When I was 15 I made my first $25 on the internet.
It was affiliate marketing for some small Gumroad product. I posted about it for a while, talked to a few people, and eventually 1 person bought.
$25. I would have made more working a shift somewhere that day lol
But I've thought about that $25 more than almost anything else I've made since, because it was the first time I understood that the internet isn't a place you go to consume things. You can say something into it and a stranger on the other side of the world will respond, and once that's true, the number of things available to you goes up by an amount that's honestly hard to describe until it happens to you.
Since then I've changed industries, changed what I sell, changed businesses, more times than I'd want to list out. Every single time, the account came with me. And at this point I'm fairly convinced that nothing else I've done has mattered as much, which is a weird thing to say about typing things into a box a few times a week.
So this is my attempt to explain why I think that, to people who probably already kind of know it and still aren't doing it:
I. Nobody is going to find you, and it has nothing to do with how good you are
Most of us picked up an assumption as kids and never really looked at it again. The assumption is that if you're good enough at something, it gets noticed.
Do great work. Keep your head down. Eventually the right person sees it and everything changes.
That's unfortunately not how any of it works. The right person is busy. They're not looking for you, they have no idea you exist, and there's no mechanism by which they'd ever find out, because your work lives inside a company and a Slack channel and a few docs nobody outside is ever going to open.
You can be excellent at something for 10+ years and have almost nobody know it. And then when you want to do something different, switch jobs, start a company, get into a room, you start from 0, because there is no record anywhere of anything you've done (besides a resume saying you worked at X company for X years).
I don't think that's a moral failure or a marketing failure. It's just the default setting. Doing good work doesn't produce evidence that you did good work. Somebody has to produce the evidence, and the only person who can do it is you.
Which sounds a little grim, but it's honestly good news, because it means the entire thing is within your control and always has been.
II. What actually changes is that you stop being a stranger
The mechanism here is way smaller and dumber than people make it sound.
You stop being a stranger to people you've never met.
Somebody clicks your profile, sees you've been talking about your work for months, and now you're not a cold message from a random person. You're someone they kind of already know. And that one difference is what opens every door behind it.
I think people miss that it runs in both directions. Yeah, people come to you. But the part that mattered more to me, especially early on, was that I could go talk to almost anybody and get a response. Founders, people way further along than me, people I had ZERO business being in a conversation with at 15,16,17 (21 now). They'd look at the profile first, see there was something there, and reply.
That's the thing nobody accounts for. You're not just building an audience, you're building permission to reach out to whoever you want. And the number of doors that opens is a lot bigger than the number of people who come knocking on yours.
I've gotten multiple job offers (to make very good money) out of it. Offers to buy the 2 agencies I've built. Referrals from people I have never once spoken to. Information I'd never have been able to get, just because somebody looked me up before answering and decided I was legit.
None of that was ever the plan early on. I was just posting hoping to make some money.
III. The reason you're not doing it is that you're scared of looking like you're trying
I know you're probably thinking in your mind right now that this just isn't true
But I know from personal experience that it is.
Posting feels like announcing yourself. Announcing yourself feels embarrassing (trust me I know and hate the feeling). And the specific fear is not that nobody will read it, the fear is that people you know will read it and think you're trying to be somebody.
Nobody wants to be the guy with the motivational thread. Everyone has seen that guy. He's insufferable.
But that version and the useful version look nothing alike, and I think most people have only been exposed to the bad one, so they assume that's the entire category. It's kind of like deciding you hate music because you heard one bad song.
You don't have to talk about anything except the thing you already do all day.
- What you're working on
- What broke this week.
- What you used to believe and stopped believing.
- Something a customer said on a call that surprised you
- A random talk with a co-worker about the future of AI
You don't have to chase trends, you don't have to have takes on celebrities, you don't have to become a personality.
You just have to be willing to say what you actually think about your own work, in public, where people can see it.
Honestly it's much closer to networking than to being an influencer. You're in a room with a lot of smart people, you say something, some of them push back, you learn something from them and they learn something from you. That's just talking to people. It happens to be recorded, and the room is a hundred times bigger than any room you'd ever get invited into otherwise.
And the judgment thing, I mean yeah, some people will judge you. They will also continue having no idea who you are or what you're capable of, so I'm not sure their opinion should be carrying this much weight in your decision making
The people who are going to matter to your life over the next 20 years are almost entirely people you likely have not met yet. You're protecting yourself from the opinions of the ones you already know.
IV. You have no idea what 300 people is actually worth
This is the misconception that costs people the most and I want to spend a minute on it.
Everyone assumes this only works at scale. The guy with 100,000 followers, sure, obviously he's getting opportunities. But 300 followers? Yeah that's like nothing, so people don't start, or they start and quit because the number looks humiliating.
BUT 300 of the right people is not 0. It's not remotely close to 0
Think about what that actually is. 300 people who know your name, work in your industry, and see how you think about things every week.
That is a network most people don't build in 10 years of going to conferences and shaking hands. You just don't feel it, because it's quiet, it's spread across a lot of different places, and nothing crazy happens on any given day.
Then there's the compounding, which you cannot see while it's happening and can only really see looking backwards.
The people who find you in year 3 are more senior than the ones who found you in year 1. Not because you did anything differently.
Because you got better, and you're talking about bigger problems now, and better people are interested in bigger problems. So the quality of everyone around you goes up on its own while you're doing the same thing you were doing before.
And a huge portion of the value never gets traced back to you at all. Somebody reads something you wrote, does nothing for 8 months, and then your name comes up in a conversation you'll never hear about. You will never know that happened. You'll just notice, over a few years, that more good things seem to come your way than used to, and you won't be able to point at why.
Which is exactly why people give up. The feedback is delayed, diffuse, and mostly invisible, and human beings are not built to keep doing things that don't produce visible feedback.
V. It's the only thing you build that comes with you
Here's the 1 thing I completely overlooked at 15 and honestly didn't expect at 21 either.
Every time I've changed what I do, the audience followed
I'd launch something completely unrelated to the last thing and there was already a group of people who knew me and were willing to hear about it.
New offer yup but always a group of people still interested. That's worth more than anything else I'm going to say in this entire article, and it's the part nobody talks about, because it only becomes obvious after a few years.
Think about what you're accumulating in a normal career. Your reputation at your company stays at your company. The relationships with your coworkers mostly fade once you leave. The internal credibility you spent 4 years building resets the day you walk out. Even the skills are only worth what the next employer thinks they're worth.
The audience is one of the only things you build that's actually yours. It moves with you through every change you're going to make over the next 30 years, and you're going to make more changes than you think.
I'd go further. If you knew for a fact that you were going to switch what you do 3-4 more times in your life, which statistically you are, then building the one asset that survives every switch is kind of the obvious move. It's just that it doesn't feel like an asset while you're building it. It feels like posting.
VI. You cannot be bad at this, you can only be impatient
There's no version of this where you put in the time and it does nothing.
You can post stuff that gets 4 likes, obviously. Everyone does at the start. I did for a long time and I still do sometimes. But if you're willing to actually learn what makes something worth reading, and you spend real time talking to people in the comments and the DMs instead of just publishing and walking away, there is no outcome where you do that for a year and your career is sitting in the same place.
Compare that to nearly anything else you could put an hour a week into. Most things have real downside. You can execute them correctly and still lose, because the market moved or the timing was wrong or somebody else got there first.
This one doesn't have that. The floor is that you get better at explaining what you do and you meet a few interesting people. The ceiling is your entire career changes. I can't think of many other things with that shape.
The only way to lose is to post for 3 weeks and stop. Which is what almost everyone does, because 3 weeks in you have 6 posts and 40 followers, and it feels stupid, and there's a voice saying this obviously isn't working.
It is working. You just can't see it yet, because nothing at this stage produces a signal. The first 2 months are you talking to almost nobody, and there's no way around that part. You have to be okay looking like nothing is happening for a while.
That's the filter of whether you're cut out for this or not.
Are you willing to keep going through the boring part where there's no feedback?
VII. How to actually start, since that's usually where people get stuck
A few things that would have saved me a lot of time.
Pick the platform your industry is actually on and ignore the rest. You don't need to be everywhere, you need to be somewhere consistently.
Write about what you did this week. That's your content strategy for the first few months. You have more material than you think, it just doesn't feel like material because it's normal to you. The stuff that's obvious to you is not obvious to the person three years behind you, and that person is who reads you first.
Have an opinion. If somebody else in your industry could have written your post word for word, it's not doing anything for you. The entire value is that people come away knowing how you specifically think about something, which is what makes them remember you instead of the 40 other accounts saying the same neutral thing.
Spend as much time in comments and DMs as you do writing. Maybe more. The posts are what make people willing to talk to you. The talking is where everything actually happens.
And don't outsource your voice to a machine. Use the tools, that's fine, everyone does. But if you hand over the thinking and the way you talk, you end up producing the same slop as every other person who set up a project and typed "make this sound human," and people can tell within about one line. The only thing you have that nobody can copy is how you specifically see things...
The $25 was 6ish years ago. Every good thing that's happened in my working life traces back to it somehow, and at the time it just felt like I'd wasted a month on the internet for less than minimum wage
Crazy to look back now though
Don't take this lightly. Read and bookmark if needed but go start posting ANYTHING by tonight.
Alright see ya - Logan
