is there an organization in this world I should know about?”

That’s it. The goal isn’t to get everybody sharing everything.

It’s to make one intelligent handoff into another network who will then make another intelligence handoff into the next network.

I’ll use the dementia example again.

You have 1,000 filmmakers following you in this scenario.

Good start.

You release a three-minute teaser about a daughter with a father who has dementia. The scene revolves around her putting Post-it notes around her dad’s house because he forgets everything.

400 people watch it, not the most viral video ever .

But a woman who runs a newsletter for 700 family caregivers sees it.

She’s not a filmmaker, and she probably will never watch another piece of content you make ever again.

She’s a maybe.

But the scene strikes something deep in her, so she sends it to her 700 followers.

A few of them are more important than most:

One of them runs a support group. Another works for a regional aging organization. Somebody in her circle invites you to screen the scene at a conference they are running. A caregiver emails you with a personal story of her own that aids greatly in the story you are trying to create.

The work traveled because somebody outside your circle recognized where it could travel to next. Sounds like a handoff to me.

And suddenly those 400 views look VERY different.

You post something. You get 400 views, while someone else gets 400,000.

They won, right?

Ehhhh, maybe. This goes back to the 5 million subscriber thing.

What happened after the view?

Who forwarded it? Who replied? Who subscribed? Who introduced you to somebody? What new community appeared?

That’s a metric I’d pay attention to.

And this very platform is a great example of why this works. Its recommendation system was specifically designed around writers recommending other writers to their existing audiences. In 2024, Substack reported that recommendations together with its app were driving 50% of all new subscriptions and 25% of new paid subscriptions on the platform.

Whatever you think of Substack, that’s a pretty significant demonstration of what happens when we stop playing the lottery and use the amazing community around us to drive discovery.

Transmission, not virality, is the name of the game now. We’re not after the next Harlem Shake.

This does not require turning yourself into the product at all.

Making a strange five-minute film or writing about the question you can’t stop thinking about isn’t influencer behavior.

You don’t have to chronicle your breakfast or make a DIML every single day.

Just make the investigation visible.

Over time, you gain not just follower count, but real recognition.

“Oh, that’s the filmmaker obsessed with this!”

“That’s the person who understands that world.”

“I keep seeing this filmmaker in all the conversations I care about.”

That sounds like something pretty sustainable.

Constantly producing shit you hate because somebody told you to post five times a week? I can’t do it anymore. I’m 60 years old for crying out loud.

If the thing you’re doing to build your audience makes you hate your life, that’s just another fucking job you want to quit.

So make something you actually want to keep making, make it specific enough that the wrong people can walk past, and make it honest enough that the right people recognize something in it. That includes the “yeses” and the “maybes”

Because the person who already loves everything you make is incredibly valuable. Keep those people by all means.

But so is the person who looks at your work and says, “I’m not sure this is for me, but I know exactly who needs to see it.”