New People, Same Inside Jokes
Dr. Shareika Fisher used a phrase this past Monday night that I have since said out loud, unprompted, at least four times — including once to my husband, who's all-too-familiar with my frequent trips down rabbit holes.
"Sticky web."
We were sitting at Greater Grounds the evening after our So This Happened Podcast anniversary party, sipping Sauvy B, still a little glowy and definitely a little tired, her beautiful Freish Florals bouquets sitting on the table between us. If you're newer around here: So THIS Happened is the podcast I co-host with Rachel Chappelle, local to Wichita, recorded live around town with wine glasses in hands. It has its own little world attached to it — our community we lovingly call the "Sip Squad".
During that evening's recording of our Season 2 premiere, Shareika Fisher Ed.D. was telling us how she ended up staying in Wichita fourteen years past the "three years, tops" plan. Not on purpose. The connections just kept multiplying until leaving would've meant untangling herself from half the city. You know the florist, who knows the event planner, who happens to sponsor your podcast, who introduces you to the woman running a 2,000-person leadership summit at the same coffee shop you both already treat like a second office. That's the web. Once it's sticky, apparently, it stays sticky.
I loved the phrase enough that it took me a full day to notice it had also solved a problem I'd been carrying around since a few weeks earlier.
That problem started in a completely different setting — no coffee shop, no wine, just a Zoom recording — with Dorien Morin-van Dam, who we'd hosted on Making A Marketer Podcast to talk organic strategy. If So THIS Happened is my Wichita show, Making a Marketer is the older one: the marketing podcast I co-host with my longtime friend Megan Powers, M.A.💥, less "local love letter," more "let's actually talk shop." Somewhere in that conversation with Dorien, she said something almost too simple to catch the first time: "pay-to-play only works once there's real ground underneath it. People want to know you before they buy from you. You don't skip the dating and go straight to the wedding."
Here's my confession. I have built my personal brand — and, lately, the whole strategy behind both shows — on one belief: community over audience. So imagine my mild spiral when I noticed what I've actually been watching on the dashboard. Not follower engagement. Non-follower reach. New eyes. Strangers, basically, and how many of them are wandering close enough to notice us.
For about a week, it felt like I'd been caught cheating on my own values. Then Dr. Fisher's web metaphor showed up and quietly rearranged the furniture in my head.
A bigger web isn't the same thread stretched thinner. It's more thread.
I'd been picturing community and audience as opposite ends of a dial — every new stranger nudging us a little further from intimacy, a little closer to polite strangers nodding along without getting the inside jokes. A web doesn't work that way. More strands just means more places for someone to land somewhere warm.
Which, it turns out, was Dorien's point too, just dressed in marketing language. The organic foundation is what makes the paid reach actually convert, because the stranger isn't landing on nothing. They're landing on structure that already exists — trust that's already holding, a Sip Squad that's already happy to catch someone up on the running jokes. Reach doesn't replace the relationship. It just hands more people a door.
I still think about the pushback I get at my day job for believing this so stubbornly — that organic has to come first, that you earn the right to be found before you go hunting for strangers. I used to feel a little precious defending that, like I was the last person still using a paper map. Turns out I wasn't wrong. I just hadn't heard the right metaphor yet, and this one came to me over flowers and a glass of Sauvy B.
So here's where I actually land on it: growing our reach was never the thing threatening our community. It was always just more web. The goal was never to keep the circle small for the sake of feeling exclusive — it was to make sure whoever wanders in has something real to land on when they get there. The inside jokes aren't in danger. There are just more people who haven't heard them yet.
If you're eyeing a growth number right now and feeling a little guilty, like it means you've traded depth for reach, ask yourself one thing: what are you actually giving the people behind that number once they show up? If the honest answer is a real place to land, you're not thinning anything out. You're just weaving more web.
