What learned in my first year of treating social media like a lab | 4 lessons on mindset
How to approach being a creator in the algo-driven world
Hey Creator!
Welcome to the “hello world” first post in the Creator Lab newsletter segment. It’s the first installment in the very longly titled “What learned in my first year of treating social media like a lab” series where I report some of the things I’ve learned about human psychology, algorithms, marketing, and growing your social media platform as a creator in an algo-driven world.
In my intro post to Creator Lab, I talked about my epic platform growth failure and how it sparked this newsletter segment, Creator Lab, but the thing you need to know is that after failing at social media growth for 11 years as a creator, I got fed up with it feeling like was a black box. So, in the last year, I built a content system that helped me approach social media like an experiment.
While I haven’t “blown up,” I HAVE had some good successes and some good failures, but that I’ve learned a TON about creator marketing, storytelling, short form media, human psychology, and algorithms that I want to share to others who might be struggling with understanding how to “grow their platform”.
To be clear, I’m not here to give you hacks, and I’m not here to give you 10 hooks you can use TODAY. I’m here to give thoughtful analysis, frameworks, and ideas for how you can grow. Think Sahil Bloom meets Austin Kleon.
This first batch of lessons are things I learned about the mindsets you need to have to play the social media game in the first place.
Lesson 1 | None of this matters unless it matters to you.
I’m starting the series off with this because this is the most important one.
The content/social media world can consume you. We all know this. We all know that it can be unhealthy, that you can suddenly go from having joy about Making the Thing to only ever obsessing about follower count, views, how to make engaging content, blah blah blah.
Look, you don’t need to do social media. You don’t have to read this series, you don’t have to figure out “why the algo does what it does.” You really don’t. You can make your art, share it however you want, because there are other things that matter to you. This is great. You know yourself. You know the tradeoffs and you’ve chosen what matters. No one can tell you if it matters, but you. So, if you read this and go “omg, wtf” or have any other reactions like this, then maybe it doesn’t matter to you and that’s okay.
I am a nerd. I enjoy experiments. Understanding systems. Learning. For the most part, I’ve enjoyed learning all of the lessons you’re about to read below. If this isn’t you, then that is more than okay. None of it matters unless it matters to you.
Lesson 2 | This is the game we have
Here’s the deal. Like it or not, we all know that if you want to gain an audience and make a living doing what we’re passionate about, then we need to use social media.
Every “me in 5 years” has an audience that connects with the things I make and if I don’t figure out the game and make it work for me, no one will.
In the end, what social media currently is, is the game we have. And if we want to be successful in it, then we have to learn how it works. There’s no way around this.
If a poker player shows up at the World Series of Poker and says “I don’t want to learn the rules or how it works, but I want to play anyway” they’re not going to get very far. Now, if they had a different goal, aka not winning, then great. Go for it, but if they show up with this attitude, lose, then complain about losing and blame the dealer, no one is gonna have pity on them. Every one would say, “my brother in Christ, you didn’t learn the rules, of course you lost.”
My refusal to learn all things about how social media actually worked kept me from succeeding. And I’m not even thinking that “succeeding” here means massive amounts of followers or some crazy metric. I mean, in general, finding 1 person a week that I don’t know who like the things I make. This is the game we have. If we want to grow, we need to learn it.
Lesson 3 | It takes time and practice to find your voice
Just like writing, painting, and any other creative endeavor, it takes tome to understand your voice in your social content. Because I write books and music and feel like I have my voice locked in those places, I’d always had the assumption that the same would be true for social content. That if I just showed up and did my “thing” that was my voice and it should be enough. WRONG. Very very wrong. This has been a huge learning curve for me.
The big question is, how do I do get people’s attention while still being true to my voice & personality, and then translate these across text and visuals? How do I use formats and hooks I know work, but make them my own? How do I make my own hooks so that I can be true to my personality as an innovator? Someone who isn’t just reusing hooks? How often do I balance my enneagram 4ness and desire to say “**** the hooks, let’s just be pirates”
Lesson 4 | The creator has to let the marketer take over
The issue with the creative self is that they are deeply tied to the thing they make in a way no one else is. It is good because they know all they went through to make it. This is how art should be.
However, the harsh truth I learned over the last 5 years is that people don’t care about your song, your book, your _____ unless you give them a reason to. Everyone is looking for things that do something for THEM. So if you’re just pointing to you, “check my new song” or “my creative process” the honest truth is that no one will care. The idea of just “posting” and “your people finding you” isn’t most people’s reality anymore.
A good marketer doesn’t just sell a product, they make you believe in it. They learn who their audience is and, in their language, tell their audience exactly how the product they are selling transforms their life or solves their problem. Creators are not marketers by nature. We’re not coming at our art from this lens, which is how it should be. However, there needs to be a moment after creation where the marketer takes over and does what marketers do, find and talk to the audience. Even if they have broad appeal, the most successful creators all have a clear audience they speak to.
Lesson 5 | Posting on Instagram, where a chunk of my followers are people I know, has been the hardest part
It’s taken me the better part of the year I’ve spent to get over the shame of being seen trying in front of the people I know and want to be respected by. I still feel it. In fact, for a long time, I didn’t post on Instagram because it felt like such emotional labor.
In some ways, I’ve considered just starting over from scratch. Creating a new account, and not following anyone I know. I’ve almost done that on my own account. Removed every follower I know in order to make it easier, but I haven’t. Instead, I’ve just accepted that people are gonna judge me, call me cringe, unfollow me, whatever. While accepting this has been hard, WHAT WILL PEOPLE THINK OF ME, this has been is a victory, in my opinion. The issue here is, the people I know might not be my audience.
Some may like what I do, but some won’t. My goal is to find the people who do like what I do. They are looking for me. So the big question is why should I let the 200ish people I “know” or want to “be respected by” ruin the potential connection with 1000s of other fans who are looking for what I make simply because I’m afraid of what people will think of me? This is what I’ve had to keep telling myself. Just let it go. If you think I’m obnoxious or derivative or any other harsh adjective, unfollow me. That’s fine.
Wrapping up
Okay, that does it for my first 5 lessons. Next week we’ll dive into some lessons on human psychology. What stuck out to you? What resonated? What do you want to know more about? What have you seen in your own experiments and experience? I’m planning on writing way more about all this so if this was helpful at all for you at all, please subscribe and stick around.
I’m planning on keeping on for 2026! I’ve heard from a few people who have had success from this that it took them around 2 years to really see momentum so I’m gonna see if that is also true for me. If this sounds like something you’d love to learn about, or just watch my journey, then please subscribe and stick around. However, just a warning, in 2026, I do plan on making this segment only available for paid subscribers of The Rabbit Hole.