Relying on a platform to get it right is hard because platforms are made up of people, and it’s hard for people to get it right for everyone all the time.

I was on the phone with my buddy Dino Corvino the other day, bumming about the recent election, and he said, “Someone in your town is hungry; make them a sandwich.”

I searched “Thanksgiving volunteer (your town)” in Google and found a local non-profit organizing meals for the upcoming holidays. I told a friend, and we went out and bought three meals for people needing a Thanksgiving dinner.

Today, for me, that’s my answer to all this.

From Embedded:

“It’s time to stop ceding our humanity to these platforms. It’s time to invest back into IRL community. It’s time to stop 24/7 scrolling social media—you will not find the answers there.”

I’ll find more of the answer when I drop off these three boxes of meals later this week because the answer is people, not platforms.

We need more people working on bringing joy into the world instead of uploading vertical videos for no one to see.

As Alice Katter says,

“The systems we live and work in today are human-made; they were created by people. So, why not create something different? That’s the beauty of creativity — it has the power to overcome established rules and even the language we use daily.”

Get to know the people who work at your local record shop, music store, gas station, library, or grocery store.

Say hi to your neighbors. Tell other creative people you like their work. Start Zoom hangs or phone calls with your friends.

Start a blog, an email list, a neighborhood group, a community meeting of artists, or gardeners, or joggers.

Conversely, don’t hang out with people who drain your energy. Set boundaries. Cut people from your life if you need to. Yes, even family. Life is short.

Spare me the “echo chamber” talk. We can have different opinions about economic policies and football teams, but if you think people I love don’t deserve basic human rights, well, go fuck yourself.

Yes, we should continue throwing stones at Spotify and Apple and Facebook and Amazon, but we can also do the work of engaging our communities for the benefit of humanity at the same time.

We can create new systems, new ways of working, new ways to show our work. I know it’d be super cool if I just laid out all the answers for your super-niche category, but I promise that you already have the ideas inside of you.

Do the thing you want to do. Most people won’t see what you’re doing anyway, so you might as well do it how you want.

Email someone way up the food chain. Go to the event. Ask for an introduction. Make your own luck. Your next big break could be one email, one interaction, one person away.

Hitting the viral jackpot on social media won’t save you, but building genuine connections with people around you just might.

We’re not meant to stare at our phones for several hours every day. As Tuğba Avci says:

“It isn’t easy, but we need to start treating our mental and emotional health with the same importance as our physical health. You wouldn’t run a marathon every day, would you? So why do we subject ourselves to this communication madness for 12 hours straight?”

We make ourselves more available to anyone at any time, as we might be on several different social media platforms and their DM inboxes and replies, Slack channels and Discords, and managing multiple email inboxes.

As Seth Godin recently wrote:

“You might not have thought you’d be spending seven hours a day reading the internet, or most of your free time posting and responding, but that’s what the social media companies have pushed us to do.

We’re so scared of leaving social media because we’ve been led to believe we’ll be alone without it.

So, how can we possibly live without social media?

We read books. Magazines. Visit our library and local bookstores. Join a knitting club or take a photography course. Learn a new skill or a language (or two).

We can play shows in weird venues. We do book clubs in diners (or Zoom). We make comic books and zines, podcasts on cassettes, and screen print our own posters.

We build websites, and we update them. We send newsletters that aren’t just digital product catalogs. We buy photo prints and postcards and vinyl from our friends, and if we’re broke we at least tell our friends about the cool things our friends are making.

We stop talking about the 900 things we read yesterday and instead tell stories of shit we’ve done, places we’ve been. Trust me, you’ve got stories.

We host dinners without cell phones. We make breakfast for friends. We talk up our friends who do good work with people who can hire them.

We start radio shows at the local college, make ambient music, make short films with our iPhones, and bring together friends to premiere our work over pizza and seltzers.

None of this is a guarantee. None of this goes viral, or brings in 100 new subscribers, or pays your rent.

None of this is easy.

People working at social media platforms made sure that posting a video is as easy as possible. That makes everything else feel like hard work.

But we need to do hard work because when done often enough, with good people, we create a scene and build culture. That’s how we find our people and start feeling less alone in all of this, because we can’t hang out at the food court at the mall on Friday nights forever.

Let’s start hosting our own Zoom calls, and meeting in basements, studios, and backrooms to create the creative world we want to inhabit.

I posted this over the weekend on Substack Notes, but you probably didn’t see it.

Five people called me, and we had some nice chats.

Most of my email subscribers don’t spend time on Substack Notes, and probably don’t even know it exists.

I’m certain of this, as over 80% of you read my newsletter in your email inbox.

It might be the same for your newsletter, too.

Hard truth: Substack Notes is social media, where algorithms control what you see and where most of your audience doesn’t see what you post anyway.

The best remedy to all this is delivering a message to their inbox.

This is why when you post a new song on Spotify, you should send an email to your fans to let them know. You can’t trust that Spotify will surface this new song to all your subscribers on their platform.

If you post a new video on YouTube, you should still send an email to your subscribers and let them know. You can’t trust YouTube to distribute your new video to everyone who subscribed to your channel.

Leaving the distribution of your work to algorithmic platforms is a dead-end street. Posting isn’t enough; you have to reach out to your audience directly if you want to survive.

Now, maybe you’ve got some objections…

🚫 Sending too many emails is spammy

✅ If people don’t want to hear from you, let ‘em leave. An unsubscribe is just making room for someone else to come and enjoy your work.

✅ Funny how we don’t want to send too many emails, yet most of us posted multiple times per hour on social media, right?

🚫 Sending a newsletter is too much work

✅ You don’t have to make vertical videos, and you don’t need to make new static images. If you’ve already posted about your new thing on Instagram, just copy and paste the caption you wrote – 95% of your audience didn’t see it anyway, so re-use it!

🚫 I don’t have enough email subscribers

✅ If you have 1,000 social media followers, you might reach 10% of them (that’s 100 people).

✅ If you have 100 email subscribers, 99.9% of them will get your next newsletter (so make sure you write a good subject line).

The best email to send to your fans is one that they expect.

If someone bought your last album, signed up for your class, or bought your latest print, chances are they’ll be receptive to getting an email about your brand-new offering.

This is the work I do with a record label client.

When High On Fire has a new record coming out, guess what? We email the folks who bought the last High On Fire album.

We did this for Death Row Records, too. If we had a new shirt drop, we’d send to people who bought shirts in the past.

A higher percentage of people will open a segmented email than if we sent it to everyone on our list.

And better-targeted emails can make you more money.

It’s called segmenting.

Substack let’s you build segments from a user’s Activity rating, which they define as, “a high-level rating of how actively the subscriber has used your newsletter in the last month, including email opens and webviews.”

You can also build segments by post views, comments, email opens and more.

All that said, I recommend using another email service like Flodesk or Kit to build a segment based on sales.

You take all the email addresses of people who bought from you before (from your online store, Bandcamp, etc.) and send them a separate email at some point.

For example, this is how Cody Cook-Parrott incorporates Flodesk into their workflow:

“A few days ago I decided to use my Flodesk email list which is made up of people who have downloaded one of my free guides or taken my classes…”

Continue sending to your regular newsletter audience, of course. Announce your new offerings as usual, but send to this “people who’ve bought from us before” segment occasionally, too.

Building new segments.

Let’s say you’re about to launch something new, like an album, a book pre-order or a new course.

When you first announce your new offering on social media, Substack Notes, or even your main newsletter, you get your fans to click and sign up to be the first to know about your offering via a landing page.

For example, maybe I want to offer a workshop next month all about segmenting. I could mention it in this newsletter, and link to a landing page where you could sign up to be the first to know about this new offering.

When I’m ready to launch, I’d email these people first because they’re the most engaged, and I’m not leaving it up to the chance that they’ll see the announcement in the next few newsletters I send. They’re getting a directly targeted email announcing the new workshop because they signed up for it!

So yeah – if you want to be alerted if I set up a Segmenting Workshop, click here!

More info:
Free landing pages for your next idea from Kit
Free forms that make people want to sign up from Flodesk

Tired of shouting into the void? In this live workshop, we dive deep into practical, no-fluff strategies for actually getting people to pay attention to the amazing stuff you’re making—without sounding like a pushy salesperson.

We cover:
• Why “I just released a thing!” isn’t enough
• How to let your work do the talking (yes, even without a big following)
• Easy ways to reshare old posts that still hit
• Embedding your media so people actually consume it
• What to say instead of “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while…”

It’s all about creating smarter, more human ways to promote your art, writing, music, or projects—especially on platforms like Substack, where your words matter.

Whether you’re a photographer, musician, writer, or curator—this is for you.

LET YOUR SUBJECT SELL THE POST FOR YOU

If you interview BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, his quote leads everything. That’s my rule.

We don’t need anyone to tell us that he “talks about writing” blah blah blah, so get out of the way and let his words lead the way.

LET YOUR POST SELL YOUR WORK FOR YOU
Stop explaining what you wrote and let the thing you wrote do the marketing.

GET TO THE POINT

You don’t need to explain the details. Nobody cares.

Do what Gabbie does, tell us what the post is about in the first few words, and get out of the way.

STOP APOLOGIZING

Blake and I had a pleasant exchange after this recent Note, but I included it because I want everyone to stop apologizing.

You can post a video, skip posting for a week or a month, you can do whatever you want, but please, you don’t need to apologize.

EMBED YOUR MEDIA

If you ask 100 people to click a link, you’re very lucky if 5% click, so put the thing RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT THE THING.

PEOPLE BUY BOOKS BECAUSE OF WHAT’S INSIDE THE BOOKS

A book cover and a pre-order link are boring.

People take screenshots of chunks of text, bits of dialogue, illustrations, and photographs from books…

Until you’re big enough for everyone to be excited about your new book, your biggest job is to make sure everyone knows what’s in the book.

At the end of the day, you compete with other writers and outlets posting the same wishy-washy “marketing,” where everyone is trying to sell a 12-pack of soda at the store.

But Coca-Cola is selling flavored sugar water, the most boring shit on the planet, and they make commercials like the one below to get the word out.

You don’t make boring art, do you? You’re work is more exciting than soda, right?!

That’s why the magic can’t stop when the piece is done, or the song is mastered, or the photo is printed.

It’s fucking time to apply the same creative magic in telling the world about your work.

Today is a great day to delete a social media app from your phone.

Just one.

You can always re-install it. But maybe today delete it. Live without it for half a day. Catch yourself reaching for it, and when you do, be gentle with yourself.

Start thinking of the times you get on the apps. While watching TV? Warming up food? In the break room?

Think of things you can do in those times and spaces instead:

• Maybe do some yoga while streaming your favorite shows.
• Do some stretches while making coffee.
• Have a book of crossword puzzles on hand.
• Practice the piano.

We can’t just delete the apps and magically be delivered from their pull. We’ve gotta be deliberate in how we extract ourselves.

Look at how JustSomeMustard has replaced Instagram with learning another language. Spending just five or 10 or 30 minutes per day on positive learning can make a huge impact over weeks and months.

We can’t be our best selves if we’re drinking chaos and drama from the firehose of social media whenever we’re bored.

When do we write lyrics? Reach out to that old friend? When do we just let ourselves be bored for a minute or 10 on the bus ride to work and day dream like we did when we were kids?

If all our downtime is consumed with arching our necks into uncomfortable positions for too many hours per day, then what becomes of our art practice or the number of books we read per year?

We can watch 100 videos about marketing our work, but first, we have to set down our phones and then do that work. Talk to other people doing similar work, see the results, and adjust accordingly.

We can’t do that if we’re watching 3.6 hours of videos per day, all at just 15 seconds per clip.

Zuckerberg and Musk would love for you to spend a few more hours with them today, but I think it’d be better if you deleted one of the social media apps from your phone today.

Once you do that, you can start doing the things you know you should be doing.

Buy the plane ticket, get your busker license, take that meeting, get on that Zoom call with total strangers.

“Tension is the feeling we experience just before we grow.

Ironically, it’s what we seek, at the very same time we avoid it.” Seth Godin

Uploading a song to the internet is easy. Zero tension.
Premiering your work “inside the dome of the Oskar-Lühning Telescope” is hard.

That’s what makes the easy stuff so alluring, as no one can judge you, or point and laugh if it doesn’t work out.

You can stay busy making Reels, but that’s another form of playing it safe, as hardly anyone will see them, let alone judge you for it.

Zero tension.

Instead, try writing an email to the five (or 50) people who open all your emails, or people who’ve bought from you in the past.

You could make a podcast and post it everywhere and reach practically no one, or you could make it for a small group of subscribers.

This creates tension because when you make a podcast for just a few people, it’s likely a few of them react in a meaningful way.

Changing the name of your project creates tension – will it confuse people? Will people forget about me? But you do the hard thing because it feels right in your bones.

There’s no tension with a product shot and a “buy now” button.

But you can create tension by documenting the process of making a great photograph and offer a limited edition print to your YouTube audience.

If I remember correcty this video only had 350 views by the time the prints were sold out.

So make that call, sign up for that marathon, email a venue and plan an actual event, with real people, in real life.

All of this hard work is less of a dopamine rush than playing the social media viral popularity game, but there’s tension, and it’s totally what you need.