In this YouTube dialogue, Mihail Pautov asks how to begin content creation when you have no followers or experience but possess expertise. The speaker empathizes with professionals who feel frustrated watching charismatic, often younger creators gain attention on social media. He describes his own attempts to shortcut the process by hiring a young writer and later an agency, both of which produced content that sounded inauthentic and failed to capture his voice. After a year of outsourcing, he realized that authentic self‑expression—having the courage to share one’s genuine thoughts and maintaining consistency—is essential. He concludes that once you commit to expressing your true thinking and building your own identity, other elements like followers and engagement will follow, and obstacles become opportunities for growth.
Chapters
You cannot export your thinking to other people, or in this case now, machines.
How can you start if you have zero followers, you have no content creation experience, but you are good at something and you wanna show it? How do you start?
I wanna express deep empathy for the people who are professionals, who are experts, who see relatively young people, sometimes good-looking people or very charismatic, go onto social media and create this name for themselves. And you're sitting there thinking, they don't know anything. I know things, but no one's following me and no one's watching what I'm doing. So there's some frustration there. I've been on that journey myself. In the beginning, I was thinking social media is stupid. It feels very empty and very vacuous, but I don't want to be left behind.
Yeah.
FOMO, really fear of missing out. Okay. Different FOMO. And then I hire somebody who's like, hey, I'm good at social media. Usually a relatively young person and they start creating content for me. I'm like, great, problem solved. No, that's just the beginning of the problem because what they do is they write in their voice and not your voice cuz they have nothing to work with. I had a woman writing for me and it sounded like a woman was writing my post. And her choices of flowers and colors. Like, that is not even me. Where are we going with this content? So I was thinking, wait, wrong strategy. Let me try again. So I hired an agency. Now the agency was like, we have all these stats, we're professional, we have a team. They didn't know my voice either. So I paid them both for months at end and thinking to myself, I'm nowhere closer to my goal. I'm creating some weird false engagement and I'm not really doing what I need to do, express my thoughts about the world and build credibility through that thinking. And the art of articulating your thoughts is really beneficial to myself. You cannot export your thinking to other people, or in this case now, machines. I think in a lot of things in life, the obstacles are an opportunity for you to grow, to change, and to evolve. So I tried this process of having other people create the content for me for about a year, and I said, no, I'm gonna figure this thing out and I'm gonna do it on my own. And that's when the change really happened. So a lot of empathy. Now we've figured out, we've tried things, we tried to take shortcuts, or we're not that interested. Now we've committed ourselves to wanting to express our thinking. That's the most important part, and finding our own identity in that process.
