“Capybaras have to GO!”

Suppose you sell Capybara merchandise (bear with me):

Stickers… t-shirts… mugs… plushies… phone protection…

Very fun work.

You’ve built a sizeable following of 23k followers on Facebook – engagement is strong… orders keep flowing in from fellow capybara enthusiasts…

Then comes along Zuckerberg and says:

“Capybaras have to GO!”

One day, he just wakes up and decides they’re hellspawn – the furry second coming of Satan.

Why?

Fuck knows.

• Perhaps he had a bad dream about them…
• Perhaps one bit him at the zoo…
• Perhaps he finally snapped after realising capybaras will always be more likeable than he is.

(No matter how much overtime his PR team puts in.)

It does not matter in the slightest.

What does?

All capybara advertising & content has to come off the platform.

This is not a hypothetical scenario; this is not a “could” happen…

This DOES happen every single year since Facebook/Instagram emerged.

(You have some examples inside my book – Blind Spot #1)

• Your ad account gets banned…
• The ToS get rewritten overnight…
• The reach drops from 28.4% to 1.91%…
• The industry/niche gets deprioritized…
• The algorithm changes (as it recently did with Andromeda…)

Each and every single one of these has nuked perfectly profitable businesses into oblivion.

The worst is they did everything right except for ONE thing:

The one thing which, very interestingly, Wall Street brokers understand better than most marketers do…

(Again, check out Blind Spot #1 in my book for more.)

And that thing is:

To move them to a platform you OWN.

If your audience lives on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, or any other platform YOU did not build…

You are a tenant merely paying rent to a landlord.

And the landlord can raise the rent… change the rules… or evict you at any time… for any reason, on a whim, as he sees fit.

(And you have no legal or operational recourse).

The excellent “The Founder” (2016) movie springs to mind:

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You don’t build an empire on a 1.4% cut of a 15¢ hamburger, you build it by OWNING the land upon which that burger is cooked. 

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(That’s McDonald’s he’s talking about in case you haven’t seen the movie – and yes indeed that’s how McDonald’s generates 60%+ of their yearly revenues.)

You do not build a business on rented land…

You build it on land YOU own.

Now, since I’m a big fan of Occam’s razor…

My definition of a platform you own is very straightforward:

If you cannot reach customers when Cuckerberg the platform decides you cannot…

You do not own them.

From my 9+ years of experience in the supplement space…

I can firmly assert that most supplement brands flunk this test.

(i.e. they don’t own their customers.)

They focus too much on Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook etc.

And if another demon platform comes out in the next few years?

They’ll probably jump on that one too.

And the platforms they actually OWN – like direct mail or email list/newsletter…

At best?

Get neglected.

At worst?

Get downright ignored.

I have heard some of the counter-arguments, though:

“Email is dead… direct mail is expensive… most of our customers are on Instagram anyway…”

(I’m sorry, ‘YOUR’ customers? You sure about that?)

And yet…

It’s that same argument which ended a thousand businesses the day TikTok/Google throttled organic reach…

Or Meta changed its ad targeting…

Or YouTube demonetized an entire industry/category.

(I have even more – and detailed – examples inside my book in Blind Spot #1.)

But you ultimately do what you gotta do.

I have learned long ago that I have no power to persuade anyone – merely give them some options to think differently.

If they choose to, at the very least, entertain those options?

Groovy.

If not?

Also groovy, my life doesn’t change in any measurable way.

But YOUR life can:

Should you go even further than just entertain those different options…

…and start applying them?

Well…

Beautiful things can happen.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”