Quit Social Media, Grew My Business, Got My Life Back

All right. So let's, uh, let's get started for real. Welcome to another pop-up broadcast of Creative on Purpose Live. My name is Scott Perry. I am the publisher of Transcendent Solopreneurship, which is dedicated to helping solopreneurs achieve greater business success without any digital marketing BS. And today I am going to share some reflections on my first week and a half off of all the usual social media platforms and just share those insights in the hopes that they are useful or helpful to those of you that are tuned in here and tuned into the replay if, if I decide to, to publish the replay of this broadcast. So I'm gonna start by talking about the situation as it was for me right before I came onto Substack, which was in August of 2022. So I've been on Substack for about 2 and a half years now. And I came here after having a lot of what appeared to be great financial success as a digital marketer. I created a power offer., based on a client, ideal client avatar, uh, and constructed a digital marketing funnel and, and powered it with Facebook ads and built a business helping, you know, being a, a coach to coaches and helping coaches create businesses that, that were more profitable and sustainable. And again, powered, powered all of that with the traditional digital marketing tricks and hacks. I created an ideal customer avatar. I created a power offer. I conducted launches and with Facebook ads, created a funnel that earned me the coveted $10,000 a month. And I took me about a year to get that business dialed in. And I ran it for about 6 months. And at the end of 6 months, when I took a long look at the mirror and started to assess how happy or not I was with that business, I found myself to be profoundly unhappy, doing a lot of work that I didn't care for, most of it around all the work required to power a business with digital marketing hacks and tricks. And working with a lot of people I didn't really care about. So I was doing work I didn't care for with people I didn't care about and making a lot of money. And I decided that that was not sustainable for me. I was working 10 hours a day, spending 80% of that time iterating, hacking, tweaking a very leaky funnel that was giving me about a 2% conversion rate. And Spending a lot of time tweaking my customer avatar, grinding out content to get people into the top of that funnel, constantly tweaking the email sequences and the nurture sequences and the landing pages and all the things that digital marketers tend to tell you you have to do if you're going to have a profitable business. Decided I couldn't do that anymore. Didn't want to do that anymore. Blew up that business and basically started from scratch. Here on Substack without any clear audience, without any clear offer, and without any marketing funnel of any type. And over the course of the last 2 and a half years, I have since developed a business where I'm doing nothing but work I love with people that I actually care about. I am working instead of 10 hours a day, I'm working 10 hours a week. Monday through Friday, uh, getting all of my work done most of the time before 7 AM in the morning, because I'm an early riser. And I spend the rest of my days caring for my grandsons alongside my wife. And so we, I spend most of my days on weekdays going to the playground, having snack time, reading books, playing games, going, uh, and taking naps. So what I'm here to talk about today is how the social media piece has fit into this transition and the benefits that I have experienced by finally divesting myself altogether from the traditional social media platform. So again, just in terms of transparency. I have up until the middle of last month was leveraging LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. I got off of what is now X, what used to be Twitter quite a while ago. And since I've been on Substack, what I was able to do as part of this, this conversion from the typical digital marketing funnel model to this purpose-driven approach based on creating conversations that lead people to decide for themselves to continue those conversations into opportunities to help them see exactly where, what they're trying to accomplish and how they can do that more effectively and efficiently. Moving into low-ticket offers and then into mid-ticket and high-ticket offers. I just did a training on all of that, by the way, earlier today. It's on the YouTube channel, so Transcendent Solopreneurship. Go to YouTube at Creative on Purpose. You'll find it. And so in building this business that I completely divested myself of any kind of typical digital marketing funnel. The only thing that I was using social media for, for the last year plus has been to share links to my Substack content. Can you leveraging social media as outposts, as distribution centers for getting people to collide with my content on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, and have them click into my Substack where they can become subscribers, which I consider anybody that's subscribed to my subsec, a prospect. There's someone that's interested in what I do. They are aware of and willing to pay some attention to what I'm doing. And then I leverage this conversational model of icebreaker conversation to diagnostic conversation, all for free, to help people step into, uh, taking a bolder step into possibility and their solopreneur potential by becoming paid subscribers, members of the inner circle and circle communities where we have weekly calls and do weekly deep dives into various aspects of what I call the Purpose-Driven Prosperity Model, which is a non-digital marketing funnel, an anti-digital marketing funnel approach to creating a thriving, prosperous business that allows you to do more of the work that you love with people that you care about and do less of the work that most of us didn't start our business to do, which is to become digital marketers. So for the first year or so of my adventures in Substack, I didn't really have any kind of offer. I was just publishing things that were interesting to me, and people who were attracted were subscribing and joining the communities and joining the community conversations. And through those conversations, I began to create offers that were more or less bespoke and individualized to whatever it was that people were trying to accomplish. Because I've done a lot of things and have a lot of experience in various domains and with just what it means to be, to, to, to, to be a, a purpose-driven person who is living in alignment with their values and their and leveraging their talents. I was able to help all sorts of people, exiting entrepreneurs that were trying to figure out what they were going to do with their lives after they exited from their entrepreneur business because of a buyout. I've helped several people that were going through relationship changes navigate life during and after divorce. I helped some coaches and some solopreneurs optimize their businesses. Uh, just to help people doing a lot of the things that I've been able to do in my life or using the principles and the ideas of reasoning from first principles, system reliability thinking, and microstepping, helping people identify the problems that they're actually experiencing and solving those problems with the greatest ease and efficiency. And once I started to get some clarity about my niche, which came from this positioning of, I'm a person that is interested in being led by my values and principles, leveraging time-tested ancient spiritual and philosophical wisdom and the scientific tools of reasoning from first principles and system reliability to accomplish goals. This niche emerged from that positioning, uh, where I was working more and more with purpose-driven solopreneurs. And so I just decided that finally I was able to craft some kind of vague offering around if you are an advancing solopreneur, solopreneur with an existing business, and would like to spend more of your time doing work you love with people you care about and less of your time with all this digital marketing BS. I'm a person that can help you. And over the course of the next, the second year of my Substack, I put together this thing called the Purpose-Driven Prosperity Model. It's an operating system based on crafting what I call a forever offer, an irresistible offer based on positioning, not niching, based on your values and talents., not on power offers and no-brainer offers. And identifying the audience that you seek to serve, people who share your values and need your talents to enhance their lives. And then crafting a client attraction system that's funnel-free, doesn't require ideal customer avatars, doesn't require power offers or no-brainer offers, doesn't require some sort of digital marketing strategy. Funnel or content grind to engage the right people in conver— you know, have them come to a place where you can engage them, the right people in conversations that help them see the direction that they want to go in and help them start to collapse time to target so that they will pay you for acceleration for collapsing time to target by gaining greater proximity and access to you, whether that's through some sort of community coaching program, course, what have you. I took— because of my experience as a digital marketer, I decided that one way I can scale this business is I can use Facebook ads to boost my, my Substack subscriber count. And I did. I went from getting 1 or 2 subscribers a day to 2 to 4 subscribers a day using Facebook ads. And what happened was that although I, I definitely exponentially grew my subscriber count, I completely destroyed my open rates and my click rates on my emails because, and this is my assertion, what I found is one of the reasons I, I was able to craft a brand new business here on Substack that allowed me to be more of who I wanted to be and become who I wanted to become as someone that was clear about who they were and what they were good at and and working with people who shared my values, needed my talents to enhance their lives. I was able to do that here on Substack in a way that I wasn't able to do it when I had a social media-powered funnel, because fundamentally, although the founders call Substack a social media app, I would argue that although it has aspects of social media, embedded in it through direct messaging and chat, uh, and content distribution and comments. It is primarily a search engine. People that come to Substack come here for the same reason they go to YouTube. They are searching for solutions to a problem or a way of achieving an aspiration. People are on Facebook or LinkedIn. Well, people are on Facebook because they are looking for distraction. They're avoiding doing any real work, and what they want to do is fuel their outrage or fuel their distraction by watching reels and watching cat videos and getting into arguments over politics, religion, or what have you. People are on LinkedIn largely just promote themselves and to look smart. And people are on Instagram for— I don't know, I never was very good at Instagram, but I guess to become an influencer, I don't know. But it turned out that those people were not my people. And what has happened for me over the last 6 months is I quit using Facebook ads altogether. I used social media only as a means to share links that would get people to my Substack. And over the course of the time between July and— or yeah, July through September, what I noticed is that without any ads, about 1% of the readers of any piece of content I posted were coming from Facebook. None were coming from LinkedIn. None were coming from Instagram. So it was an easy call to just get rid of LinkedIn, which I've always hated. Even when I was using it as a primary funnel amplifier, I was able to just deactivate those two platforms, LinkedIn and Instagram, without any discernible change in my organic audience growth, free subscriber and paid subscriber count. For Facebook, I decided that for the remainder of this year, I'm going to deactivate that account. So I deactivated it on the morning of October 1st, and I'm going to see what happens if I simply don't, um, have any social media to use to promote my Substack. And I'm just going to leverage the tools that Substack provides both as content distribution, as a search engine, and as social media. So I'll get to the meat and potatoes of today's broadcast, which is my reflections on what it's been like for these last 10 days. For the previous 3 months, I was actually only using I was on social media for less than 90 minutes a week. It took less than 90 minutes a week to simply promote my Substack content on social media. So I justified staying on social media because it really wasn't costing me all that much time. And I thought, you know, when it came down to deciding to get off the 3 platforms I was on, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, I thought, well, really all I'm going to save is 90 minutes a week, which is not nothing, right? There's, that's 90 minutes a week I can spend with my grandkids, with my wife, taking walks, taking naps, reading books, doing things that actually are meaningful and fulfilling to me. But here's, here's what I didn't anticipate, which is even though I was spending almost no time, you know, minutes a day on social media. The fact that social media is completely out of my life has just had an incredible impact on my sense of equanimity, well-being, um, cognitive clarity, and and focus on doing the work that really matters with the people that I really care about, because now I don't have to worry about cutting up content to put on Facebook or Instagram, Instagram Reels. Now I'm not worried about how, what, you know, what that 1% of people that are coming from Facebook are doing once they're in my, like, 1% of the people that came to my Facebook or to my Substack came from Facebook and 0% became paid subscribers. So what was, what was really in it for me? There's plenty in it for Facebook. I was creating content for Facebook and spending time on Facebook. I was even getting paid a little bit for that content that I was posting on Facebook by Facebook. With all of that out of the picture, I cannot even describe to you the benefit in terms of my mood, my attitude, and my behavior. Because without a button to push, just like, oh, I'm bored, I don't know what else to do, I'll go watch some Carl Sagan reels on Facebook. Now I am always, when I am looking for something to do, I'm either going to get on Substack to help people that I care about because they are subscribed to, or the kind of people that could become subscribers to my Substack, or I'm putting, shutting down my computer and my phone and I'm going into our little romper room to play with my grandsons, to read books, to take a longer nap, or to put everybody, you know, get everybody in the stroller and take them to the playground. And so the, the biggest boost to my life, to my wellbeing, to my sense of meaning, equanimity, and flourishing is that without social media at all, life is so much richer, so much more clear, so much more fun. And my focus both on my life vision and my, my business optimization could not be more clear than it is right now. So I'll just wrap up by saying, I'm not advocating, I'm not sharing my experience because I think you should do what I do. This is the great problem with most of the online gurus and digital marketers in the world is these are not bad people. These are people that have accomplished a thing. And think that because they accomplished it, that you can accomplish it doing what they did. The problem with buying into a guru or digital marketer program that says you can achieve what I achieved by doing what I did in the past is that you are not them and it is no longer the past. By the time you're purchasing some guru or digital marketer's program, You are buying into something that is already delivering diminished returns. As an early adopter of the LinkedIn DM strategy, I can tell you that before everybody was doing it, it worked really well. I made a ton of money through a DM marketing strategy on LinkedIn until I didn't, because once everybody caught on and once some gurus and digital marketers started teaching it, it polluted the marketplace with too many people that were doing it too poorly and really just turning it into nothing but a pitch and a spam fest. And it stopped working for me and it doesn't work well for much of anybody that I'm aware of. This is the same thing that's true of Facebook ad strategies, you know, that are based on some sort of DM funnel, you know, with or without video as the primary content being delivered. It— I, I've done it. I've achieved great success with a video-based DM strategy powered by Facebook ads. But now that more and more people are doing it, more and more people are doing it poorly, and that whole approach does not work the way it used to. But here's the bigger thing. If you are a purpose-driven difference maker, you should be only engaged in marketing that aligns with who you are, what you're good at, and where you belong. If you're not the kind of person that likes to spend time on social media, then you don't have to be on social media. That's the promise that I am sharing with you all. I built a very successful career as a full-time musician and a very successful guitar lesson studio before there was any kind of digital marketing. And I did that using basic business philosophy and fundamental principles that were basically all built on serving prospects before they— so they could— would become leads and so that they would become happy clients that would be happy to promote my business for me. And you can do all of that without any of the digital marketing hacks and tricks. You don't need social media. You don't need a funnel. You don't need an ideal customer avatar. You don't need a launch strategy. If you simply show up and do your thing and let people watch, not only will you gain preeminence in your craft, becoming the one and only choice for doing what you do in the way that you can do it for the kind of people that share your values and need your talents, but you will be able to, to attract the right clients and customers without doing any of the things that you don't want to do, whether that's not being on social media or not spending all your time tweaking a very leaky funnel or dealing with ideal customer avatars or launch schedules, etc. And so what we just talked about in the previous training that was at noon, it's on the YouTube channel. I can't remember exactly what it's called, but it's basically— I actually went through the data. I showed everybody the numbers that I collected from Q3 in terms of my client attraction process. And that client attraction process is based on, I started a conversation where a certain percentage of people continued the conversation and allowed me the privilege of helping them get clear about what they were actually trying to accomplish and delivered a roadmap that would help them get there. And then, and all of that was for free, and then offered them a very affordable low-ticket offer that would help them gain some traction. And once they gained some traction and some clarity that they could collapse time to target, a certain percentage of those people moved into a higher-ticket offer to get acceleration momentum, collapse time to target with greater ease and velocity. This very simple, and you might think of it as a funnel. I don't think of it as a funnel because I'm not leveraging any of the the typical funnel tools or tactics or even strategies. It's not based on copy on your landing page or copy in your email sequences or colors of the buttons on your sales page or any of that. It's just based on demonstrating and delivering value at every step of the way so that people decide for themselves to take the next step. And all you have to do is deliver the promise that you just made them in the previous step. And if you do that repeatedly, you're not selling anything because nobody likes to be sold anything. People do like to buy. We love to buy stuff. You know, that's why we go to Target or Walmart or Barnes Noble or wherever we go is, you know, we want to, we, we like, we like shopping. We We like buying stuff, but we like to buy the stuff that we want to buy. We don't like for people to be used car salesmen trying to purchase what they have and using all sorts of manipulative tricks to get us to purchase. So the approach that I'm advocating is all run through Inception. It's all run by helping people self-identify as the kind of person that wants to take the next step. And here's the thing that I proved on the last training, whereas your typical digital marketing funnel has a 2% conversion rate from the time someone enters the funnel by opting in for some sort of freebie or, or lead magnet to hitting buy on the high-ticket offer on the sales page at the end. That's a 2% conversion rate. The conversion rate that I'm getting here on Substack without any kind of funnel, without any kind of pressure, By simply being present and being helpful at every step is now at 38%. And that sounds unbelievable. It's all bore out in the, the, the numbers and the data. You can go to YouTube and watch it right now. And that whole process that I taught, that's giving me that outrageous conversion rate, which is up from 20% the previous quarter. From 20% to 38% is only getting more and more optimized and only requiring less and less of my time. I'm working less than 10 hours a week. I earned my annual revenue goal by mid-June of this year, which means I've been playing with house money and doing only doing what I want to do with my time for the last whatever that is, 3 months, 4 months. And I'm not doing anything that anybody else couldn't do. I just show up every day, do my thing, let people watch. And I trust that my people will find me and they will ask me for help. And there's a certain amount of that help that I deliver absolutely free that allows me to improve my craft. And become the preeminent one and only choice in my domain for the kind of people that share my values and need my talents to accomplish what they want to accomplish. And the rest of my time I spend doing whatever I want. And that's the promise of the Purpose Driven Prosperity model that I offer to anybody that wants to explore it. So wrapping it up, is it possible to have a profitable, prosperous business without social media? Yes, it is. Because it was possible long before social media came around. I built two businesses without any social media whatsoever. Does that mean that you have to get off social media? No, you do you, play your game. If you like being on social media, if you, you know, like spending time there, if you like the, the, if, if a direct messaging, um, kind of funnel works for you on Facebook, by all means, if you like doing it, you're getting the kind of people you want to get and doing the kind of work you want to do, more power to you. But if you're finding yourself spending more of your time doing work you don't like and doing that work with people that you don't care about, there is a better way. And if that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to go ahead and subscribe to the Transcendent Solopreneurship publication. Where we are proving that business success without digital marketing BS is not only possible, but it is, it is almost inevitable if you are willing to do the work. All right. So that's, uh, that's it. This is my last call of the day. I'm going to go to the playground with my grandsons. Until next time, be well, do good. Have fun. Thanks for being here.