When Platforms Control Your Paycheck

Ultimize. A woman built a 6-figure business on Instagram. 7 years of work, 30,000 followers, a podcast with millions of downloads, a real community, people depending on her for support. And then one Friday afternoon, it was gone. Not temporarily down, not reviewing your account. Gone. Deleted. Locked out. No appeal. No explanation, no human being to talk to. Just an email that basically said, thank you for building your business on our platform. Now please disappear. This story is not an anomaly. It is the business model. If you're building your livelihood on one platform and I don't mean to pick on Instagram, it could be any of them. I need to say something to you that might sting a little. You don't have a business. You have a lucky streak at a slot machine, and the casino can pull the plug anytime it wants. They can kick you out anytime they want. Because let's be very clear about something: big tech companies are not your partners. They are not your friends. They are not your community. They are not your safety net. They are a casino with better branding, and the house always wins. Why are guys like Mark Zuckerberg and the leadership at Google so insanely rich? It's not just ads. It's not just scale. It's not just innovation. It's because they don't have to deal with you or me. No customer service. Those people cost a lot of money. There's no customer service. There's no real escalation. No human being saying, "Hey, this person just lost their entire livelihood. Maybe we should check the facts of the situation. Maybe we should fix that." No. Zero. Vilch. Nada. You can lose your business and the only thing that still works perfectly is your monthly billing. Hey, sorry we deleted your account, but just to confirm, you're still paying us $15.99 a month, right? That's for some platforms. Obviously, Facebook doesn't charge, Instagram doesn't charge unless it's for advertising. Well, that's not a glitch. That's the system working exactly as designed. And I say this as someone who makes nearly 100% of my income from technology platforms. I'm not anti-tech. I love the stuff. I use it every day, but I never forget what it is. It's transactional. You're not the customer. You're the product. I'm the product. Your audience is the product. Your attention is the product. And the moment something goes wrong, hey, you're completely on your own. I'll give you my own story. 10 years ago, my YouTube account gone overnight. No warning, no explanation, just bye-bye. No, here's how to fix it. Just gone. Years of content, millions of views disappeared. And I did what everyone does. I begged, I emailed, I tried to pull strings, I promised to spend a fortune on advertising. I tried to find a human being Nothing. It was like trying to get a refund from a vending machine. Hello, I just lost my entire business. Silence. And here's the part that really hurts. That one's on me. Now, fortunately, I didn't put all my eggs in one basket. It wasn't all in one platform, one pipeline, one point of failure. So when it failed, it didn't destroy me, but There is a lesson here, and it's not don't use platforms. Use them, exploit them, maximize them, but never depend on them exclusively. Because the moment you depend on any one of them, you're vulnerable. You have to think like a paranoid entrepreneur. You wake up every morning and say, is my account still there? That's not anxiety. That's awareness. That's reality. That is how I feel on certain platforms. Because if your business cannot be, or if it can be deleted by an algorithm, it's not really a business, it's a lease or a hope and the landlord doesn't know your name. So what should you do? You diversify, you spread your content, you spread your audience, you build redundancy, you build backup, you build resilience, you build emails. You don't say I have 100,000 followers on Instagram. Ideally you say I have 10,000 followers on 10 different platforms. Because one of them will disappear, guaranteed. It's not if, it's when, even if you did nothing wrong. And here's the final mindset shift. Stop thinking of platforms as homes. They're not homes. They're not even rented apartments. They're highways. You use them to move people to places you control, your email list, your websites, your communities, your products, assets that cannot be turned off by someone in a hoodie in Silicon Valley who just decided your content wasn't aligned with community standards, whatever that means this week. So yes, use the platforms, make money from them, grow from them, but never trust them. Because the second you trust them, you're one email away from unemployment or bankruptcy. And if that sounds harsh, good, because the truth is harsh. But it's also liberating because once you understand the game, you stop playing like a customer and you start playing like the house. So please be careful. My heart went out to this woman who had essentially a business helping other women in need. It sounded like a great business and just gone overnight, which is why right now what I'm doing is I'm streaming live on YouTube. I'm streaming live on a couple of Facebook pages. I'm streaming live on LinkedIn. I'm streaming live on Twitch, on X, sometimes Instagram. This video will be put on every one of those platforms as a standalone. Then each story is edited into an 8-minute or so story placed on all those platforms. Then each story is sliced and diced into 2 or 3 shorts each, and those are put out. So I'm on roughly 10 platforms, 30 different pieces of content on all of them. So it's kind of 300 at-bats. I hope YouTube doesn't ban me tomorrow. I hope Facebook doesn't ban me tomorrow. But if they do, my attitude is going to be, see you later. I don't need you. I hope that's your attitude as well for any social media platform or tech company you deal with. Ultimize.