The line “if you don’t know us, you shouldn’t” is gold. Then Austin Nasso the tech bro vibe codes them a website.
It’s literally so millennial to have a website. HAH!
Watch the YouTube short here.
IT’S LITERALLY SO MILLENNIAL TO HAVE A WEBSITE
Author: Seth Werkheiser
WORK BEFORE PLATFORMS
Mirella Stoyanova from ‘Author Platform Follows the Work’
“While author platform is important, I think new writers are particularly vulnerable to getting the order of operations wrong.
The author platform follows the work. Not the other way around.
Notably, none of the authors I admire had particularly robust social media platforms before they became successful.”
FIRST DAY OF THE YEAR OVER THE YEARS
2025: NETWORKING WITHOUT SOCIAL MEDIA
2024: BYE, INSTAGRAM
2023: OVEREXTENDING FOR WHO?
2021: PUT YOUR HEALTH ON YOUR CALENDAR
2020: NEW YEARS DAY ADVENTURES
2019: DEFINE YOUR OWN SUCCESS IN 2019
I forgot all about that very adventurous New Yeas Day in 2020! Wild to think how that year turned out.
DOWNLOAD, BACK UP
On the first of the month I’m reminded to download my photos from my iPhone. I do this so I don’t have to keep paying Apple a monthly fee that just keeps going up, and I just like having my photos right where I can see them, in folders.
For December I have 215 photos, 54 screen shots, and 18 videos. I’ll keep that saved locally on my MacBook Pro (just 3.5GB), and start a new folder for January where I’ll dump the photos from my Nikon throughout the month.
Then, in February, I’ll move this January folder to my external hard drive.
My folders goes all the way back to 2002, but it’s not nearly as organized. The total is about 57,000 photos, which takes up 207GB on my 2TB drive, backed up regularly to BackBlaze.
Yeah, I miss the search functionality (finding all the photos of bikes, or cats would be great), but I love only paying .99 cents per month for iCloud instead of $120 a year.
EVERY BOOK IS A LOTTERY TICKET
From Cory Doctorow
“I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.”
INFLUENCERS ALL THE WAY DOWN
Collin Brooke from ‘You gotta be in it to win it’
“There’s an extent to which the influencer industry is basically a machine that generates confirmation bias at scale. That is, every influencer is, at the very least, a walking advertisement for the idea of becoming an influencer.”
EARLY MORNING LAUNCHING
Sometimes you just wake up at 4am and can’t get back to sleep so you start planing out a podcast series that you’d announce and launch on the day you host a big online event. What if?
POST EARLY, PLEASE
Chelsea Bradley from ‘Your Content is Killing Your Brand‘
“When should it be posted? If the event is tomorrow, the answer is not tonight. Most people won’t see it until two days from now – it’s too late. Like when restaurants post their daily specials at 6 pm – great, hope your dinner service was wonderful. I saw it at noon the next day, and it means nothing to me now, I wish I had known about it sooner so I could plan.”
THE PEOPLE IN THE ROOM
We’ve all seen it – people waiting for their drinks at Starbucks. Arms crossed, sighing loudly while scrolling on their phones. Waiting, waiting, waiting for their drinks.
Then someone walks in, no wait, and walks out with their drink.
I get it; get people to order on the app. Less interaction, no friction, no need for someone to take the order.
In and out, money in the bank.
But I just looked and there’s like a dozen people here in this space, none of them having a pleasant experience.
How does that bode well for a business? A brand?
People in and out, and on their way.
And a business place filled with people rolling their eyes and getting the wrong order (like me) and just walking away.
MOVING FROM SUBSTACK TO WORDPRESS
The holdiday downtime has given me some breathing room to get this project done, moving 500 or so posts from Substack to my WordPress blog at Social Media Escape Club.
I did this 100% manually, too. I think I tried exporting awhile back and it crapped out somewhere along the line, and I just said fuck it, I’ll do it one at a time, which really wasn’t so bad because some stuff I wanted to reformat, re-do, or remove 100% anyways.
Why move all my posts from Substack to WordPress? Because someday the Substack platform will cease to exist, and I’ll have no record of my work otherwise.
Because Substack makes it too easy to accidentally delete your entire publication, just like how I deleted multiple posts when I thought I was deleting a podcast feed.
I don’t trust the Substack platform anymore.
My first music blog from 2001 is gone because we were young and dumb and moved onto other things, and we didn’t pay the hosting bill, and oops the domain name lapsed.
The 2000+ metal trivia questions I posted on Twitter as @skulltoaster from 2011-2018 are all gone, along with the 1000+ email newsletters via Mailchimp.
If I get locked out of my account, or Substack goes away, five years of writing goes away with it, and I don’t want that to happen.
Each Substack post is getting moved, and in its place I write “this post has moved…” along with a link to its new home on WordPress. This removes any duplicate work which might affect my SEO or domain health… but that’s secondary to me owning my work, my writing, my ideas.
I will keep sending my newsletter via Substack (for now), but it will not be my base of operations. Everything gets written on my blog first, then it goes from there.
Each newsletter post will include just enough meat and bones to make it a worthy open and read, and they’ll be links throughout for anyone who wants to go deeper.
As I wrote earlier this year, “my newsletter isn’t my permanent address, it’s a delivery truck.”