Grow Your Multi-Platform Business In The Right Platforms

So what are we talking about this week? If you read my latest post, I talked about how I ditched 66% of my platforms to grow a multi-platform business. And so that's exactly what we're going to be talking about today. If you want to grow a sustainable business, what are the right platforms for you to be in, what you should consider, and also how you make sure that whatever you are building makes sense for you, for your business, for your values. And so, I wanted to share a little story. When I started writing, and it's a bit over 3 years ago, I had an issue, which is everyone had a different opinion. So, if I talked to authors, they would tell me that the platforms to be were Facebook or Instagram. If I talked to creators, they would say that I had absolutely to be on YouTube. People told me that I had to be on TikTok. And then, the corporate people say, you absolutely must be on LinkedIn. I don't know if this sounds familiar. But you hear so many opinions and the thing is everybody's right, but also everybody's wrong because you are the only one who knows yourself, your business, your values, what you really want to create. And so I think it's important to cancel a little bit the noise and find out what makes sense for you, which is what I want to try to help to do today. So yes, I did fall for the shiny object syndrome and I started being everywhere. And when I mean everywhere, on the one hand, I started writing on Medium because writers told me Medium is the platform where real writers are. We are not creators, we are writers. So, I was on Medium. Then I was on Instagram, I was on Facebook because my publisher told me that I had to be there to sell books. Then I was also on LinkedIn because I come from the corporate world and that's where you have to be if you're going to be in the B2B space. And then I was also on Substack and on X because people told me that if you had to, if you wanted to make a big impact, you had to be on X. And at one point, and this was 3 years ago, I was across everywhere and I was spreading so thin that I was really moonwalking towards success. That's how I like to call it. This idea that you're creating an illusion of productivity because you're doing a lot of things, but you're actually not moving the needle much. And so imagine this picture, right, of you doing so many things, but really you're kind of on a treadmill. Not doing much. And so I paused. And in January 2024, and I always do this at the beginning of every year, I pause, I reflect, I look back, I celebrate as well, but I'm also very critical. Like, what are the things that are not working? What are the things that are really not moving the needle? And how can I make a bigger impact? And so I decided that I really had to be much more strategic and not think about platforms for the sake of being in platforms, but really thinking about impact. And that mindset shift completely changed the way that I was looking at my business because it wasn't about which platform do I have to be in. It was more about what impact do I want to make? And then what are the tools that are going to help me make that impact? And a platform is just that, it's a tool. So yes, everybody was right, but everybody was wrong at the same time. And so what are the questions that I ask myself? And I would like for you to think about these questions because I think that they're super important and they definitely helped me find my compass and really be much more focused and much more centered. The first one is, where is your ideal client? And this might sound obvious, but many people don't ask themselves this question. And when you really stop and think, where is my ideal client? You might actually realize that there might be a mismatch. And let me give you an example. When 3 years ago, I was writing every single day on X, previous, formerly known as Twitter. My goal there was to sell my services as a public speaker. I do masterclasses, webinars, workshops, and so on in the corporate space. And so I was posting there, but I realized that the people who were going to hire me, which is heads of human resources, learning and development teams, chief people of staff, they were not on X, or at least not in the capacity of I'm here to find a speaker. And so I was wasting all this energy in a platform that one, wasn't really aligned with my values because it's very, very toxic, but also it wasn't really serving the purpose of helping me find my ideal clients. And so that's where you can have a mismatch. So the number one question is, where are your ideal clients? And these might be readers, students, corporate clients, but really think about where they are because that's where you want to be. And that's where you want to double down. So question number 1, ideal client. Question number 2 is where do you have leverage? And by leverage, I mean a competitive advantage, and this could be different things depending on your background, depending on your skills. Let me give you an example. If you come from the corporate world, in my case, I have over 15 years of corporate experience. At first, I thought that it wasn't really adding a lot of value in my work as a writer because people here, honestly, they don't really care that I worked at Apple or wherever it is that I worked or you worked before. However, in a platform like LinkedIn, for example, your corporate experience, your corporate background, your expertise, that B2B skillset is extremely valuable. And so, for me personally, a place where I have more leverage is LinkedIn because it's a B2B platform. And so, that's where having expertise in leading teams, in business development, sales and marketing in the corporate world, That for me is a big advantage. Now, what are some platforms? Where are some places where you have a competitive advantage? And it could be completely different things. Let me give you another example. If you're really great at things that have to do with video editing, digital marketing, all that type of stuff, that is a competitive advantage. So you might actually want to be on a platform like YouTube, for example, where you can really play to your strengths. So think about where you have the biggest leverage. Another hint on where you might have the biggest competitive advantage is where you already have a decent audience, just naturally by wherever you come from. You might have a bigger audience perhaps on Instagram because you come more from a creative background, or like in my case, it might be LinkedIn because I was in the boring corporate world for so many years. So that's the second question. So now we have 2 questions, right? I asked you about where your ideal client is. And the second one is the leverage. The third one is, where can you make the biggest impact? And it's not going to be everywhere. And I really want you to think of that question, like, where can you really touch more people and make an impact with your work? And impact is not about volume, it's first and foremost about depth. And that's why in my case, I ended up on Substack because I realized that what I really wanted to do was building a community. For me, that's what impact means. It's not just having a bunch of numbers. In fact, if you're interested, last week I deleted 500 subscribers from my publication who were inactive because I'm not here to build an audience. I'm not here to build vanity metrics. I really want to have a community. And so, when I was asking myself the question, where can you make the biggest impact? The answer was, well, I want to build a real community, therefore the best place for me to do so is on Substack. And so, by using these questions, ideal client, where you have a competitive advantage, and where you can make the biggest impact, I was able to really narrow down and laser focus on what really matters to me and where I can really move the needle so that I'm not moonwalking towards success. So, what happened with all of these? As I said at the beginning of the session, I was spread across 6 platforms or so. I decided to remove the things that were not aligned with these 3 questions. So, let me go one by one. Medium, I don't know if you were there before, but it was really not helping me with the impact because they changed the algorithm overnight. They changed the distribution model. And so, even though I had 6,000 followers, I couldn't really do much with them. So, I realized that it wasn't a platform that was really serving me. It was not on my terms either. I was just a digital tenant there. And that's why I wanted to build a community. So I said goodbye to Medium. It's still there, but it's pretty much a ghost. So that was that one. Then I was on Instagram and Facebook, but the style there was not really me. It felt much more superficial to me. It felt much more performative, not really aligned with my values. And so I decided that I was going to keep it for my daughters and my family and my dog, which is what I do. So I'm still active there, but more as a Chief executive mom. So I decided that's not really where I wanted to focus. And then X, because it was just so toxic, I decided that I didn't need that level of toxicity in my life. The world is already pretty messed up as it is, so you don't need X in your life. So X became my ex. And so with this, what was left then? 2 platforms. One is obviously Substack. I absolutely love Substack. I think it's an incredible platform to build a community. And today it ticks all my boxes. My ideal client is here. What do I do, by the way, at The Elementary Mindset on Substack? So my goal is really to help people turn their creativity into their lifestyle. Many people have great ideas. They're writers, they're super creative, but they struggle to monetize their creativity. And so I try to bring the strategy. I try to bring the business input so that we can turn an idea into a sustainable business. And therefore, my ideal client is definitely here. It's students who take my courses, it's the creators who have been in my cohort. It's people who want to publish books. I have published multiple books, one with Penguin Random House, which is the latest one, by the way, called The Anti-Procrastinator. And so that's why I decided to focus on Substack because yes, my ideal client is here, but also I can build a community because we can go much deeper than just sending a one-way newsletter. So I'm here with many of you today that I've met so many times, new faces as well. My group chat, for example, is super active today. By the way, if you want to collaborate, you don't have to be a paid member. You can just check my free chat in the Lemon Tree Mindset. And there are people there who are pitching for a podcast, who want to invite you to write a guest post, who want to do a co-authored post, for example. So, I really try to turn the Lemon Tree Mindset not just into an audience builder, but a community builder. And that's really my vision with this, and impact is a result of all of that. In fact, I believe so much in the impact of Substack that a year and a half ago, I launched the Spanish version called El Limonero. So that's a bit about Substack, and that's why it's become my one and pretty much only platform for all my creative work, whether it's as a coach, I do one-to-one sessions, whether it's as a creator, online writer, and so on. So that's my platform for B2C for my creative work. And so the other one is actually LinkedIn. Personally, I still think that it is the most powerful platform if you want to grow a B2B business, meaning if you want to sell product or services to corporates, global organizations, other businesses, it is still the place to be because all those decision makers, all the stakeholders are there. So this is the other line of my business. On the one hand, there's the creative part, which is on Substack. On the other hand, there's my B2B line of business, which is public speaking. I host masterclasses, keynote speeches. I do webinars for global organizations on the topics of leadership, communication, and cultural agility. And so for those of you who are interested in either starting in the B2B world, or perhaps you're already there, but you want to know how you can go a little bit deeper, I definitely recommend that you focus your energy on LinkedIn. In my case, for example, I first, I post there pretty much every single day from Monday to Friday. And I share a lot of my own corporate experience. I used to work at Apple before. I talk about how I used to develop teams, what I learned during those years in the corporate world. I talk about my work as a speaker. And that really allows me to do 2 things. One is build the connections with the audience, but it also helps me build credibility because I'm sharing the behind the scenes every time I go to speak at an event. So, last month, I was in Mumbai, India to speak at an HR conference. A couple of weeks ago, I did an event for AIA, the largest insurance company in Asia. And so, I share everything that I do as a speaker, and that really allows me to build my brand, to get more exposure, to get in front of the decision makers. So that's it in a nutshell. In my case, my business has 2 main pillars. One is the creative business that is very B2C and is where I am today, Substack, and I'm going deeper into that to build not an audience, but a community. My second pillar is my B2B business, which is all focused on public speaking and corporate training. My decision makers are not on Substack. I keep that for LinkedIn because I know that my public, my potential clients, they are on LinkedIn. I don't need to make a lot of noise everywhere else. This really allows me to do less, but in a way that is more focused, in a way that has more impact. I do want to address some of the questions that I get very often from people who are exploring like how to cross-pollinate, how to have more synergies between platforms so that you're not just working in silos into platforms that never talk to each other, but you can really create some synergies between them. And so one of the things that works very well is try to use one platform to create leverage on another one. So in my case, even though these topics are seemingly very disconnected, being a public speaker in the corporate world and being a creator. Very often I invite my LinkedIn followers to go across and visit some of the work that I've done on Substack. How do I do this? Well, you have to find the hidden link. What can someone who is on LinkedIn want from Substack? How do I trigger their interest? Let me give you an example. So many people in the corporate world are fed up. They want to do their own thing. They want to escape it. They just don't know how because they've been trapped for so long. in the ladder, in the hamster wheel that they don't know how to. So if I write on Substack a post, for example, about my life as a solopreneur or how I became a mompreneur, this is something that potentially will interest people from LinkedIn. And so that's how I can make a connection. And so what I do is I might write something about being a mompreneur and a public speaker. So I'm connecting both worlds, right? And then I said, if you would like to know more, And I don't just copy the link of the article of Substack on LinkedIn because that really drops the visibility. Algorithm doesn't like that. What I do is tag the comments and then I send people to Substack. The reason why this doesn't work, by the way, because I see so many people in my community make the same mistake. They just go on LinkedIn, they write the article from Substack, put the link there. This doesn't work. And the reason why is because LinkedIn, like many platforms, is ads-driven. That's how they make their business. They want to get lots of eyes in front of the companies that pay ads for them. And so when you put a link, especially if it's a link to a third party that is a competitor like Substack, it just triggers the alarm. And so they're like, oh, this person is trying to get our viewers, is trying to get our ad dollar money away from us straight into the hands of the competitors. That doesn't make sense. So As much as I don't like it, I probably would do the same. So that's why it doesn't work, but you have ways around it, such as very subtly saying, hey, if you want to know more, you can go to the comments. So that's one way how you can create synergies between the platforms. The other way, to give an example that is from Substack to LinkedIn, and I talk about these 2 platforms because it is what I know better, think or ask yourself the same question. What could interest someone who is on Substack about LinkedIn? Pretty much what I shared about today. If you're interested in growing a business that is B2B because it pays better, because you're able to have a bigger impact, you can build a brand if you're really working for these big corporates, then you can talk about how you can sell in the B2B world. What is the language that you use, how you can create an amazing LinkedIn profile to generate leads. And so that's how I play around with both platforms so that they don't live in isolation and they don't live in silos. So with this, I've taken you through this journey of how I started out with this big array of different platforms and slowly, but with strategy, I really narrowed it down to the 2 that make sense for me. This is not prescriptive. This is really something that is very, very personal for you to think about. How I did this is with the 3 questions that I mentioned at the beginning. Where is your ideal client? Where do you have leverage or competitive advantage? And where can you make the biggest impact? Now, this is not something that is static. Whatever we are doing as creative entrepreneurs, it's always moving, right? We always have to be pivoting, changing, adjusting. So this is not the end. In my case, for example, earlier this year, I asked myself the same question, what is working? What is not working? And so I realized that I was pretty happy with my strategy of having these 2 main platforms that serve 2 different lines of businesses. And what I realized is that since 2025, I've been doing live sessions pretty much every single week, both in English and Spanish. And these live sessions, they were actually just getting a lot of dust after they were published because they weren't really going anywhere. And what I realized is that productivity doesn't necessarily have to be about creating more. It can also be about giving longevity to the work that you're already creating. And so, for me, the question was this, how can I make a bigger impact with the work that I already have without having to add any incremental effort? And that's where earlier this year, I decided to launch my YouTube channel, not to create more things, not to make more noise, but to give a digital home to live sessions just like today so that they can actually be somewhere and reach more people and make a bigger impact and meet and find new clients. So that's where I'm going. That's where I'm headed. 2 big platforms and then YouTube that is helping me with the video content. I do believe that video is becoming bigger, whether we like it or not. So I think it is a good idea to prepare yourself. It is a good idea to develop new skills. I'm just learning how to edit videos at 45, so it's never too late. So I really encourage you to keep growing. And that's it for today. I hope it gave you some good ideas or more than ideas. I just hope it challenged you to be strategic about what you're building. You don't have to be everywhere. And one last thing, when you listen to everyone, you stop listening to yourself. So after today's session, don't listen to me, don't listen to all the creators and writers that you see out there. Just focus on your strategy and make sure that you're really able to cancel the noise, stop moonwalking, and focus on what can really move the needle so that you can grow your lemon tree. So thank you very much. Sending you a big hug from Taipei. Bye! Bye!