"You cannot rely on a platform to build an audience today" – Tara McMullin

Welcome to Monday Mornings! A publication about the new world of work beyond the 9-5 — exploring the rise of mass entrepreneurialism. Through sharp analysis and interviews with the builders, thinkers, and leaders driving this shift, Monday Mornings unpacks what a post 9-5 world means for individuals, businesses, and society.

This edition is a Q&A Interview, where an expert guest offers their take on the future of work, along with our signature Monday Marvels and Monday Moanings.

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Happy Monday, folks!

This week, I’m talking to Tara McMullin. 

Tara is a writer, podcaster and critic who studies emerging forms of work and has been making a living online since 2009.

Her website, podcast, and book all share the same name: What Works. Tara systematically unpacks the stories that keep so many of us chasing “more” in our work. She has spent years studying, critiquing, and analysing the evolving nature of entrepreneurial work, in particular. An ideal interviewee for both today’s topic on the Creator Economy, and for the Monday Mornings thesis overall!

Tara shared with me:

• Ways in which the creator economy has shifted since she started earning online

• How the platforms, and people with big audiences, are lying to us

• What ‘sucked’ most for her about Substack and why she took her 11,000 subscribers off the platform.

Enjoy!

Q: Thanks for joining us to discuss the Creator Economy, Tara. You’ve spent 15 years making a living online. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen?

A: There’s a palpable tension defining so many people’s experiences working online today – that tension being the difference between the promise of this work and its reality. 

We’re being incentivised, forced even, to produce more and more content and keep the ‘feed’ going. But at the same time, all of that work is contributing to a big of a lack of - not information - but of attention. Attention is what’s truly scarce (despite the tools we have promising us access to mass audiences). We’ve all been socialised to think that a lack of attention is our individual problem, when really it’s an ecosystem problem.

I also think a lot about how the economic cycle has changed. I got started at the height of the Great Recession in 2009, when you had to work hard for your money and develop a toolkit for economic instability.

Then in the early 2010s there was an economic rebound. A lot of people started making money online in this era when money was flowing, people felt really good, were trying lots of things…. it was working! There was money to spend and invest.

For the past five years we’ve had economic instability and so that makes it harder to maintain a livelihood today. But many people didn’t learn the skillset required for this time when the money was flowing freely because they didn’t have to; people would literally pay for anything. Think “I coach football coaches using tarot and astrology and help them get in touch with their their inner goddess” type of thing!

The skillset needed to make money online today requires knowing what people’s actual problems are as well as explaining how your offer interacts with their lived experience. If you can't make that super strong case for how you’ll help someone, you're not going to make sales and you're going to get frustrated. That’s where many people are today – frustrated, and not making a proper living.

Q: It sounded much easier ten years ago! So, if we can simply solve people’s problems we’ll make a good living online?

A: Not quite. Today, when you post something online, you have no idea whether the people who actually want to see it will see it.

In the past, platforms reliably helped you communicate with people, even at scale. But you can’t count on that now. No matter how much A/B testing you do, how strategic you are, or how carefully you craft your posts, the algorithm can just decide not to show it. It’s like a butterfly flaps its wings a thousand miles away, and your post disappears.

You cannot rely on a platform to help you build an audience today. Or for its network effects. The audience building that happens today is happening through personal social networks that independent of platforms.

The people who are really making it work are ‘doing audience-building’ outside of the platforms: talking to people on Zoom, texting, calling, developing relationships that aren’t reliant on social media. Crucially, they are boosting each others work. Whether that’s trading podcast interviews, featuring each other on YouTube channels, linking to each other’s newsletters.

But this isn’t the way most people think about building an online business anymore. We’ve been conditioned by platforms to believe they’ll do the hard work for us. “Just post here,” they say, “and we’ll help you grow.” But they don’t. And when it doesn’t work, they make us believe the problem is us. We’re told, you just need a better hook. To use this new feature. But that’s not the issue.

I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but the people who succeeded early on didn’t grow big audiences the way they teach us to now. They built their audiences through relationships and built each other up. Then a lot of them turned around and started teaching others how to be successful at social media… without revealing the behind-the-scenes part. They sold courses on how to post and the platforms loved this because it meant more content and more engagement for them. 

We now have a whole generation of small business owners who were never taught that success online actually requires personal relationships and strong networks. But that message doesn’t sell as well. It’s much sexier to say, “Post five times a week and you’ll build an audience of 10,000 and make six figures selling courses!” than to say, “You need real relationships with people you care about.”

And here’s the biggest myth of all: not every type of business even needs an audience. We’re told, “You need an audience!” or in softer terms, “You need to build a community!” If you step back and really look at the economic drivers, you can see why we’ve all bought into this idea. But the reality is, for most people, if you ask yourself, “Do I actually need an audience?” The answer is probably no.

Q: I’m sure that’s a welcome message for many readers! Can we talk about creators doing ‘self-promotion’, as your viral essay questioned the premise of doing so. Why is that?

A: I am referring to the concept of 'enshittification’. Coined by Corey Doctorow talking about TikTok, enshittification applies to all platform-based businesses.

So my essay ‘Sorry (Not Sorry), Self-Promotion Doesn't Work,’ focuses on the third and final stage of a social media platform’s lifecycle, when the platform starts squeezing as much profit from the system as possible.

They add more more ad inventory which leaves less organic growth for content creators, who in turn, have to create so much more content to cut through the noise. Even then it’s still gets seen by a handful of people!

The platform inevitably becomes more awful and unusable for a lot of people. If you think about Google Search, or Facebook, LinkedIn… they are well into the final phase of enshittification and yes we use them, but who enjoys them? 

There is an enshittification cycle happening for us as creators, too. At first you're making stuff… it's going great, people are seeing it and you feel super jazzed. And so, you become dependent on the platform — everything you know about reaching people is mediated through that platform. Once the second phase starts to kick in and the advertisers come, you have to work harder for the same results. Then the third phase it’s even harder and you hate it even more. So not only are there diminishing returns, but as a creator your mental health is tanking. 

This then leads to (understandably) worse content creation because you just can't make good stuff at the rate that you need to. It’s not a recipe for good content and it makes the experience for everyone using the platform worse.

In the same way you talk louder as a restaurant gets busier, you find yourself shouting to the person across the table from you. It's the same thing on social media. You're just raising the volume. No one enjoys that kind of shouting conversation and it doesn’t produce good conversations. Really, we all know the way to get someone to listen to you is to whisper. To speak softly so they have to lean in.

The problem is that platforms don't surface this kind of content. This makes being discovered so hard.

As creators the only solution is making remarkable content that people are willing to go out of their way for — i.e. head over to your website or podcast. And in stage three of platform enshittification, that‘s where those personal networks are really required, so we can be discovered without the platforms.

Q: This interview is a good example of that ‘discovery’ process — introducing you to my readers! Handy since you recently left the Substack platform. Tell us why?

A: It’s important to say that I had had independent websites for 14 years before I went onto Substack to run my independent newsletter. Substack had seemed the antidote to the other social platforms I decided to come off at this time. But sure enough, Substack went through its own enshittification cycle. The cycle there happened so fast because people know how to work the cycle now! 

I realised I had begun creating content that lived in a feed just like all the other platforms. It really started to grate on me when I realised I was thinking more about how to ‘hit it’ on Substack notes than how to write a great essay. That sucked and I hated it. 

I was thinking way too much about the box that Substack was putting me into when I know that exact box doesn't exist elsewhere. The longer I stay and fit into this box, the more dependent I am on that box. 

I decided to take the subscribers I found through Substack and go play my own game.

Q: These platforms are effectively the ‘boss’ for the independent workforce, and a not very benevolent one at that. On the topic of dependency, is independence possible for creators?

A: Creators are part of the independent workforce, and I have looked into this for the US so that’s the context I’ll speak to. Here, we have a very binary labour classification: we have independent contractors or employees. 

The employee classification comes with all sorts of social safety nets like unemployment insurance, workmen's comp, health insurance, retirement savings.  Basically anything that you can think of as a social safety net is tied to employment. Independent contractors have none of those things.

In addition to that, they have no rights to organise. So the entire Uber, Lyft or Postmates workforce have no legal protections when it comes to organising and their employers (who are technically not employers) have no requirement to bargain with them.

Companies have figured out that the fewer people they can put in the employment classification and the more in the independent contractor classification, the more profitable, flexible and agile they can be in the market. And then policy-wise, nothing has changed. So when politicians talk about what ‘workers’ need, they still have the idea that the average worker is an employee when increasingly, the average worker is an independent contractor. So we do need a certain class solidarity when it comes to independent labor.

[Quick side note from Ellen, in February we covered this very topic of independent workers rights, or there lack of, so save that one to come back to. Back to Tara….]

Etsy sellers recognised this. They recognised that in themselves they represent a ‘class’ that is able to boost each other and can come together to bargain for better rights – in turn, showing their boss (the Etsy platform) who is benefiting from their labour that they do have power and rights, at least at scale.

We need politicians and policy makers across the board to actually look at the data when it comes to who is being classified as what and what that means for our social safety networks. We also need to recognise the give and take in the safety net system that allows people to take risk.

We say that we support entrepreneurs taking risks, but when you look at facts, in what way are we doing that? We have no support for risk taking at all. What we need is much more social investment in independent workers. We need to be able to say to people, go “We've got you if you fail.”

A final note from Ellen:

It seems as independent workers we could all take a lead from Etsy, and start seeing ourselves as the collective group that we are, working together to create that bargaining power!

That’s a wrap for today’s interview, but to learn more about Tara’s work: Visit her website and subscribe to her essays, grab a copy of her book and discover episodes of her podcast.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s interview with Tara. What else do you think should be considered? Share your opinions in the comments or reply directly!

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And, in other news this month…

👍Monday Marvels 

India announced a $1B fund to support its booming creator economy. Set to launch during the WAVES summit in Goa, the fund will back IP creation, global expansion, and monetisation for creators across art, music, gaming, and content.

👎 Monday Moanings

The Trump administration's recent executive orders targeting DEI initiatives has cut $4 million National Science Foundation grant intended to support autistic students find STEM jobs. The funding freeze has already resulted in staff layoffs and halted programming intended to students pursue science and engineering careers.

That’s it for today, thanks for reading and see you again in two weeks!

Monday Mornings is written and hosted by Ellen Donnelly, a writer, speaker, and business coach focused on the future of work. She specialises in the shift towards mass entrepreneurialism, and supports founders navigating career pivots in her private coaching practice, The Ask.