Remember when the internet made sense?
You followed someone, you saw their posts. You posted something, your followers saw it. Fair and clean.
Now you’re scrolling through content you never asked for from accounts you don’t follow.
And here’s the kicker – when YOU post something important, maybe 3% actually see it. The rest is buried under engagement bait.
Platforms basically told you: “Thanks for bringing your audience. We’ll handle the relationship from here.”
Cool. Super cool.
We traded control for convenience, and now we’re stuck with a mess that’s built for engagement, dopamine and doomscrolling.
Digital Sharecropping
(aka “Welcome to the Farm”)
Nobody says this out loud, so I will.
Building your business on social media = farming someone else’s land.
You do the work. You plant the seeds. You water the plants every day. You work your ass off pulling the weeds..
Then one day the landlord wakes up cranky and changes the rules. Because he can. Because you signed a 534-page terms of service agreement you absolutely didn’t read. Nobody did. Only their lawyers.
I found a guy on Instagram last month. Painter. Legit talent. Gorgeous art.
He built 80,000 followers over four years. People loved him.
Then the algorithm shifted.
His reach dropped 93%.
Ninety. Three. Percent.
His sales stopped – they’d been coming mostly through Instagram DMs.
He tried everything. Posting at different times. Reels. Stories. Carousels. Even dancing on camera while holding his paintings.
Nothing worked.
“What did I do wrong?” he cried. “Should I try TikTok?”
I wanted to hug him and shake him at the same time because he didn’t do anything wrong. He just built a customer base he didn’t own and now he was talking about doing it again somewhere else.
That’s not a business – that’s a hamster wheel with better lighting.
And honestly, he isn’t even the worst case. At least he still had his account. Because when the algorithm punches people in the throat, most folks…
Playing musical chairs, but everyone loses
They react the same way. They just… pick a new platform and start over, thinking THIS will be the one.
Telegram! Until it goes dark in your country. Or changes its policies. Or people stop checking it. (because nobody needs 100 channels in their life)
LinkedIn tried to be “professional.” Now it’s motivation porn and fake success stories. “I was homeless three months ago, now I run a 7-figure agency selling courses about running 7-figure agencies.”
The math doesn’t math, but okay.
Discord!
Great idea. Build your business on a gaming platform designed for teenagers to yell at each other during Fortnite matches. What could possibly go wrong?
Twitter became X and… yeah. If you think THAT’S stable I’ve got a bridge to sell you. Actually, Elon already bought it and renamed it “Bridge X.” Tickets start at $8/month.
The pattern never changes. A platform lures you in with “free reach,” you build there for years, they change the rules, now you pay to talk to the people you already earned.
Chef’s kiss. Very sustainable. No notes.
Moving from Instagram to Telegram isn’t a solution – it’s just changing landlords. Same farm, but the crops just have different emojis.
Meanwhile, you still have an actual business to run. Or you’re trying to.
But here’s what nobody wants to admit: The platform hopping isn’t the problem – it’s a symptom.
The actual problem is that you’re renting attention and the rent keeps going up while the value keeps going down.
Renting vs. owning
I’m not a control freak about most things. My workspace is a mess. I wear the same hoodie 7 days in a row. I don’t care.
But my business? I need leverage. When I pull a lever, something needs to happen. I need to know that what I built today will be there tomorrow.
So let me be really blunt: If your main way of reaching customers lives on social media, your business sits in danger right now. Not “someday maybe” danger. Like, right now danger.
Answer this: If Meta locks your accounts tomorrow morning, how would you reach those people?
“But I didn’t do anything wrong!”
Doesn’t matter.
Their algorithm doesn’t care. Their AI doesn’t care. The underpaid moderator who glanced at your account for 4.2 seconds before lunch definitely doesn’t care.
Just one false flag. One policy change. One competitor who mass-reports your account because you’re an easy target. And Poof. Gone.
Even your 150,000 followers don’t mean anything if you can’t reach them.
That’s like storing your customer database in someone else’s safe and they only open it when they feel like it. Sometimes. Maybe. For a fee.
You would never accept that deal if I described it like that.
Yet here we are, living our best sharecropping lives and acting like this is normal business.
The last real channel
There’s exactly one channel left that behaves like a real business tool.
Email.
I know. I KNOW. It feels like fax machines and rolodexes.
And yes, 95% of the email you see is spam. But that’s a sampling error. That’s like visiting only gas station bathrooms and deciding every bathroom on earth is disgusting.
Meanwhile, quiet businesses generate millions through private inbox conversations you never witness. You won’t see the best email marketers unless you’re on their lists (and most people aren’t). So everyone judges email based on the worst 5%.
I avoided email for my whole life too. And wow, I was wrong.
Email is the only channel where “permission granted” actually means “message delivered.”
Someone opts in. You send an email. It lands in their inbox. They open it.
No side algorithm deciding if they’re allowed to see it. No platform deciding your post “isn’t engaging enough.” No Zuckerbergs waking up deciding to pivot to VR office spaces.
Only you and the people who said, “Tell me more about what you’re doing.”
On social, you pay every time you want to reach your audience. Time or money. Every time. Forever.
With email, you invest once to acquire the subscriber. Then their LTV belongs to you. (or until they choose to leave, it’s their choice)
When I just started auditing businesses, I asked one question: “How many customers came directly from social posts?”
Average answer: 8-12%. The rest came from email, word of mouth, search, or direct traffic.
But these same businesses were spending 60-70% of their budget optimizing for visibility, not revenue.
So I ran the numbers.
Average social follower value: about $0.003 per follower per post.
Average email subscriber value: $1-3 per subscriber per month.
Not 10%. Not double. ONE THOUSAND times more valuable.
That’s not “slightly better” – that’s a different universe.
Because visibility doesn’t equal revenue. Access does.
Email gives you that access – what’s why it’s an actual business asset that appears on your balance sheet. This thing you can carry with you EVEN if every platform spontaneously combusts.
Your backup generator
You know why hospitals have backup generators?
Not because the main power fails often (it usually doesn’t). Because when it DOES fail, people die. And that’s considered “bad for business.”
Your email list is your backup generator.
Maybe social media keeps working forever. Maybe the algorithms stay friendly. Maybe your accounts never get locked. Maybe Elon Musk becomes a stable, predictable business partner.
Maybe.
But what if they don’t?
What if Facebook decides tomorrow that business pages need to pay $500/month for “verified reach”? (Don’t think they won’t. They’re a public company. They answer to shareholders, not you.)
So. Do you have a backup generator? Or do you just hope the power never goes out?
I’m not a betting man, but those are terrible odds.
So here’s what you do instead…
Get off the farm (but keep the crops)
Look, I get it. Social media is where everyone is. It’s where the virality happens. It’s where the memes are born and die.
Post. Have fun. Ship memes. Do your dancing Reels. Live your truth.
But for God’s sake, don’t build your business on it.
Use social media like a billboard – create awareness and drive people somewhere. But that “somewhere” must be something you own.
Your email list is that something.
And you don’t even need 10,000 subscribers to make sales.
Start with 100. Hell, start with 50.
Put a simple form on your website. Offer something valuable in exchange. Set up a basic welcome sequence. That’s it.
Six months from now you’ll feel insanely relieved you started today. Or you’ll stand in the ashes of your Instagram account whispering, “Wow. Nobody warned me.”
Except… consider this the warning.
If you’re reading this and thinking “Yep. I’ve been sharecropping too,” good news: I can help.
I help entrepreneurs turn their subscribers into revenue using email – welcome sequences, sales automations, the whole thing.
You can focus on your business and be confident that when the AI slop tsunami hits, you’ll still have a direct line to your customers.
You’ll have a system that runs 24/7 delivers your message and making sales.
>>> Click here to see how we can work together
All because you own the channel.
P.S. Remember when Instagram chronological feeds worked? Email doesn’t change the rules. Go check your last 5 receipts – I bet none came via DM. The world runs on the ‘boring’ stuff.