Moving Your Audience Up The Creator Gravity Pyramid: How to Go From "Meh" to Magnetic
If 2026 is your year of creating online, writing, and building your "personal brand," tuck this blueprint in your back pocket.
If there’s one person Twitter’s algorithm adores, it’s this fellow:
These posts are from Nick Huber, an entrepreneur and real estate investor. Nick sold his business, the Startup Squad, in 2021 for $1.7M, before starting a real estate private equity and self-storage operations firm. Today, that firm’s portfolio is valued at an estimated $100M.
Despite these asinine takes, Nick is no bumbling dunce. To have amassed such a lascivious portfolio, he must have put in years of work, zeal, and grit. He accumulated a lot of wisdom—the kind you could, theoretically, distill on the internet and build a sizable audience around. But instead of sharing his hard-earned insights on property management and entrepreneurship, Nick thought:
No.
That alone won’t do.
Instead, Nick realized that posting inflammatory takes would turn his personal brand into a juggernaut.
And go stratospheric he did.
In just a few years, Nick grew his Twitter audience to half a million by posting mostly engagement bait.
However! I’m not here to critique Nick’s brainless takes. I’m here to talk about how the hundreds of thousands of followers he amassed weren’t worth nearly what he thought. Because when it came time to cash in, his gold proved about as valuable as Chuck E. Cheese tokens.
Last February, Nick announced his new book: The Sweaty Startup: How to Get Rich Doing Boring Things. The post got one million impressions but generated just 271 sales. In other words, 0.03% of people who saw Nick’s post bought his book.
By April, things didn’t seem much better:
What went wrong? How could Nick have such a vast audience but convince only a minuscule fraction of them to spend $15 on his book?
The short answer is that most people don’t want to buy books from someone who bashes doctors or champions ethically dubious Filipino labor.
The longer answer is Nick hadn’t ascended the Creator Gravity Pyramid. He had hundreds of thousands of followers, but few fans.
Think of every creator’s audience climbing five levels:
Discovery. People see you. The algorithm randomly serves them your content.
Engagement. People interact with you. They consume your post, leave a comment, like, share, or follow.
Magnetism. People seek you out. They bypass the algorithm to find you, binge your backlog, and will consume all your new content.
Commitment. People invest in you. They trust you, and are willing to spend time, energy, and money to support you.
Identity. People see themselves in your creations. They now belong to your philosophy, movement, or way of seeing the world, and feel instant kinship with your other fans.
As your audience climbs this pyramid—and they transition from follower to fan—the strength of your Creator Gravity increases. This is the gravitational force around your online planet that pulls people and opportunities into your orbit.
In Nick’s case, he was lodged at the second level: Engagement. Which is pretty common! Many creators get obsessed with metrics and mistake virality for value.
Like, it’s all fun and games to watch your follower count balloon while you declare that having kids after 35 is a huge mistake or that childhood vaccines are unnecessary.
That is, until you want your audience to move up the pyramid and support you, whether by becoming a paid subscriber, booking a 1:1 call, or, I don’t know, buying a book.
Unfortunately for Nick, provoking people isn’t the same thing as procuring their trust or respect. And without those, the chances of them supporting you are slim.
To Nick’s credit, this whole snafu did appear to snap him out of his rage-bait autopilot:
Now, let’s zoom-in on a creator whose audience, I think, has climbed all five levels: Anna Howard. Anna is a NYC-based actress, podcast strategist, and runs The Wild Geese Pod, a gorgeous, sincere, deeply human podcast that is adored by her listeners:
Here’s what it looked like for me to move up her pyramid:
Discovery: I first found Ana’s podcast after YouTube suggested I watch ‘creating a digital garden to end doomscrolling.’
Engagement: I freaking loved it and followed her on Spotify and YouTube.
Magnetism: Soon after, I’d binger her entire backlog, from ‘how language shapes the way we think,’ to ‘a writing practice to help you meet yourself’ and I couldn’t wait for new videos.
Commitment: I’m subscribed to her paid Substack, and the next time she hosts a meetup in NYC, I’m there.
Identity: I don’t just “consume” Anna’s work. Her content broadens my worldview. It touches me. And if she were drop merch, and I spotted a stranger wearing it in the wild, I’d feel like we’d get along.
How to Move Your Audience Up The Pyramid
If 2026 is your year of creation, writing, pulling in dream opportunities, and building your “personal brand” (*wince*), the Creator Gravity Pyramid is your blueprint. The first step is asking yourself:
Where on the pyramid is my audience?
If your posts get views but no one is commenting, sharing, or following you, they’re at Level 1.
If your posts get lots of engagement in the moment, but you have no DMs, anyone asking you follow-up questions, and when you launch something, crickets, they’re at Level 2.
If you have people in your DMs asking when your next post is going to be, or telling you they binged your entire newsletter, but when you ask them to commit time or money, they ghost, they’re at Level 3.
If you have people subscribed to your paid Substack, booking 1:1 calls, but no one is quoting your ideas, using your frameworks, or starting their own communities based on your work, they’re at Level 4.
If you have people using your coined language, putting your community affiliation in their bio, creating content about being part of your world, and audience members bonding about being mutual fans, they’re at Level 5.
Once you know where your audience lands on the pyramid, you can meet them where they are and move them up.
Explaining how to move people up this pyramid step-by-step will have to be its own separate guide. Don’t hate me! Otherwise, this article would turn into a beast (and it’s already over 1267 words long!).
But there are two things you can take away today:
Avoid the Engagement Trap.®
Lots of followers and reactions feel good. (As Anne Lamott would say, they’re a nice big white plate of cocaine for your ego.) But virality does not equal gravity.
Getting people from Level 4 (Commitment) to Level 5 (Identity) is a whole different game.
It’s not just about “making good content.”
You can make the most delightful, shareable content in the world, and still never hit Level 5 if you’re not actively fostering community and “world-building.”
You need to:
Engage with your audience (not just broadcast at them!):
Q&As
Livestreams
Respond to comments and DMs
Have rituals, traditions, and shared language:
Inside jokes
Weekly threads
Coined language
Recurring formats
Make your fans visible to one other so they bond with each other (not just you):
Host in-person meetups
Have an online community platform (Slack, Discord, Circle, etc)
In short, you’re going to need to put in a big fat dollop of effort.
And it’s much easier to instead post engagement bait, AI slop, a Get Ready With Me, platitudes on hard work, then just kick back, relax, and watch the likes pour in.
But if you made it to the end of this article, I’m willing to bet that’s not you.
You’re not here to fart out some barren, sterile world. You’re here to make virtuoso work, and for it to become a blooming planet.
That means planting ideas. Tending to the soil. Nurturing your community. It means showing up even when the ground is cracked, growth feels slow, and you’re tempted to give up already and get Kentucky Bluegrass instead, synthetic sheen be damned!
It’s hard. Not everyone will do it. Which is exactly why it’s more important now than ever.
Today I learned that I’m at Level 0 🥲
I almost clicked off of this once I saw Nick's face lol. Though I loved the lesson here. A great reminder!