Failing My Two Year Plan

For real

Close to the Romanian-Serbian border, 2021

In September 2021, I let my clients know that I’m reducing my hours to focus on my endeavor in social media. I was part of some critical projects and was one of the most tech-savvy in several teams.

Their response caught me off-guard.

Let’s do a 100% increase in your hourly rate and be our CTO

It didn’t take long to realize this was my moment to make some money. So, I put my social media stuff on the back burner and focused on client work. But at the same time, I made myself a promise:

I was active on Twitter from April 2021, saw some potential in it, and thought, slowly, let’s build a media side-hustle on top of it in the next two years. By September 2023, I’ll quit being a full-time CTO and continue building my business.

Well, it didn’t happen.

Over the past two years, I launched three info products, a course, a browser plugin, a SaaS, and continued freelancing. I also dabbled with YouTube and wrote many blog posts, newsletters, and tweets.

Everything combined, I made ~$300 on Gumroad selling info products.

I made about ~$200 with sponsored tweets and published two sponsored posts on akoskm.com for $800.

Of course, I said no to some opportunities I wouldn’t say I liked where I could’ve made 2x more money, but still, calling this an online business would be far-fetched.

The worst of all, I’ve spent a ton of time online. Writing, engaging, planning, creating, and consuming content daily.

It’s been almost two months since I’ve gone silent on the platforms because I realized I’ve been chasing the wrong goals.

Here’s how it started.

The tipping point

At the beginning of this year, I decided to improve my writing and dive into the copywriting communities. I followed a bunch of writers on Twitter and didn’t take long to notice a pattern in all their stories, offers, and jargon.

Their ideas were variations on the same theme, and their stories - if you took out the specifics like whether they ended up doing this because they had student loans or had to feed their family - were the same formulas:

There are no new stories.

So why do some people get noticed and others don’t?

Social Media Food Chains.

At the bottom, accounts produce daily content without strategy or planning.

The slightly more prominent, mid-tier accounts that produce organized content will exchange their know-how for the trust and loyalty of the smaller accounts that aspire to be mid-tier.

This is when the big players come into the game and use the accumulated loyalty of their followers to promote the mid-tier accounts to the accounts at the beginning of the chain. And cash-in, of course.

Depending on your budget, you can get a shoutout from the most recognized leaders in a space. You do this several times, and people will think you’re what you want them to think. And that’s about it.

You don’t need an outstanding story, a visionary idea, or something new to say. It helps, but nothing helps more than a paid spot in someone’s newsletter or feed.

This isn’t a revolutionary process, but the inner motivation to be at the top is to sell to lower tiers got me thinking.

Is that it?

So I decided to step back and figure out where it all went wrong and if there were other ways to make internet money without selling a $10 e-book titled” How to make $10 with an e-book”.

What did I learn?

I joined the mid-tier of this chain between 2021 and 2022:

It seemed fun to see the numbers go up for a while, but besides chasing higher and higher numbers, I simply didn’t know how this would translate to money in the future. And nobody I asked on my tier did.

A clear offer lifts you from the mid-tier of the food chain to the top. Until you make this offer, you rely on bigger accounts to promote you while giving your best daily to smaller accounts to earn their trust.

The better your offer is, the less you rely on promotion.

And I always hear this:” You’ll figure out as you go”. But I suggest you do the opposite.

Start with The Offer

It doesn’t have to be public. It can be a sub-goal in the long run, a checkpoint, but make sure you know what you’re working towards.

Setting the correct goal initially will help you focus and eliminate noise faster.

Some goals that would’ve made sense in my situation were a programming course, a book, or some SaaS application.

Then, I could have turned these goals into specific offers.

Some goals that made absolutely no sense, but I kept working towards them in the hope of figuring out the offer later were:

• getting more followers

• landing more sponsored tweets

• or sponsored blog posts

This year, I’ve seen influencers from Tech Twitter looking for an actual job. They kept putting in the effort and growing their audience but never figured out their offer and ended up being commodity creators. Commodity creators are accounts with rentable feeds. It’s a job like any other. You’re either tweeting what other people paid for or working on getting more followers so you can charge those people more.

At the same time, I was glad I started this social media business experiment as a side hustle instead of leaving my clients and going into the void without knowing what I was working towards.

Stopping is not Quitting

I didn’t quit my idea of creating a media business, but I did stop some bad habits.

These might sound obvious, but I feel I have to write them down as a reminder:

Stop following the crowd mindlessly. Avoid chasing things just because everyone else is doing it.

Stop chasing things for the sake of chasing something.

If there is no intrinsic motivation, stop.

If the thing itself doesn’t give you value, peace, or purpose, stop.

It’s easy to follow goals that lead to other goals - such as follower count. And it’s much, much harder to stop once you’re in.

Stop early if you feel you’re in the wrong game - you can restart as many times as you want.

What’s next?

Of all the things I could have returned to, I choose to write to you.

I write here because this is perhaps the only place where I feel that you don’t read every sentence looking for a money-making opportunity. Nor do you expect me to write about it.

If you’re reading my newsletter for a while, you know I write about the things I’ve tried, what worked and what didn’t. I write about the goals I’ve set for myself and what I learned while chasing them.

What I learned is having the will to do it isn’t enough.

You’ll get easily side-tracked in every possible way. Having less time but a clear goal is much more efficient.

As the French proverb goes:

If working hard made you rich, donkeys would be covered in gold.

Whatever transformation you’re looking for, starting a business, stepping up your career, or improving your life, comes naturally when you know what you must work towards.

As always, thank you for reading my newsletter, and good luck finding that goal.

- Akos