I Lost 20,000 Followers in One Night

I was a top 20 livestreamer on Meerkat.

If you don't know what Meerkat is, that's the whole point of this letter.

Meerkat was the live-streaming app before Periscope, before Instagram Live, before everyone and their cousin went live on LinkedIn. It was the thing. Hot. Buzzy. I was crushing it. Built an audience. Had momentum. Felt like I'd found my platform.

Then one night — gone. The app died. 20,000 followers, vanished. Not because I did anything wrong. Because I built my house on someone else's land, and they sold the land.

That was my first real lesson in digital sharecropping.

Sharecropping: you farm the land, you do the work, you grow the crop. But you don't own the soil. The landlord can change the rent, change the rules, or bulldoze the whole field. And you just... start over somewhere else.

That's social media. All of it.

I have 58k+ followers and 28,000+ subscribers on my LinkedIn Newsletter right now. You know what I own? Zero of them. LinkedIn owns them. LinkedIn decides who sees my posts. LinkedIn can change the algorithm tomorrow and my reach drops 80% and I'm back to yelling into the void.

I'm sharecropping again. I know it. I'm doing it anyway because that's where the people are. But I'm not confused about what it is.

Here's what I think about instead: assets.

Content disappears. A LinkedIn post has a shelf life of maybe 48 hours. A carousel gets recycled. A video gets buried. You make it, it performs or it doesn't, and then you make another one. It's street food. You cook, they eat, it's gone.

Assets compound. An email list is yours. Nobody can algorithm that away. A presentation on your own site lives there until you take it down. A newsletter builds trust over months. These are the restaurant, not the food cart.

The difference between content and assets is the difference between renting and owning. Both keep a roof over your head. Only one builds equity.

I know this because emails convert for me. When I send an email, people buy. When I post on LinkedIn, people like. Likes don't pay rent. Conversions do.

The irony is everyone's obsessed with creating content when they should be obsessed with creating assets that content drives people toward.

Social post → drives to presentation → drives to email list → drives to conversion.

That's a pipeline. That's owned. The social post is the cheapest, most replaceable part of that chain. It's the flyer on the windshield, not the restaurant.

This is why I built Preso, honestly. A presentation is an asset. It packages how an expert thinks. Not everything they know, but the one thing that matters to the person in the room. Because experts love to cram. I get it. You spent 10 years learning this stuff and you want to share all of it. But your audience isn't there to drink from a fire hose. They're there for the one sip that changes something.

Preso forces the cut. Less about you, more about them. That's the product.

The dream isn't more followers. The dream is: I could delete LinkedIn tomorrow and my business still works. My email list still works. My presentations still live on my site. My audience is mine.

I'm not there yet. I'm still sharecropping. But at least this time I know I'm doing it, and I'm building the farm next door at the same time.

Meerkat taught me that. Twenty thousand followers and a dead app.

— String

P.S. If LinkedIn goes down tomorrow, you can find me at my Preso link. And probably at KFC.