I was doing social media wrong all this time

The Monkey and the Pedestal

My Twitter-focused writing journey is ending, thanks to the same person who helped start it.

Arvid Khal, the author of some great books and The Bootstrapped Founder Podcast.

In 2021 I purchased his book Zero To Sold because I read good things about it, even though I had no intentions of building a SaaS.

But the main win from discovering Arvid on social media was his unique audience-building approach.

It differed from what I was surrounded with: the growth hacks, the like & reply & retweet.

In this issue, I’ll save you anywhere from $7 to $50 that you wanted to spend on a paid course, a cohort, or a book that would teach you how to go viral and prosper on social media.

All the Pedestals

Thanks to Arvid’s recent podcast episode about The Monkey and the Pedestal, I finally understood:

I’ve been mostly building pedestals by writing Twitter-first content.

Twitter is an interesting beast, especially Tech-Twitter.

Some days you’ll go there and wonder why these tweets even exist.

People play the attention game because it’s rewarding.

And the promise is that you can monetize if you’re good at it.

But the hacks, the mindsets, and the frameworks only encourage you to build that next pedestal.

Let’s say you’re a software engineer.

You have your niche and generate 112 ideas in 30 minutes. Put them in the viral tweet framework, and likes and follows will start to come.

The Chrome plugins, the VS Code plugins, the JavaScript Array methods that almost feel illegal to know!

You think: this works!

Already got 10k followers on Twitter, easy.

It’s time to make some money!

You create a nice little course on some software engineering topic and realize: it doesn’t sell.

Only 2% of your followers turned into buyers. What’s wrong?

Why do people buy from these other people selling those viral courses?

Jakob Greenfeld @jakobgreenfeld

The big problem with the way social media currently works is that people who focus 100% on getting attention are the ones who get it. And these people have no real insights to share besides how to get attention.

What they do is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What do they sell?

They get attention by teaching you how to get attention.

They already know how to get attention, so they would build pedestals if they spent most of their time building a Twitter audience. But instead, they’re:

• expanding to other networks

• creating new products

• repurposing existing products for smaller niches

And at the end of their engagement funnel are the course, the paid community, and the product that sells.

This is the hard part, the monkey they trained.

What do you sell?

If, as a software engineer, you’re still writing the next viral thread about JavaScript Array functions, Chrome Extensions, and VSCode plugins, I have bad news for you.

You’re building pedestals.

All this information is already out there. And writing about it just has become easier with ChatGPT.

But practicing this is nothing like training a monkey to recite Shakespeare.

It’s more like having the monkey eat a banana.

Going viral and getting attention has its place and time.

But here’s what you need to know before you buy any of these guides on building audiences and writing viral tweets:

You don’t need them unless you trained a monkey to recite Shakespeare.

Get good at things so you can offer applicable insights.

Do something new well and teach others how to do it.

Training the monkey is doing the hard things first.

Thanks for enduring my ramblings about the wonderful world of social media. I’ll take a break from these topics for now.

In the upcoming issues, expect to read more about my growing blog and restarted Freelancing career that seems to be taking up quite nicely 🤞.

- Akos