Category: sethwCategory: sethw

You can post about things being unfair, or you can do the work and make art.

I’ve seen this from all sorts of creative folks, from people just starting out to Grammy nominees, dating back to my music blog days in the early 2000s.

I get it – part of the problem is that people aren’t aware that Spotify doesn’t pay well. Or that simply “liking” something “really does help” with the algorithm.

But what resonates for me with this clip of comedian Anthony Jeselnik is that no one is gonna see him hurt. There’s enough hurt in this business. Why add to the pity party? Who does a crack in the armor serve?

The art doesn’t need excuses, it needs work.

From Lucy Werner of Hype Yourself, talking about how to get closer to the sorts of people you want to be working with (from one our recent Escape Pod Zoom calls).

“One of my mantras is: put yourself where you don’t belong. Yes, it’s good to have your squad of people doing similar things to empathize with, but I always like to be the only PR (person) in a room full of artists and creatives. That’s my happy space — they’re the people I want to hang out with.”

Lucy did this at a market hall, where people were “selling jeans, or candles, or perfumes, or whatever. And I just sat there with a sign, being like, 15 minutes of free PR or branding advice.”

She said she was busy all day “because we were the only service-based people sat in a market store around product sellers.”

Joi Katskee does a radio show, and on one of our calls she told us how she talked about her program at an open mic night.

I made flyers for Social Media Escape Club, and set them out at a punk rock flea market while selling some old music gear. This led to about a dozen face to face conversations with all sorts of people about wanting to get off social media.

The common theme here is none of us hoped for an algorithm to bring the right people to us, we just showed up.

So if you’ve been thinking that social media is the only way to find your people, I just gave you three examples of meeting people in the real world, one conversation at a time. Instead of chasing follower counts or engagement, find new ways to get around the people you want to work with.

And start figuring that out with other creative folks by joining one of our upcoming calls!

In this conversation via Substack Live with Dr. Zeest Khan, we talk about leaving social media, building community that actually matters, and why chasing joy beats the heck out of chasing metrics.

(more…)

Someone on a recent Escape Pod Zoom call shared a perfect example of how social media isn’t a great way to organize an event.

They told us how an organization was promoting an event entirely through Facebook. Now, this person is a valued part of this community, but they’re not on social media, so they had no idea it was happening!

They only found out via text from someone else, and when they showed up, organizers and members hugged them and said, “Oh, thank goodness we didn’t know that you were going to make it!”

This is why you don’t center your community around social media, because even the people that follow you aren’t guaranteed to see every update. Consider than in 2026, a growing number of people aren’t even on social media anymore.

So get phone numbers, get an email addresses, heck, get mailing addresses; it’s time to get away from trusting the social media algorithms, and get back to connecting directly with your people.

Maybe you tried to do a Substack Live once or twice, nobody showed up, and then you figured it’s a big waste of time. No, screw that, just keep showing up!

When we were talking about this on Saturday (check the schedule for more), and it lines up well with our conversation last week with Sean Gordon, the co-owner of Taffeta Music Hall. They’re not trying to get people to show up for a live stream, but rather live events, like open mics, comedy nights, trivia nights, that sort of thing.

“We’re doing a comedy open mic night the second Wednesday of every month now… the first one, maybe like 10 people showed up. But the comedy… the comics understand, believe me, if anyone understands the growth and success of something, it’s comics.”

If you want to have a regular event where 50 people show up every week, ya gotta start somewhere!

“Those few people that are there, you gotta make sure that they have a good time, and you gotta make sure they come back, because if they’re gonna come back, they’re gonna bring a friend… and then it just kind of snowballs from there.”

Again, Sean is talking about live events, but this applies to live streams, too (and just about everything).

It’s not that no one cares about the thing you’re trying to do, it’s that no one knows! Your job is to just keep showing up, because people can’t discover what doesn’t exist if you quit too soon.

Go live this week, but do more than “just” announcing it once and thinking that everyone saw it. Invite some people personally. Like, individual emails, DMs, or texts. Figure out how to host three people first, to learn and understand how to manage a gathering. Make your mistakes in front of just a few (and probably very understanding) people instead of 20 strangers.

You build trust by showing up, and your reputation is built on the work with the people in the room.