If You Can Name Your Readers, the Funnel Is the Wrong Shape

I spent an afternoon rebuilding my personal positioning and came out with two changes that look unrelated and are actually the same decision made twice.

The first: the positioning line moved to AI partner for fast-growing enterprises. The second: the distribution moved off broad social funnels and onto one-to-one messages, backed by long-form video explainers.

The reason both changes happened in one sitting is that I finally wrote down who I was actually writing for. And when I did, I could name them. Three people, specifically — a client chief executive, a founding pair at another client, the founder of a partner firm. Not segments. Names.

That is the diagnostic. If you can list your target readers as individuals, you do not have an audience problem, you have a relationship problem, and a funnel is the wrong instrument for a relationship problem.

Why the broadcast funnel was wrong for me

A broadcast funnel is a filtering machine. It works by putting something in front of a large number of people, most of whom are not right, and using volume plus a series of qualification steps to find the few who are. That is a good machine when your buyers are numerous, hard to identify individually, and cheap to reach.

Mine are none of those things. The people I want are experienced operators — the kind who have been punched in the mouth by a plan a few times — and there are not thousands of them within reach. There are perhaps dozens. For an audience that size, a broadcast funnel is a very expensive way of getting a message to a room I could simply walk into.

The posts, the follower counts, the reach numbers — all of it optimises for the top of a funnel whose top is small by definition. I was building a filtering machine for a set that doesn't need filtering.

So: one-to-one messages as the primary channel, with the social profiles kept alive as a passive presence rather than an engine. Depth beats reach when the total addressable audience is small and high-trust. In that regime, one message that lands is worth more than a thousand impressions that don't, and the metric that matters stops being reach and starts being how many of the named people replied.

Why the positioning had to move first

The two changes are causally linked, and in this order.

My positioning had been a description of me — generalist, builder, ambiguity-to-systems. Accurate, and useless as a channel decision, because it doesn't tell you where the reader is or what they were doing before they met you. The revised line describes a job someone is trying to get done: they are growing fast, AI is somewhere in their plan, and they need a partner rather than a vendor.

Once the line describes a job, the audience becomes concrete, and once the audience is concrete you can count it. Counting it is what killed the funnel.

The second-order benefit is the one worth stating as a rule: when your personal positioning mirrors your company's go-to-market motion, every piece of content does double duty as sales enablement. Before the change, my writing and my company's pitch were two adjacent stories that a reader had to reconcile. After it, they are one story told at two scales. Nothing has to be translated, and nothing competes for the same attention.

The structure that came out of it

Four pillars for the AkshayBuilds publication, and I think the shape generalises for anyone writing to operators rather than beginners:

• War stories — situations that were genuinely ambiguous and how they resolved, including when they resolved badly.
• Systems that held up — the mental models and structures that survived contact with reality.
• Honest tooling — what the technology does and, more usefully, what it doesn't.
• Compounding notes — small observations that only pay off in aggregate.

What these have in common is that none of them work as an explainer. An experienced operator does not need the concept explained; they need to know what happened when someone tried it. Write scars, not tutorials — a scar is not repeatable by anyone who wasn't there, which is exactly why it is worth reading.

What I am willing to be wrong about

One-to-one doesn't compound, and that is a real cost. A message sent is a message spent — there is no archive, no search traffic, no compounding surface, and no way for someone I have never met to find me. A strategy built entirely on direct outreach caps at the size of my contact list and dies quietly when I stop sending.

That is what the long-form video and the written publication are for, and I should be honest that they are the part carrying the compounding, not the part carrying the conversion. The direct messages convert people who already know me. The published work is how the list of people who know me grows at all. Cut the second and the first has a runway of about a year.

The other risk: naming three readers is clarifying right up until it becomes a constraint. Three people is a sample small enough that their idiosyncrasies read as market signal. The named-reader test is a good way to choose a channel. It is a bad way to decide what is true about a market.