Sharing an hour with a community of like-minded creative people in similar pursuits will give you a greater “return on investment” than spending 45 days per year on social media.

Most people won’t do this because there’s no instant gratification of LIKES or shares.

An artist told me recently they paint with their art friends from around the world four times a week on Zoom, and they’ve been doing it for five years.

I don’t even need to know if that person sold 10 paintings this month, or built their email list to 10,000 people, and I don’t care. Fulfillment and a sense of belonging to something outside of ourselves can’t be measured in a spreadsheet.

Many creative people lose themselves in their phones, spending 3+ hours a day posting, engaging, and replying. Instead of scratching lottery tickets everyday hoping for that big break, put down the phone discover the real payoff with those in your creative orbit.

Substack began as a place to send newsletters to email subscribers.

Substack has since become its own bustling social media space, complete with the communal unease and tension of trying to “win” on the platform. This gets people complaining about a lack of likes or comments on their posts.

We have to remember, though, that not everybody reads newsletters in the Substack app, or on the Substack website, which is the only place to “like” a post or leave a comment.

To do either, readers must visit the Substack website or open the Substack app, a platform optimized to increase paid memberships, whether yours or someone else’s publication.

Substack needs eyeballs, and every writer sending a newsletter is how they get ’em.

This from River Selby:

Whenever we log on to a social media platform, we risk our autonomy, our agency as human beings. Everyone, myself included, wants to think that they are resistant to the negative aspects of social media: advertising, algorithmic persuasion, etc. But we aren’t. The more time we spend on these platforms, the more vulnerable we are to persuasion.

The goal of every platform is to keep you on the platform, nothing else. The time you spend on their site or app, it builds value for their shareholders, and you hand over data by the truckload with every click, swipe, and like.

Read the rest of “The Resistance Will Not Happen On Instagram (or Facebook or TikTok)” here.

Here are some things we talked about on our calls this past week:

• You’re probably not doing email wrong
• The growth vs. quality trade-off with recommendations or going viral (8,000 new subs but zero paid conversions)
• Domain validation and email deliverability (DMARC/SPF, testing tools)
• Platform sovereignty: owning your website vs. relying on platforms
• The dangers of platform dependency (Lucy Werner’s entire Substack getting wiped)
• Content restrictions and AI detection tools flagging original work as fake
• Using email marketing automations (or not)
• Physical networking still works (think business cards at conferences, zines)
• Multi-platform content strategy, the Austin Kleon model (blog + Substack)

Come join a call this week!

UPCOMING ESCAPE PODS:

◾ CO-WORK ESCAPE POD
Clean up your online store, refresh your bio, write a newsletter – come work with the Social Media Escape Club and get things done!
Tuesday, February 3
12:00 PM – 2:00 PM EST
REGISTER: https://luma.com/nadilhbk

◾ MINI ESCAPE POD Q&A #29
Limited to just three guests so you we can focus on your challenges and answer questions together.
Wednesday, February 4
11:00 AM – 11:45 AM EST
REGISTER: Members only, start a 30 trial here!

◾ ESCAPE POD VIDEO CALL #105 W/ NOLAN GREEN
​Musician Nolan Green is the force behind The Grassy Knoll, an experimental, jazz-influenced electronic and alternative rock project with a cult following dating back to the 1990s. His cinematic, genre-blurring work has appeared across film, TV, and games, including the theme for Netflix’s Bobby Kennedy for President and placements in Legion and Roswell.
Thursday, February 5
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST
REGISTER: https://luma.com/gn6hr7ig

Five actionable items from this week’s calls:

1. Test your emails before sending – Use mail-tester.com to check deliverability, send previews to multiple email providers, and check how your emails render in dark/light mode
2. Set up domain validation (DMARC/SPF/DKIM) – For email deliverability and helping prevent your newsletters from landing in spam
3. Buy your domain name now – Even if you’re not ready for a full website, secure your domain as a long-term investment towards owning your work.
4. Implement a 24-hour review period – Wait a day before sending emails and get a second pair of eyes to catch errors 
5. Start a tiny email circle – Replace sprawling Discord servers with a 4-person email thread for ongoing connection and direct collaboration (reply to this email to join one of ours)

◾ BREAK UP 💔 WITH SOCIAL MEDIA DAY
We’ll gather on Zoom to delete at least one social media app from our phone. ​This is a group break up, together, in good company.
Saturday, February 14
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST
REGISTER: https://luma.com/sime7eyi

◾ ESCAPE POD #108 W/ CARLY VALANCY
​I’ll kick things off with a 15-minute conversation with Carly Valancy about the art of reaching out and building real connections. There will definitely be a 5 minute exercise in reaching out on this call!
Thursday, March 5
2:00 PM – 3:00 PM EST
REGISTER: https://luma.com/w0oh4x06

What if you wrote five blog posts for every newsletter you send?

Most people won’t see your blog post, while the newsletter gets delivered to inboxes.

The blog is practice. The newsletter is performance.

A comic works new material, but first they write without an audience.

Some takeaways from today’s ALL EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDERS SUCK Focus Pod, where ten of us got together on a Zoom call and talked about our experiences with multiple email tools like Mailchimp, MailerLite, Squarespace, and more.

1. No one is really “doing email wrong.” A lot of people talking about their setups made it clear that the communal frustration is real. So many platforms, so many quirks, all with the usual pain points.
2. Platform vibes, not feature lists. The back and forth gave us more insight than a comparison chart or watching 12 more YouTube videos. Adult content restrictions, WordPress file upload weirdness, support loops that go nowhere, analytic blind spots… all these things come to light when get together and compare notes in real time.
3. Growth stories sound very different when told out loud. Viral posts, recommendation engines, and big numbers looked way less awesome once folks shared what actually happened afterwards, which was usually low engagement, zero paid conversions, and high churn. This felt good as it helped recalibrate what “big growth” really means.
4. Simplicity wins (for lots of different reasons). Some folks valued simple tools because they reduce tinkering and messing around with designs. Others because they reduce anxiety. Hearing those reasons side by side helped people name what they actually need from a platform, not what they think they should want.

This was a group of smart people thinking out loud together, testing assumptions, talking trash, and helping each other feel less alone in all the messy decisions we’re trying to make.

This sort of collective sense-making doesn’t translate in a recap post like this – you sort of had to be there, so consider becoming a member today!

Today I discovered dominosugarfactory.com, a site built by photographer Noah Kalina. The site features his film photographs of the Domino Sugar Factory building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn from 2008-2013, along with his current photos when he visits his old neighborhood.

I also found rekall via Rodrigo Ghedin, which he describes as “a fairly dose of cyberpunk aesthetics.” Upon further investigation, the rekall site has been updated every night by Steve Gaynor since 2010.

I made a “Website Walk” video based on the new Gourmet Magazine, too, which I found out about via Kottke. Turns out Condé Nast didn’t renew the trademark on the magazine title, so some foodie writers bought it up and relaunched it.

This isn’t a matter of “what’s old is new again,” but rather “what worked, worked.”

Keep your domain name current, and pay your hosting bill every year, and your work survives when a platform goes down, kicks you off, locks you out, or gets bought by Yahoo (we all know how that goes).

One way to get people to subscribe to your email newsletter is to get current subscribers to share it. This is what I told Greg Nichols of Onward Industries during one of my free “BREAK UP 💔 WITH SOCIAL MEDIA” 15 minute Zoom calls.

I suggested he could interview cool people he already knows that subscribed to his newsletter. Then, when their interviews lands in their inbox, they’re probably going to FWD it to some people. It’s not guaranteed you’ll get 100 new subscribers, but hey, we’re not playing the inflated social media vanity metrics game anymore, are we?

You don’t need 100 new subscribers every month, you need 10 who give a damn.

So upon talking about this with Greg, he asked if he could interview me, and I said heck yes!

“Throughout our conversation, I asked Seth to join me in a small exercise: making tiny handmade zines as we spoke. It was a quirky way to slow down, to craft meaning, and to pull our work out of the abstraction of ideas and back into our hands. That little parallel exercise ended up being deeply rewarding—less “arts & crafts” and more re-orienting to what matters.”

Watch the full interview (along with lots of quotes and commentary from Greg) here.