Category: InterviewCategory: Interview

On today’s Substack Live Mel Mitchell-Jackson and I talked about internet platform burnout, leaving stable jobs to pursue creative work, social media’s failure to convert to actual sales, the importance of building trust, and why it’s so hard to make art when also trying to please the algorithms.

Mel on dashboards, and playing the numbers game:

“These stats dashboards just want you to be working harder, faster, all the time and they don’t think about your well being. And that is horrible for a creative person because then you lose your own sacred space to make your work.”

On getting views on platforms, but not much sales:

“I was promoting the program on both YouTube and TikTok. And in the promotion on TikTok, I was posting every day. Sometimes three times a day… I was spending a full time job, like 36 hours a week on TikTok in order to promote this thing. And then when I looked at my like backend website stats, I learned that none of my traffic or sales for this were brought by TikTok. I was just spinning my wheels.”

Oh, and Mel talks about a video they made about one of their paintings, and it got 500,000 views on TikTok, but didn’t lead to one sale.

Artist David Speed from today’s Substack Live:

“From all of these brilliant minds that I’ve had on (the podcast), the overwhelming thing that comes through is just keep making stuff. Because through the things that you will make, you will process the world around you. You will learn what resonates with people and what doesn’t. You’ll find your niche. You’ll find your groove. You’ll find your people. And you’ll get better at what you do. So just keep making stuff. I think make is the most important word that we have. And it is my mission on this planet to encourage people to make stuff. Make as many things as you can. Leave behind a legacy of beautiful things that you’ve made. Make, make, make.”

Listen to the full interview to hear us talk about:

• How 3K email subscribers is mightier than 160,000 Instagram followers
• Small in-person events build trust
• David’s monthly free studio paint sessions in London
• Start a podcast (and listen to David’s Creative Rebels Podcast)
• Plant flags everywhere
• AI slop makes people want to get back to real human-created work

(more…)

I joined Russell Nohelty as a guest on his Substack Live as part of his January Joy(ful) Growth Club.

“If you gain a thousand new followers on social media, you might reach ten percent of them. Might as well get a hundred people on your email list.”

One of my favorite lines to throw around, ‘cuz it’s true!

Russell and I talked about building creative careers without relying on social media, using music, writing, comedy, and live events as examples of how audiences actually grow: slowly, locally, and through lots of repetition – because no one sees everything we post!

“I don’t do (Substack) Lives where there’s no energetic exchange beyond that hour,” said Russell, “I want something I can give back to my audience.”

The conversation covered message repetition, storytelling around your work, why most people don’t see everything you publish, and how having an audience gives you the freedom to make work that isn’t optimized for going viral but still matters.

We work to impress algorithms in hopes they’ll share our stuff, when we should be working to impress our readers so they’ll share it with other humans.

And Dr. Julie Kellogg reminds us; “AND, we must ask people to share our work.”

Even Seth Godin asked readers to share his original ‘Unleashing the Ideavirus‘ PDF back in the year 2000.

I was honored to be asked to be Bree Noble’s podcast recently to talk about musicians trying to “make it all work” in 2025, coping with social media burnout, the vanity metrics, and how to maybe build something sustainable without sacrificing your sanity.

A lot can get distilled to the fact that a lot of what you post isn’t seen by like 95% of your followers. Or the gut-punch that every artist has felt, when you do everything “right” on social media and still get just four likes. As I put it on the show: “You reached fourteen people. That’s disheartening.“

We dug into what actually works, like playing a Tuesday-night show to fifteen people and making fans, or how grabbing a few emails after a set beats begging a platform to show your post to strangers on the internet.

Bree is a legend, and has spoken with so many artists over the years. She talks to Elaine Ryan about balancing gigs and sync work, Marc Christian about booking high-end events, Raven Rae about sustainable music careers – check out all of those interviews here!