The Landlord

Nobody puts new floors in a place they're renting.

You might paint a wall, if the landlord lets you. You might hang a few pictures. But you don't tear out the kitchen. You don't put real money into somebody else's walls, because you already know how this ends. One day the rent goes up, or the building sells, or a letter shows up saying they need the unit back. And everything you poured into that place stays behind when you go.

Everyone understands this about apartments. Very few people see it in their own business.

Think about what a following on social media actually is. It's a list of people you can't contact, sitting on a feed you don't control. Reach shows up one month and is gone the next. The rules change without anyone asking you first. You can spend years in there, posting every day, replying to every comment, learning what the feed wants and giving it exactly that. Then the feed wants something else. There's no letter this time. It just happens, and you find out when the numbers do.

That's not bad luck. That's what renting is.

The platform is the landlord. The algorithm is the lease, and it gets rewritten any morning they like, without your signature on it.

I wrote a while back about the years I worked three jobs, and what I learned about trading time for money. This is the same trade wearing a different outfit. You pay in hours instead of rent, and at the end of it you still don't own anything. The landlord does.

I'm not telling anyone to quit social media. Use it. It's the front window, not the house. People walk by, they look in, some of them come to the door. Your job is to have a door for them to come to, and a place behind it that belongs to you.

That place is your hub. A website with your name on it, an email list, a community you run. Small at first, and slower to grow than you'd like. It isn't going to go viral for you, and I've written before about why I stopped wishing it would. But every hour you put into it stays put. The rent on it never goes up. The rules don't change on a Tuesday, and no letter is coming to tell you to be out by the end of the month.

The whole difference is right there. It isn't the tools or the tactics. It's who holds the keys.

Here's the part that's hard to hear. Most people already know this. They've felt the reach drop, watched a post that should have landed go nowhere, and told themselves it was a bad week. They know the platform doesn't belong to them, and they keep renovating the rental anyway, because that's where everyone is and the house isn't built yet.

Building the house takes longer. It's also the only thing still standing when the lease runs out.

Stop putting floors in a place you don't own.