TCC Podcast #285: Building a Business that won’t Burn You Out with Tyler J. McCall

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
Tyler’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Episode 177
Episode 191

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  Social media. We’ve had a lot of people on the show to talk about their approach to Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn. It’s almost as if you can’t build a copywriting business these days without spending serious time on social media. And while that may not be strictly true, you can, but it’s becoming less and less common. Our guest for today’s podcast is Tyler J. McCall. Tyler’s gone through a bit of a transition when it comes to using social media for his business over the last few months. It used to be the main focus and now it’s not. And if you struggle with social media as a business building tool, or you’re interested in using it in a more sustainable way, you’ll want to stick around for this interview. Tyler also shared how he’s reinvented his entire business over the last year, how to deal with trolls and people that are harassing you online and overcoming burnout. Like we said, you’re not going to want to miss this one.

Kira Hug:  Before we dive into our interview with Tyler, the sponsor for this week’s episode is the Copywriter Think Tank. It’s our mastermind coaching program that helps copywriters dive deeper and explore ideas they didn’t think were possible and act on them. We’re introducing two new coaches inside the Think Tank who focus on systems and mindset, so members have the opportunity to ask for support from multiple coaches. If you are looking to create a new offer or program, product, scale your income, maybe launch a book, maybe launch a podcast, the Think Tank could be your next step to making it happen. If you want more information, head over to copywriterthinktank.com to learn more. All right, let’s get into the interview and learn how Tyler ended up as the founder of onlinebusinessowner.com.

Tyler J. McCall:  I’ll give you the shortest version possible. I left my nonprofit career back in 2015 to start my own online business after having a bunch of side hustles before that. And the first business I started was a marketing agency with a really close friend. And that’s where I really started learning about online business and running my own business full time. And eventually that marketing agency, we started specializing in Instagram marketing, and then I became a go-to Instagram marketing for local businesses, and then I started coaching and consulting. And then in 2017, I took all that experience and knowledge and all of my experience from the nonprofit world. I was also a political and community organizer before that, and put that into my first membership site called Follower to Fan Society. And at the time of recording this episode, beginning of 2022, Follower to Fan Society is almost over.

We have just a few more months left of delivering content and coaching in that community and then we’re closing it forever. So a four year old membership which, I don’t know about y’all, feels like, I don’t know, decades in the online business world, with how fast things change and people change their businesses. But that’s what I’ve done for the past four years. I’ve been an Instagram marketing strategist in the online space. I really enjoyed that. I worked specifically with online business owners, creatives, makers, artists were really the folks that we served through Follower to Fan. And in 2020 and 2021 everything kind of changed in the world and a lot changed for me personally, as far as what was really important to me and what I wanted to do in my business. So for the past couple of years, I’ve been digging through all of that and figuring out the next step

And I left a coaching community I’ve been part of for a number of years which had turned really toxic. And I left that in 2020, and I’ve just been spending the past couple years kind of healing and learning new things, and unlearning a lot of stuff. And in October 2021, we launched our new business, onlinebusinessowner.com. And I have to say, it’s the happiest I’ve ever been in my business. It brings me the most joy of anything I’ve ever done and I feel like it’s the best use of my skills. And this is something I could see myself doing for a long time, whereas things before I was just kind of doing them until I didn’t have to do them anymore. So that’s a little, the two minute version.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. That was like a beautiful table of contents for the, it feels like the whole episode as this thing unfolds, not even knowing what we’re going to talk about yet. I’m just like, “Okay, lots of places to jump in.” So before we get to the most recent stuff and that’s probably going to be the most interesting stuff, I’d love to back up just to when you were starting your own marketing agency, because so many of our listeners are starting their own thing. They’re finding their feet. Tell us a little bit about what was going on and why you made the steps that you did, the first couple of clients that you connected with. What was that whole process like?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah. I love that question because I didn’t leave my full-time nonprofit marketing job until I had an established roster of clients, which meant for about eight months, I was burning the wick at both ends and also apologies to the YMCA where I used to work, but my afternoons every now and then may have been spent on a little bit of my own business. And I got my first client actually, it was a gift shop in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, where I was living at the time. And I was a customer of this gift shop. I had gone in there for years. I would go buy gifts and cards. One of my side hustles before my marketing agency is, I had a homemade room and linen fragrance spray that I made called Mr. McCall’s Fine Fragrances, which I made at home myself.

And they were the first store to ever carry my handmade fragrance company brand that I created. So, they carried that in the store and I had built a relationship with them over years of being a customer. And I had just walked in one day and said, “Hey, I love what you all are doing. I love your store. I know people are obsessed with your brand, but your Instagram makes me really sad. Would you pay me to manage your Instagram account?” And they said, “Oh, sure. What would that look like?” And I was like, “$300 a month. I’ll post for you five times a week. I’ll come in a few times a month. I’ll take photos with my iPhone. I’ll write your captions. I’ll do the hashtags and I’ll do your Instagram for you.” And they were like, “Great, fine.”

And I ran that agency. After I left my nonprofit job, I ran that agency for about three years and they stayed on until the very end. They were my very last client. They were no longer paying $300 a month at the very end, we had upgraded some things, but they were my first client. And from there, I just used my connections and relationships and started getting more and more clients, and getting people on six month retainer contracts to do content creation, management, blogging, newsletter writing. Also, here’s the other secret Rob and Kira, at this point I actually didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I was fully making it up as I went along, but that’s how I started. And I just built an agency from there.

Kira Hug:  I want to jump forward in time to 2020, 2021, when you said that you really wanted to shift and focus on what was important to you. You left a community at that time. It sounds like that was a really important step for you. Can you talk a little bit more about that stage and what steps do you take when you realize this doesn’t feel right, I’m not in the right places, I’m not doing the right thing, how do you start to move forward from there?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah. It’s a really good question. There were a few things that were happening for me at that stage. One being, I realized that the values that I had, my personal values, the values in my business, were not aligned with the values in the community that I had been a part of and this coach that I had learned from. And at that point I was in a high ticket mastermind, spending $30,000 a year to be in this community. And 2020 created so much opportunity for people to kind of think about what was important for them. And for me, it was really realizing that I had totally mismatched values around equity and inclusion, and racial justice, and issues that are really important to me and have been my entire life. So the first thing for me was just realizing that and then looking for some support from other mentors and peers, people that I really trusted to help me navigate that situation.

And then, I think one of the most important things from that time and really an important lesson was actually not just slinking away and leaving in this kind of secretive way. It’s also not making a huge, big blow up explosion either, just being very confident in my beliefs and values and saying like, “Hey, this doesn’t work for me anymore. I’m no longer going to collaborate with you.” And for me, it actually, the first step was ending a long-term affiliate partnership that I had with this coach. I was a top affiliate for a number of years. And part of that process, which I haven’t talked about much publicly, and walking away from that, we had already planned to be a part of an affiliate promotion that summer. We had already spent tens of thousands of dollars on copywriting and design, and ads, and bonus creation.

We were ready for the launch. And because we had anticipated in the past, that had brought hundreds of thousands of dollars, half a million dollars in revenue into our business and we walked away from all of that. And that really required us to shift everything and shift directions in our business and figure out where that lost money was going to come from, and all of that. But looking back I don’t regret any of that. I’m so glad we did it, but it was definitely not an easy decision. I don’t know if I answered your question Kira, but it’s a little rambly, but there we are.

Rob Marsh:  I would love to dig in Tyler, to that process of identifying the right coach. We get this question a lot where people are like, okay, how do I find a mentor? How do I connect with the right person? And I have my ideas of what that is, but especially having gone through this process where you disconnected from somebody who probably had a positive impact on your business for a while.

Tyler J. McCall:  Sure.

Rob Marsh:  You found out that the values weren’t aligned. But how do you find that next person? How do you identify them and say, yes, this is the next person who’s going to help me take the next step?

Tyler J. McCall:  It’s funny you ask that Rob, because I feel like I’m very deep in that right now. And I don’t fully know who that person is or where to find them, or who those people are. I’m definitely in a period of kind of searching for that myself. I will say that what I’m looking for these days when I’m thinking of coaches or people I want to learn from, people that I want to work with or collaborate with, when I’m looking for people that I want to connect with from a kind of peer to peer perspective, I really want to understand the behind the scenes and the under the hood of what they’re doing and what they’re building. And that feels really important to me now. The other thing that’s really important more so than ever is actually paying attention to my gut and my intuition.

I spent so much time, especially in that coaching environment, there were so many things that would happen, conversations that would happen with the coach, things that would happen in calls, things that would happen in-person events where I was deeply uncomfortable and I felt like this isn’t right, this isn’t right for me, I don’t want to be here, yet I stayed and I didn’t listen to my intuition and now it’s very different. I feel like I’m probably a bit more, I’m probably quicker now to say no to things than ever before. And that may be to my detriment at a certain point, but I’m still searching for that and figuring that out myself.

Kira Hug:  You mentioned a healing process. Was the healing process connected to the change in your business and kind of shutting down one business and starting the next business or is that disconnected?

Tyler J. McCall:  It was really connected. And there were a few things, and most of this happened last year in 2021. And there were, I think there were really three, I think there were probably three main things that were going on. Number one, and most of this has happened in a therapy setting with a trained mental health professional. Number one, I realized that I had a lot to unlearn. I had some deep programming from the coaching community I had come out of. Honestly, looking back now, I would say that it’s a cult-like environment in the way that the community was being led and how people were expected to act in that community. So I had a lot of deep programming to do there. I still am doing that in therapy. A lot of that had to do around self trust, self doubt, trusting myself to make the best decision, those types of things.

The second thing that was going on was severe burnout, just to the point of physical exhaustion, mental exhaustion. I couldn’t be creative. I couldn’t create anything. I couldn’t write, which has always been a huge part of my business and just feeling so burnt out. And then the last thing that happened in 2021, for the first time I experienced relentless harassment from an online troll, which I never experienced before that lasted for weeks, that included verbal and physical threats. That included content created that was all lies about me on YouTube, on blogs, on podcasts, on Instagram, people rallying behind this person, losing clients, refund requests and all of that kind of stuff. And that was honestly just such a traumatic experience. And because of that, that was definitely kind of a catalyst for me, I ended up taking most of 2021 off.

I intended to take a three month social media sabbatical during the summer of 2021. And I went off of social media, my husband and I moved from North Carolina to Chicago. And I realized that I was so deeply burnt out. I ended up taking most of the rest of the year off my business. And I still haven’t returned to social media the way that I did before. That just really caused me to kind of evaluate what I want my business and my marketing to look like.

Rob Marsh:  Holly cow, that’s heavy.

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah. Yes.

Rob Marsh:  I can see why a lot of changes there. Let’s talk about the experience with the troll. How do you deal with that, when somebody’s coming after you like that? Did you just shut off, ignore it? Were you tempted to respond? What was going on that even made it so you could deal with this whole thing?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah. I learned so many lessons from that and I’ve been thinking recently, I need to document that somewhere. My friend Amy Porterfield just recorded a podcast episode about this experience too, because she and I were both experiencing this from the same person for an extended period of time. And in the beginning I chose to engage with the person. I thought that would be the best course of action. And then after I talked about it with people I trusted, my team, my dearest friends, my husband, they were all like, “What are you doing? Don’t engage with this person. It’s not going to lead to anything positive. They have some stuff going on and you are just kind of caught in their world.” And when I pulled back from this person, me pulling back is what caused the harassment and trolling to intensify.

So a big lesson learned from that is to not engage in those situations. Eventually we blocked that person on all of our profiles. I had to engage my attorney for conversations around all of that. And it was a big energy, time and financial drain on our business to have to navigate that for several months. But the biggest lesson I learned is, do not engage. And also this person had never been a customer of mine. They weren’t part of my community. They weren’t on my mailing list. They didn’t listen to my podcast. They never bought a single product of mine. And at the end of the day, their opinion about me really didn’t matter because they weren’t even a part of the community that I had been nurturing online for years and years.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. And you’d mentioned that you lost some clients during that time, and I can imagine there are listeners who have dealt with something similar and maybe they’re losing clients or they feel like their reputation is taking a hit and they’ve worked so hard to build it. Besides the emotional trauma involved, how do you repair a reputation or how do you kind of deal with that side of it when you’re in the middle of it and beyond, and afterwards?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah. For me, I was very fortunate during that time that there was a lot of, kind of back-channeling going on in my community. What we realized with this person is that when people would disengage with this person, they would maybe unfollow them on social media. Then this person would notice and then the person that had unfollowed them would then get swept into kind of their tirades and the things they were saying about them. So a lot of people, what was really difficult is no one around me who knew me and trusted me, and understood me, could speak out publicly in support of me because then they were going to get swept up into all of this as well. Eventually this person totally fizzled out. They’re just not even, I don’t even think they’re online anymore.

I’m not seeking them out so I don’t know for sure. But for me, a lot of it was having these conversations behind the scenes, indirect messages with people, learning that there were a lot of people who were, they didn’t believe what this person was saying. They knew it was completely untrue. They knew who I really was and what my values were, and that those had really stood for themselves. And it’s so interesting, those people were doing the damage control on my behalf without me ever really having to do anything. I never spoke out publicly about this person when this was happening. And I think it’s just a real testament to building a strong community and nurturing people, and having people who regardless of what is said, people who know you and who trust that they know you and your intentions, and the good that you’re doing in the world. And those people were the ones who were standing up for me and making sure that as these things were being said online, that other people knew that those things weren’t true.

Rob Marsh:  We are huge believers in community and I think that’s a really important point. So my next question is, okay, let’s say I’m listening and I don’t yet have that community or I haven’t found the right community. Do you have any tips for curating your own community, finding the right community that matches with your values, that gives you that kind of support that you need, or the coaching, the mentoring, the peer support?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah, for sure. I mean, there are so many great communities that folks can find and join online, memberships. I don’t know if you’re a copywriter, the Copywriter’s Club. I mean, there’s so many places you can go and find people who are doing what you’re doing or building what you’re building. And I think finding those communities is great and really important. I think the real value in joining those communities is, and don’t come for me when I say this you all, it’s not necessarily the value in the curriculum or the coaching calls or anything like that, it is finding other people in those spaces that you can connect with and that you can start to do business alongside. It’s really interesting, I just had a call last week with someone who has been, she was one of our first customers. She was actually in the very first batch of the first 80 people that joined our membership in 2017.

And over time, she joined our team as a community moderator. And I was just talking with her a few weeks ago because we’re winding down our membership. And I was just saying, “Hey, this is our plan. So we’ll compensate you through this date and then we’re going to wind down the community,” and all of that. And she was talking, she’s like, “Oh yeah,” she was talking about the community. And she said, “Yeah, there’s this group of us, we all met in Follower To Fan back in 2017 and we’re still in contact. We’re all doing these monthly challenges together, submitting ourselves for artist contests and pitching ourselves for commissions and things like that.”

And I’m like, “Wait a minute, these people you met online, in a Facebook group four years ago? She was like, “Yeah, we’ve stayed in touch all this time and built our businesses with one another.” And that just blew my mind that it came out of something I just made up myself in my home office four years ago. So I don’t know. I feel like that’s a secret look for the communities within the communities. That’s where there’s a lot of opportunity.

Kira Hug:  How has your view of online business changed over the last few years as you’ve dealt with so much? Like leaving the cult-like community, dealing with extreme burnout, harassment by a troll. You’ve dealt with so many things, when you’ve walked away from that, what have you taken with you that’s really important?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah. Number one, online business is an incredible opportunity for people to create something and do it on their own terms. So no matter what, I still fully believe that and that’s why I have this kind of business. The second lesson learned through all of this is that there’s no one right way to do business. A lot of what you see online and what’s presented through marketing and messaging, and products, is that this way is the right way and it’s just not true. There are over a million and one right ways to run your online business. And I think what’s most important is finding one that resonates the most with you. I would say another thing I’ve really learned is that your business has to, I think it’s just really important to go back to the reason you started your business.

And people talk about this all the time, but for me, I started my business for two main reasons. One, I wanted more freedom and flexibility in my life. And number two, I was working a job where I felt my skillset was never being fully utilized. So, if I’m going to run my own business, and that’s the reason why I wanted to start this business, then I need to make sure I’m consistently protecting my freedom and flexibility, and that I am fully utilizing the skillset that I have. So that’s been a big learning as well, and the last thing I’ll say, this was my biggest takeaway from 2021 and this whole process of healing from burnout and launching a new business. And if you’re listening to this episode and you are in that place right now of maybe hating your business, resenting your business, wanting to pivot in your business, I want you to come back to what I’m saying here.

You can’t create the next step, you can’t figure out your next move when you’re operating from a place of deep pain and burnout and overwhelm. What I found is time and time again, I kind of reached these points in my business where I was frustrated with my business and I wanted to pivot and go a different direction. And I would figure out my next move from that place of frustration and overwhelm. And what I realized as I repeated that pattern year after year, after year, is that I was simply recreating the same environment every single time. So what I had to do, and I’m very fortunate I was able to do this, I know not everyone is, but if you’re in a position to do this, what I had to do was shut off all of the inputs and all of the noise.

So for me, that was going off social. I had to shut out as much of the work as possible. So for me, that looked like going offline and really being unavailable and not creating anything or selling anything new, and just running my business, operating off of reserves, not making income month over month, running a negative profit month over month, but just so the business could sustain itself. So I could go away and go offline, and by go away, I mean, go to my bedroom or go to the coffee shop on the corner and figure out my next move from a place of rest and wholeness instead of from a place of frustration and overwhelm.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I like this. And obviously these are the things you’re doing in your business to get through that overwhelm. Are there other things that you were doing in your personal life? You mentioned the move, obviously support from others that also helped you get through that burnout, changes that you made there?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah. I mean, I’m a huge proponent of therapy. I think most people need to be in therapy. I think pretty much any entrepreneur or business owner I’ve ever met could benefit from therapy in some form or the other. So that has been deeply important to me in this whole process. Being really communicative with my husband through this whole process and having his buy-in I think. I am the sole breadwinner in our family. The business provides for me and for my husband, and our household, and lifestyle. So having him on board, being able to say to him like, “Hey, I may need to take an extended period of time off of work. Are you okay if we tap into our savings? Are you okay if we tap into money that we’ve set aside for other things so I don’t have to work for some period of time to figure out what I want to do next?”

Having that communication was really important. And honestly, just going for walks and being really present in the community where I live. I live in an incredible neighborhood here in Chicago. It’s a super queer neighborhood, which is really important to me to have that representation. So just being really present in my neighborhood, being out and about, going to the farmer’s market, going on walks, that was really healing for me. And also doing that without AirPods in, without the headphones, without the podcast.

Kira Hug:  What, you do that?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yes, without the NPR News update playing. That’s the other thing, I kind of stopped watching the news. That was helpful too. I got my New York Times subscription and just checked that out every morning. That was really helpful too.

Kira Hug:  Walking around without ear pods. You’re talking craziness now.

Rob Marsh:  I didn’t realize you didn’t do that anymore.

Kira Hug:  Can you do that?

Tyler J. McCall:  I know, you can do it. Yes.

Kira Hug:  Oh, my goodness.

Tyler J. McCall:  Going to the grocery store or Target without headphones in, oh my God. It’s amazing.

Kira Hug:  And actually talking to other people, what?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yes.

Kira Hug:  Well, I’m on team therapy all the way. I tell all of my family members regularly how much they all need therapy. So I am that obnoxious person who reminds them how much they need it. And so I can’t overlook the sabbatical. And I really want to hear about what you did during the sabbatical and how it felt to unplug from the matrix and to not be on social media. And you mentioned being out and about, and going to coffee shops and feeling creative again. But can you just share more details about what that was like day in and day out and how it affected you? And most of us can’t even imagine, and we aren’t quite there yet how to unplug from this system that we’re all part of.

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah. It was, I think to this point in my life, I think it was one of the most, I don’t want to oversell it, but it was honestly one of the most impactful things I’ve ever done. I have been, sorry, I’m 33 years old. I’ve been on social media since social media was a thing. I mean, at middle school, I was writing on my Xanga blog, in high school it was Myspace. College, Facebook had just come out when I entered college. Every platform that launched I’ve been on it since the platform was created and social media has always been a part of my life. It was a part of my work in the nonprofit, doing community organizing. And then I started a business where it’s all I had done. I realized I had not taken time off of social media, away from it completely, my entire adult life.

And that now,thinking back about it was, felt deeply like it wasn’t the right thing for me. I don’t know, I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like who I had become. I didn’t like how I was being stimulated by social media. I didn’t really care for the need to feel like I had to always be on. I really became really frustrated and resentful with this idea of I had to kind of be this dancing bear on the internet to make money for my business, and it just wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore. So for me, it was very easy. I kind of reached this point of like, “You know what, I got to cut it off.” It was very easy for me to delete the apps from my phone to have someone, actually my marketing manager changed my passwords so I couldn’t get into the accounts and just to not be on social media.

The thing I’ll say is that, and folks who are listening and you’re thinking about doing this, first of all, I have a three episode series on my podcast, the Online Business Show, it’s called the Sabbatical Series, where I walk through the lessons I learned, how to plan your own. And then I talk more about our relationship with social media as creators and entrepreneurs. So, you can check that out on the Online Business Show. But for me, I had to get really clear on my reason for why I wanted to do it. And I think that’s really important for anyone that wants to do something similar to this. My reason why was to cut off all of the inputs and all of the noise that was distracting me in my business and in my life.

All the messages saying I wasn’t doing enough, I wasn’t making enough, I wasn’t creating enough, just to shut all of that off. So, I didn’t care about still being on my phone, I just wanted to be off of social media if that makes sense. Some folks they may want to just not be on their phone as much. So I think their approach may be a bit different, so that looked like I was still on my phone, I was just playing a word game, I was playing Sudoku. I was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. I was reading the news on the news app on my phone. I was reading a book on my phone. Because so much of social media is muscle memory, so I was still picking up my phone, I was just doing something different on my phone. And then when I wanted news or information about what was happening in the world or on television, my husband and I are huge reality television fans.

 

So when I wanted to see what the latest gossip was about the Real Housewives or wherever, I had to go seek that out intentionally. So a few things that have kind of stayed over from that. First of all, I don’t really have social media on my personal phone, I have it on my work phone, which lives in my home office. I actually really only get on social media when I’m sitting at my desktop computer, which feels really great. And that’s been kind of a holdover. And I also, I’m just really okay with posting and then logging off, which is totally different than what I used to do, even what I used to teach, is stay on, engage, start conversation, respond to people.

Now I just log on Facebook, Facebook’s actually kind of my platform of choice these days for my business. So it feels like it’s, I don’t know, 2014 all over again, but I’ll just open up Facebook, post something and then just close out and I don’t read the comments or respond to anything. And that just feels good. That’s what I want to do right now. So that’s what I find to be working.

Rob Marsh:  I definitely can’t fault you for that approach, because I am not the most engaging person on social media myself. But let’s talk a little bit more about some of what’s going on badly on social media, probably particularly Instagram, TikTok, some of these platforms. How are we actually, in some ways, damaging our business or damaging our own health when we’re engaging in the ways that so many people have been teaching?

Tyler J. McCall:  Yeah. Oh my goodness. I have so many thoughts. Let me try and put them in a nice little package with a bow on them. I have some concerns; I have some fears about kind of, where we are right now at social. One of my concerns is that these platforms are never going to stop changing. I think we kind of got to a point and as I said, I’ve been an Instagram marketer for a long time. I’ve been on Instagram since it was created. We kind of had, we had reached different points on Instagram where the app was kind of just steady. We knew what was going to work. Stories launching, and I think that was 2016, 2017, was a big game changer on Instagram. And then we just, Instagram kind of stayed the same. And then Instagram live, IG TV was kind of a thing, but it didn’t really change the format that much.

And then reels happened. And I think it’s really important for people to consider, especially as business owners and creators, that the platforms, the way that these platforms are working and introducing new features, new tools, things like that, they’re not introducing these things to make your life easier as a creator. I think a lot of times we think about it that way like, oh, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, whatever they’re doing this for me as a content creator. That is never really their end goal, their goal, their ultimate goal is to maintain users attention on the platform. There was actually, I wrote about this recently for our Online Business Digest. In December, there was a leaked document out of TikTok’s headquarters in China and it was called TikTok Algo 101. And it was a step by step breakdown of how the TikTok algorithm actually functions.

And it was written for the layperson, it’s kind of a non-technical document. And in it, it says, our primary objective is to increase user activity and increase, something around the domination of users or domination of this type of content in the world. They are measuring how effective their strategy is, their algorithm is based on how many people they’re getting from around the world to get on this platform and then how long they’re staying on the platform. So, I think it’s kind of, it feels a little bit like, I don’t know, matrixy-conspiracy theory, whatever, but I think it’s important to think about the goal that these platforms have. So as a creator, as a business owner on these platforms, you’re playing into this. So that’s something that’s really important to consider and to realize that anytime, I’m a big believer, especially Facebook or Meta as the parent company is now called, anytime they’re coming out with something that seems like the goal here is to make it better for creators, make it better for customers.

Many of these platforms are doing that preemptively because in the past year we’ve had a Facebook whistleblower come out. We’ve had Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, we’ve had them sitting in front of congressional panels testifying about the platforms. The Washington Post did a massive expose last year called the Facebook Files. If you haven’t listened to that podcast or read it, I encourage you to go do so, where there is there’s proof where Facebook knew about all this harm they were causing around disinformation, human trafficking, child trafficking, impacting the mental health of teen girls around body image causing an increase in self harm and suicide.

All of these things and the platforms knew about it and they’ve done nothing to change it. And that is deeply troubling to me as someone that has built a business that depends on these platforms. So we’re not doing that anymore in our business. We’re shifting what our business depends on and how we build traffic and how we build community, and where we create content. And I feel like for a lot of business owners, we’re going to have to do that. I think these platforms are really getting away from themselves and they’re getting away from us as creators and entrepreneurs.

Kira Hug:  We’re halfway through the interview. So let’s cut in and talk about a couple of ideas worth emphasizing. So Rob, what did you write down? What did you underline from this part of the conversation?

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, I’ve got a bunch of notes, but start with the idea or what happened with Tyler shutting down his existing business to do something new. And the idea here is that change is pretty constant in our business, whether it’s shutting down a niche or a product, or a packaged service, or moving from one thing to the next is pretty common. But doing it in such a drastic way as Tyler has, literally shutting down something that’s been supporting him for the last four years and completely reinventing his business, that’s pretty drastic and kind of an interesting story to hear. I mean, just emphasizing the idea that change happens. And for some of us, maybe we want to do the same thing, shift dramatically from a full-time job to writing as a freelancer or shifting the kinds of clients that we work, or the niche that we work in. It’s all doable and Tyler’s proving that it can be done well.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. And Tyler has such an incredible story that he shared with us about severe burnout. I mean, this is not a little bit of burnout, this is severe. Taking a year off, I mean, being harassed, leaving communities. So much happened for Tyler. And the cool thing is that we can all take some lessons away from it, even if we’re not dealing with that type of burnout. Maybe it’s just we’re feeling like burnout is approaching, but not quite there. Or maybe we know some things aren’t working in our business, but we don’t have to dramatically change it.

I still could pull lessons from it. And I think one of the lessons that Tyler reminded me of is just that online business is an incredible opportunity for people to create something and do it on their own terms. And it’s cool t