One Poll Showed Her She’d Built for the Wrong Audience

You don’t know your audience as well as you think you do. That’s the thing I couldn’t stop chewing on after sitting down with Leah Maselli — because she’s living proof of how expensive that gap can get.

Leah had 96,000 followers. A Pilates instructor and registered dietitian posting reformer flows that were getting saved thousands of times. From the outside, she was crushing it.

Then she ran one poll.

The poll that changed everything

She asked her audience a dead-simple question, basically: “Who are you guys?” She figured they were Pilates enthusiasts — people who liked Pilates and wanted to follow along.

Almost every single one said the same thing: I’m an instructor. Not fans. Teachers. People saving her flows to teach in their own classes.

Here’s the part that stings. She’d just spent an entire summer filming workout content — not instructor content — and built a whole app around it. For an audience that didn’t exist. Her real audience didn’t want workouts. They wanted class plans and teaching tips.

Her audience had been telling her who they were the whole time. The poll just made it impossible to ignore.

One poll. That’s all it took to see it. She leaned all the way into who was actually there, started posting class plans, and it took off. That single pivot is the reason she now runs not one, but two memberships — mostly by herself.

Run the same play this week

The best part is that none of this required an agency, a survey tool, or a single guess. You can run the exact same play before your next coffee gets cold:

1. Drop an open question box on your story: “What do you want more of from me?”
2. Watch for the theme — the same request keeps showing up.
3. Turn the top three or four answers into a poll, and let the majority vote.
4. When about five people ask for the same thing, go build it.

That last one is Leah’s rule, not mine. She told me that two years ago, a single request was enough to send her building for a whole day. Now her bar is roughly five people asking for the same thing — enough signal to act, not so much that she waits forever. It’s a simple filter that keeps her shipping the things her audience actually wants.

Three more things worth stealing

We got into way more than the poll. A few things are still rattling around in my head.

“Dip your toes” before you leap

Leah walked away from a stable hospital job — the one she’d put herself six figures into debt for — but she didn’t free-fall. She built the free version of her app, sat in her own DMs, asked people what they wanted, and grew that side revenue until it out-earned her clinical work. Only then did she jump. Her framing is calculated risk: name the two or three biggest things that could go wrong, figure out what mitigates each one, and at some point stop calculating and make the leap.

Solve their second problem

Her newest business, Pilatespreneur, came from a single idea she heard in a business-coaching video: your first business solves your audience’s first problem; your next one solves their second. Her first problem solved was instructors not knowing what or how to teach. Their second problem? The exact burnout she’d lived — teaching 30 to 40 hours a week with no recurring revenue. So she built the thing that solves it.

Read your analytics with your coffee

As a one-woman show, Leah says her data is the only driver she has besides asking her audience directly. So every morning she checks it over coffee — revenue, retention, churn, acquisition. The number that surprised her recently: she’d been posting advanced content because she loves it, but her members kept searching for intermediate and all-levels plans. A useful gut-check for any of us.

I’m not creating content for myself. I’m creating content for my subscribers.

If you want the full story — the migration, the marriage and the move all in the same stretch, and how she sold a high-ticket cohort with no testimonials — the whole conversation is worth your time.