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Accessibility is one of the most overlooked aspects of being a creator, but it is an incredibly powerful tool to make long-term friends and, ultimately, more money.
Today, we’ll dive into how creators can leverage being accessible as a driver for growth.
The blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/accessibility-for-profit/
The blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/accessibility-for-profit/
The podcast episode: https://share.transistor.fm/s/3179a05c
You'll find my weekly article on my blog: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com
Newsletter: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/newsletter
My book Zero to Sold: https://zerotosold.com/
My book The Embedded Entrepreneur: https://embeddedentrepreneur.com/
My course Find your Following: https://findyourfollowing.com
Creators & Guests
What is The Bootstrapped Founder?
Arvid Kahl talks about starting and bootstrapping businesses, how to build an audience, and how to build in public.
Accessibility is one of the most overlooked aspects of being a creator, but it is an incredibly powerful tool to make long-term friends and, ultimately, more money.
Hey, I’m Arvid, and welcome to the Bootstrapped Founder. Today, we’ll dive into how creators can leverage being accessible as a driver for growth.
This episode is sponsored by Acquire.com, more on that later. Now, let’s find out what accessibility is and how it can make you a better creator.
As a software developer, I learned about accessibility while working for large companies. Often, we had to implement government-mandated guidelines to make our software products more usable by a wide variety of people. We implemented screen-reader friendly websites, high color contrast, tooltips, and flexible designs. It became part of my approach to writing software to think about edge cases not just in the logic, but also in the user interface that I built. Accessibility isn’t just for people with disabilities: a useful and easy-to-handle product helps everyone.
Later, as an indie hacker and solo founder, I realized its importance after attending a conference that featured a [talk about accessibility](https://marcysutton.com/talk/angular-accessibility-at-ngeuropehttps://marcysutton.com/talk/angular-accessibility-at-ngeurope). It made me think about the challenges people face when accessing and using software solutions. Now, as a creator and entrepreneur, I always consider accessibility in the work and the process beneath it. Here’s what I recommend.
### Multimodal Distribution
To make your work more accessible, try offering it in different formats that cater to various kinds of consumption. Long-form text, short form text. Video. Audio. All of these formats appeal to someone out there and are necessary for certain people to be able to enjoy your work. For example, when I started my media business, I focused on writing because I believed it to be generally accessible. However, some readers told me they struggled with my long articles due to dyslexia or other reading issues.
To help those highly valued readers, I started a podcast where I narrated my articles instead of using an automated tool. Might as well put my full effort into this. Having already written the article made it easier to create subtitles and transcripts since I was reading from a script. And when I added video, the same principle applied – the article served as the script and transcript.
Offering multiple formats ensures that at least one of them will be easy for any person to consume. Some people may prefer reading or listening over watching videos. Providing different options makes your content more inclusive and, at the same time, diversifies your platform risk. If you’re only on YouTube, you’re one account ban away from total bankruptcy. If you have a blog, a podcast, a newsletter, and a YouTube channel, you’re diversified and can recover from losing any one channel.
### A Global Audience
Another way to increase accessibility is by translating your content into other languages. Though I haven't done this yet, I’ve seen creators succeed a lot with this. AI-powered translation systems have become more reliable, making it possible to create subtitles or even synthesize your voice in another language for videos or podcasts. This can be quite some effort, but if you know that your audience struggles with English and would also like a few alternative languages, consider looking into tools that allow you to automate that translation step.
### Simple, please
As a writer, accessibility also means simplifying complex ideas and avoiding jargon that only insiders understand. Instead of using complicated words and phrases, aim for clarity so that your work can reach a wider audience. This is true for essays just as much as it is for tweets.
To appeal to a wider audience, instead of using the term "indie hacker," I try using "software entrepreneur." When writing for people outside of the software entrepreneurship business, I don't use abbreviations like "MRR." At least not without defining it first. Defining jargon terms in your writing makes it more accessible to those who are new or come from different backgrounds, and it also prevents confusion among terms that might have different meanings in another context.
Translating complex concepts into simpler ideas helps make your writing and content easier to parse and absorb. As your audience grows, accessibility becomes more important. If you outgrow your initial niche or language framework, you may attract people from other languages and locations who are interested in what you have to say. Make it as easy as you can for people to jump into your work.
Remember that everyone has a different capacity for focusing their attention. If you create short and well-scoped content, you allow more people to pay their often limited attention to it effectively. We all get distracted, and some people incredibly fast, so give them a chance to learn before they are pulled somewhere else. The easiest way to do is is leading with the conclusion and presenting your arguments afterwards.
### Financial Concerns
Let's talk a bit about financial accessibility. This means allowing people from less financially strong economies to access your content. When considering financial accessibility, think about whether people can reliably access your content through the technology they own. Can they afford the necessary device, like a computer or phone? And is your content too large or difficult for them to download?
Remember that in some locations, downloading just one blog article could take minutes or even hours. It might also use up their monthly data cap on their phone plan. So, think about saving data and reducing the data footprint of your content platforms.
Also, some people might not be able to access the platforms you’re offering your content from. If you’re only on Apple Podcasts, people without iPhone or Macs might struggle with reliably accessing your valuable work. Diversification is important here, too.
Another aspect of financial accessibility is making sure your products are priced in a way that is affordable for people from places with lower purchasing power. I personally offer [purchasing power parity pricing](https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/purchasing-power-parity-pricing/) for almost all my products, which adjusts the prices based on the financial stability and purchasing power in a country compared to where it's being sold.
This method helps people afford your product who otherwise couldn't. Selling ebooks and PDF files, I've received many emails from people grateful for purchasing power parity pricing. Several readers told me that with PPPP, it's the first time they could actually buy a product instead of pirating it. And if this isn’t a sign of value and respect, I don’t know what to say.
Even if you make less money per individual sale, allowing an entire geographic location to afford your product when they otherwise couldn't is significant. As a content creator, this is a massively powerful and severely overlooked kind of accessibility you need to keep in mind.
### Process
Think about accessibility as part of your process. You can still write and record as much as you want, but providing a baseline of exchangeable media options gives people a choice in how they consume your content.
Turn accessibility into a process. Use free tools like [Otter.ai](http://Otter.ai) to get a good-enough transcript of all your multimedia content. Get used to uploading every video to a transcription tool and not releasing content before you have subtitles and transcripts in place.
This might sound overwhelming. But it’s the right thing to do. It will make you stand out compared to other creators who assume everyone wants or can consume their content in one particular way.
Make your work accessible, and your audience will make sure it will be shared far and wide.
And that’s it for today.
I will now briefly thank my sponsor: [acquire.com](http://acquire.com/). Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product, acquired customers and is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue, the SaaS dream, right? The problem is, you're not growing for whatever reason, maybe it's lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest and you feel stuck in your business with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, reignited the fire, started working on the business, not just in the business, and all those things like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach and six months down the road, you made all that money. You've tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. But reality is unfortunately not as simple as this. And the situation that you might be in is different for every founder facing this crossroad. Too many times, the story here ends up being one of inaction or stagnation until the business itself becomes less and less valuable over time or worse, completely worthless. So if you find yourself here already or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option that's selling your business on [acquire.com](http://acquire.com/). Because capitalizing on the value of your time today, that's a pretty smart move. [Acquire.com](http://acquire.com/) is free to list. They've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to [try.acquire.com/arvid](http://try.acquire.com/arvid) and see for yourself if this is the right option for you.
Thank you for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder today. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you'll find my books and my twitter course there too. If you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder), makes a massive difference if you show up there because then the podcast will show up in other people's feeds. Any of this will help the show. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.