This one concept changed the way I think about marketing

May 11

We all know the feeling as business owners. You finally have a second to zoom out and think about your business as a whole and you have that “oh shit” moment when you realize that you don’t have enough in the pipeline to hit your goals.

Cut to scrolling on Instagram for “inspiration.” Googling “how do get better SEO.” Seeing if you can find the login to that YouTube course you took three years ago and did nothing with.

The results of these efforts? Usually a whole lot of imposter syndrome and “oh my god, how long will that take me.” It’s like a tidal wave of to dlist items: Post 3 times a day. Try every platform. Find the right hook, the right lighting, the right posting time. Go viral if you can. The theme below all of it? Do more. If you don’t have the results that you want, it’s because you’re not doing enough yet.

We’ll come right out and say it: for most business owners, this advice is steering you wrong.

Not because consistency and quality don't matter (they do!), but because the underlying premise is missing nuance.

Advice given on the internet can be targeted at a huge range of people - solopreneurs to people with forty person marketing teams - but you can’t always tell who the advice is for when you hear it. Even advice targeted at small businesses and solopreneurs doesn’t always clarify the things that work for service providers or high ticket coaches versus digital product sales or content creators.

Because solopreneurs and especially those with service based businesses still have to, you know, run the business. You still have to serve clients. You still have to deliver the work that's generating your revenue right now. Trying to do more in marketing runs the real risk of taking your time away from the thing that's actually making you money -- in hopes of eventually making more. That's a cycle a lot of business owners get stuck in. More effort, no visible traction, no clear signal of what's working, and eventually burnout or giving up.

The thing that changed how I think about all of this isn't a new platform or a better hook formula. It's a concept most people associate with money, not marketing. And once I started applying it, a lot of the noise started to make sense.

Prefer to watch? Here's the video!

The marketing strategy that actually works to grow your business

Spreading your attention is the reason you're not seeing growth

When most small business owners start thinking seriously about marketing, the instinct is to test a couple of platforms first. See what feels right, see what gets any response, and then double down on what's working. On the surface, that sounds perfectly reasonable.

The problem is that the moment you're splitting your time across Instagram reels, Facebook ads, and a weekly blog post, even with good intentions, you're dividing the resource that matters most: your attention. Marketing today is intensely competitive. Getting someone to follow you, finish watching your video, or click through to your site is harder than it's ever been. When you spread your efforts across three channels and spend maybe two hours a week on each, the amount of time it will reasonably take for your quality to improve on any of them is significant. And if quality isn't improving, growth isn't either.

Trying to do everything at once doesn't make you three times stronger. It makes each individual effort three times weaker. If you have six hours a week to put toward marketing, six focused hours on one channel will get you somewhere real, far faster than two scattered hours across three.

And yet the marketing world keeps pushing the opposite message. Add another channel. Explore new formats. Repurpose everything.

The very human instinct to resist committing to one thing is understandable. Committing feels like potentially missing the platform that could have been great for you. But here's the thing: spreading your attention doesn't solve that problem. It just guarantees you never find out what any of them could have been.

What a penny doubling every day taught me about marketing

Here's an experiment I want you to run in your head.

Would you rather take $1 million today, or one cent that doubles every day for 30 days?

Most people take the million because it seems like easy money. But watch what happens as we play it out. By the end of the first week, the penny side has 64 cents. On day 14, it's $81.92. Three weeks in, on day 21, things have started to look up, the penny side has crossed $10,000. But it still looks measly compared to $1M.

But on day 28, almost all the way through the experiment, something incredible happens: the penny doubled each day for 28 days crosses $1.3 million. Two days later at the end of the experiment, on day 30, it reaches $5,368,709.12.

That is compounding, what many people call the eighth wonder of the world. Growth that isn't calculated on a fixed baseline, but continuously recalculated based on whatever the new total is at each interval. Small improvements build on each other, and at some point the curve bends sharply upward.

Most of us have heard this concept in the context of money. WhenInvest $100 at 5% interest, let the calculation happen on the new total each month rather than the original $100, and over time your returns start doing the heavy lifting. But the concept of compounding doesn’t only apply to money.

When you’re trying to grow on social media it can feel like the growth is crawling at the beginning. Algorithms tend to give more reach to creators who already have retention and credibility, so at the start it feels like pushing up hill. But what you’re actually feeling is the beginning of the compound growth curve - the gains at this stage feel so minimal, but your baseline is slowly growing day by day. At some point, just like that jumping point in the penny experiment, you get on the right side of that curve and it feels like growth begets growth.

The same process happens with any skill you’re learning - golf, baking sourdough, writing, data analysis, you name it. Early on, it feels like you're grinding just to get to a baseline level of competency. But stick with something week over week, and at some point you start having these big leaps in ability that wouldn't have been possible without all the repetitions that came before.

Why you shouldn’t try to go viral

Chasing overnight growth - the video that blows up, the post that gets shared everywhere, the spike that suddenly puts you in front of thousands of people - is closer to day trading than investing. You're essentially gambling, because the likelihood of one singular post yielding such dramatic results is so low but the tactics that you tend to appeal to try to get these big results aren’t the sustainable, credibility building tactics. Trying to go viral is very likely to cost you time and money unless you have a specific and rare advantage: exceptional video editing skills, access to high-level talent, or production quality that are able to deliver these outsized results without the time put in to build the foundation.

Most small business owners don't have those things. So chasing virality is, more often than not, a distraction to avoid doing the real work that leads to sustainable results over time. (Because as someone who’s had 3 videos break a million views on social media, the traffic doesn’t last forever and then you’re back trying to draw attention just like you were before.)

Let’s think back to investing for the alternative here. If you put money into the stock market and stay in for one year, your odds of having a gain are around 70%. Stay in for 10 years, and that number climbs above 95%. In my experience as a marketer and small business owner, consistent investment in your marketing works the same way. If you show up week over week, month over month, on the timeline of years - your likelihood of reaching the results you're after is close to 95% or better.

Most people never get there because they aren't consistent, and they don't stick with it long enough for the compounding to kick in. They quit during that period where it feels like a slog and never see the long term results that were available to them.

What it looks like to actually focus your marketing

Focusing your marketing doesn't just mean picking one platform and showing up on it. Consistency matters, but the active improvement is what most advice leaves out and it's what actually feeds the compound curve.

There are a couple of ways I think about this.

1 - Run experiments in your marketing.

One your one platform of choice, deliberately test different approaches - hooks, formats, topics, thumbnails - so you come out of each week or month with more clarity about what's working for your specific audience. You're not just adding to a pile of content. You're building knowledge each time, and that knowledge compounds the same way everything else does.

2 - Study top performers

I keep a dashboard I built in Claude that resurfaces top-performing videos, hooks, and thumbnails from other creators in my niche. That way, I'm not just repeating my own patterns on a loop, I'm continuously refining what I'm making based on what's demonstrably connecting with people. The baseline quality of what I put out improves month over month because of it.

3 - Make sure you’re building in the right medium

Platform selection is part of this too. If you are creating on a platform because you heard it’s the easiest way to grow but it’s fundamentally a mismatch for your personality, you’ll never sustain it. The question is: which platform can you show up on consistently, week over week, and actually want to get better at over time? The platform you're genuinely interested in, that you're willing to commit to improving at, is the one where compounding can actually happen. Finding that match isn't settling for less. It's the prerequisite for everything else.

What it really takes to grow your business with marketing

When I was building my last business, it took about three months of posting 10 to 15 times a week on TikTok before my first video gained any real traction. Six months in, I had my first viral-ish video. By the time those big growth numbers actually showed up, I had put in thousands of repetitions. Thousands. That's not an exaggeration. It’s the realistic take on what it really takes to see major growth.

The growth was real. But so was the time it took to get there.

When you're in the early stages, when you have the metaphorical 64 cents and the person next to you has a million dollars, it can feel like clear evidence that nothing is working. That isn’t necessarily true - it’s very likely you’re just so early on the curve that you aren’t noticing the slow improvements over time. The compound growth curve doesn't start paying out in visible ways until you've built enough of a baseline for the math to work.

As a busy business owner, you already have more demands on your attention than you can reasonably meet. Building marketing strategies that intentionally accumulate skill and credibility over time, even when they feel slow at the start, are the ones that pay off long term. The game after that is just not quitting before they do.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

How do I know which marketing platform to focus on as a small business owner?

The platform you focus on should sit at the intersection of three things: what you can show up on consistently week over week, what you're genuinely interested in getting better at, and what your potential clients are actually using. Fastest-growing doesn't always win -- sustainable does. If you hate making video content, a video-first platform will be a grind that's hard to maintain long enough for compounding to kick in. Pick the platform you can commit to improving at over time, and that commitment will do more for your results than any algorithm optimization.

How long does it take for consistent marketing to start working?

There's no universal timeline, but based on experience building a previous business, plan for at least three to six months of consistent effort before seeing meaningful traction -- and that's with high posting frequency. Lower frequency takes longer. The key word is consistent: sporadic effort resets the compounding process. The curve exists, but you have to stay on it long enough to reach the bend. Most people quit before they get there, which is why the strategy feels like it doesn't work when it actually just needs more time.

Should I be on multiple marketing platforms to reach more people?

For most small business owners, the answer is no -- at least not yet. Splitting your time across multiple platforms divides your attention and slows down the quality improvement that compounding depends on. Two hours a week on three platforms means none of them will improve fast enough to see meaningful growth on any realistic timeline. The better move is to build real presence and skill on one platform first, let that compound, and expand only once the first channel is running with some momentum and less active effort from you.

Why do viral tactics and high-volume approaches not work for service-based business owners?

Two reasons. First, most service-based business owners don't have the time or infrastructure to sustain high-volume content production without pulling time away from the work that's actually generating revenue right now. Second, viral is closer to gambling than investing -- it requires rare advantages like exceptional production skills or access to high-level talent to deliver reliably, and even when it works, it rarely compounds into sustained growth without a consistent foundation under it. Chasing viral is a high-risk, low-probability strategy for most people in this category.

What does "running experiments" in your marketing actually mean?

Running experiments means deliberately testing one variable at a time -- a different hook style, a new topic angle, a different thumbnail format -- and tracking what changes. It's the opposite of posting and hoping. The goal is to come out of each testing period with more clarity about what works for your specific audience, so you're building knowledge with every piece of content instead of just adding volume. Over time, that accumulated knowledge is what improves your baseline and accelerates the compound curve.