The platform you borrow will betray you
Thousands of people follow you on social media.
Your posts get likes. Your videos get views. Your numbers keep climbing.
Feels like you’re building something, doesn’t it?
You’re not.
You’re building your business on land you don’t own. On someone else’s terms. By someone else’s rules.
Here’s what I’ve learned in 25 years of running my own digital publishing business: most people hand control of their livelihoods to corporations and then act surprised when those corporations pull the rug out from under them.
LinkedIn. Google. Facebook. Instagram. TikTok. YouTube.
Every single one of them can change the rules tomorrow. And they will—because they answer to shareholders, not to you.
I’ve been caught out twice. Both times because I leaned too heavily on platforms I didn’t control. It’s a hard lesson to learn, and I learnt it the expensive way.
This isn’t new. It’s just history repeating itself online.
Yahoo dominated search. Then Google replaced it. MySpace was the biggest social network on the planet. Then Facebook swallowed it whole. And when Facebook changed its algorithm, businesses that had built their entire audience there watched their reach collapse overnight.
All of them had built on land they didn’t own.
That’s why I focused on email instead.
Email isn’t a platform. It’s infrastructure. Nobody owns it. No algorithm decides whether your message gets through. No corporation can take your list away.
That one shift changed everything for me.
Since I started building my email newsletter properly, it’s sold more than 65,000 copies of my field guide, filled every live event I’ve run since 2010, sold thousands of online courses, and sold out webinars in a matter of days.
Not because email is some magic trick.
But because relationships compound. And email lets you build real ones over time, on your own terms.
Social media is fine for getting discovered. I use it myself.
But if you want something that actually holds, something no algorithm change can destroy overnight, you need to build something you own.
I share what I’ve figured out about running a simple, profitable knowledge business in my newsletter.
Some of it is free. Some of it comes from lessons that cost me years and a fair few mistakes to learn properly.
If that’s of interest, subscribe.
No hype. No manufactured urgency. No 11-step systems promising you the earth.
Just what I’ve found actually works. What you do with it is up to you.