Category: CommunityCategory: Community

It’s time for the BIG MONEY PIZZA PARTY!

I’m not gonna promise $10,000 a month, but hey, let’s pay a phone bill, maybe. We’re gonna talk about paid offerings, Stripe, selling stuff online.

This’ll be a kind, gentle, safe space to talk about the cash money side of creativity without the HUSTLE and SALES talk.

Wednesday, November 19 from 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST

From Joe Pulizzi:

Take a piece of your content offline. As everything around us becomes digital and synthetic, physical experiences will be like luxury goods. A printed newsletter. A quarterly dinner. A local meetup. A short book. Even a small run of “best-of” print issues. Tangibility creates trust. When everything else feels virtual, something you can hold in your hands becomes memorable, meaningful, and rare.

Found this quote the same day I found out about the Six String Social Club!

Said David, “I’m glad people are digging this idea. It’s a giver of life to players to get together with each other.”

How can you move your content into the real world?

“I need more subscribers” season is over.

Maybe now it’s Embrace What Exists season. Or Time to Celebrate Who’s Here.

The season of “more subscribers” will come around again, for sure. But today—right now—there are wonderful people already in our life and creative orbit. Maybe this can be a season (or even just a week) of honoring what already exists.

I saw Substack’s latest post, Demystifying the Feed, and figured I’d rant about it on a Substack Live!

Here’s some of the stuff I covered:

• The lottery effect: I compared Notes (and social media in general) to a lottery—someone wins big to keep the rest of us playing, but most people don’t.
• Algorithms ≠ strategy: I talked about how algorithmic feeds will always disappoint. You can’t game them, and they don’t owe us growth.
• Don’t outsource your audience: I reminded everyone that Substack is useful, but temporary. Platforms crash, change, or ghost. An email list is portable and ours forever.
• Real-world examples: I shared a story about a musician who skipped social media promo, reached out to a local newspaper and radio station, and played to 150 people in a new town—plus 30 new email signups on a clipboard. You can read that post here.
• Offline matters: I talked about how flyers, zines, and conversations still work. My own punk rock flea market table proved it—people still want to connect in person.
• Community ≠ platform: I said Substack makes great tools, but the “community” belongs to them, not us. Real community happens off-platform.
• For quieter creatives: I encouraged folks to stay authentic—slow growth, not performance. I’d rather grow as myself than pretend to be louder or slicker than I am.
• Blog and email > Notes: I emphasized that everything I post on Notes should also live on my own site.
• Let unsubscribes go: I reminded everyone to stop watching unsubscribe counts. I don’t track them either, it’s better to just focus on who stays.
• Final takeaway: The way I “demystify the feed” is by not relying on it. I’d rather build small circles, reach people directly, and keep the internet human-sized.

Yonder Surf Zine sums it up pretty well (get a copy here):

“For years now, we’ve been giving our words, thoughts and images to a $100 Billion tech company. It feels like we’ve lost control of our cultural narrative to a social media algorithm.

We’ve handed the very essence of our culture to the Silicon Valley tech bros and we’re losing our own minds in the process. We do it to justify our existence as surfers or creatives; in an eternal battle for online attention. It’s not good for us; it’s not good for surf culture and it’s not good for future generations.”

Why don’t people visit websites anymore? Because we put all our best work on someone else’s website, namely Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, YouTubeetc.

If we put all our best work on these various platforms that we don’t control, what incentive is there to visit our websites?

And remember – these platforms monetize our work. We are the product, the never ending feed of text and images and videos and hot takes. These companies cram all this “content” into a feed, throw in advertisements, and make money.

Guitarist Steve Vai knew this years ago, saying (as the artist) “I get paid the most.”

(Yonder link via Looking Sideways)