Trying To Be Everywhere Is Why You're Nowhere

The advice to try every platform to see what works is for people with big budgets and bigger teams. For solo founders, this is an impossible task.

Posting on five platforms is not a strategy. It is a slow way to burn out.

You know the feeling. You are trying to put in consistent effort on Instagram and LinkedIn and Substack. There is a LinkedIn post half written in one tab, a video you filmed two days ago and still have not edited, a newsletter draft you keep meaning to finish, and a quiet promise that this is the week you finally crack Twitter.

You try to post every day but miss a few. You try to engage with the right accounts. You are doing everything you can on top of building the product and talking to users and everything else you have to do.

You are showing up on multiple platforms and growing on none of them.

I spent six months in this hell hole with my last startup. But there is a way to get out of it in an afternoon.

"Try Everything" Is Wrong

“Try every channel, see what works, double down on the winner.” You have heard it a hundred times. After all, how will you pick a winner without testing it out? If I got a dollar every time someone told me this, I would have raised enough to fund one more month of Shezaar.

This advice assumes you have the hours to run a real experiment on each one.

You don’t.

With the time you actually have, you cannot run a real experiment the way experiments are supposed to be run. You can only run a few half-hearted ones at once, and you will end up pouring weeks into the wrong platform before you ever find out.

Take Table for One. I have posted on this Substack consistently since 1 May 2026. It took me 47 days to reach 101 subscribers.

That was at least five notes a day and two articles a week. I took a one week break in the middle and Substack punished me for it by tanking my views. In terms of effort, this is 20 to 25 hours a week, counting ideation, research, editing, scheduling, and engaging with other people on the platform.

There is no way I could have put in that same effort on LinkedIn at the same time.

But did I pick Substack because I love to write? No. I picked it for three specific reasons. It is where the audience I want lives. It builds my creativity, so I can sustain it. And in my niche it is not as saturated as LinkedIn. Hold on to those three reasons, because they are not luck.

I Guessed Wrong, And It Cost Me Months

I was not careful about picking the right platform for Shezaar, my last startup, and it was brutal. I was trying to grow on Instagram, TikTok, Substack, Reddit, and the occasional LinkedIn post. I could barely make a dent, and I was exhausted and burnt out.

I also assumed my users would come from Instagram and TikTok, so that is where most of my hours went. Scripting, shooting, editing video.

The users came from Substack and Reddit.

Obvious in hindsight. The people I was building for were researchers at heart. They lived in long newsletters and deep Reddit threads, not fifteen second videos. I burned weeks making content for people who were never going to buy. I was confident in my gut, and my gut was wrong.

That is when I learned nobody can afford to find this out the slow way. So do not experiment. Diagnose.

Finding The Right Channel In An Afternoon

Before you commit a single week to a channel, run this. Three checks, scored 0 to 3 each. Add them up. Do it for every channel you are weighing. You spend an afternoon instead of 6 months, and the highest score is where you go. These are the same three reasons I picked Substack.

Check 1: Are your people actually here, right now?

Take the exact words your customers use for their problem. If you do not have those words yet, stop and go get them.

Now search those words on the platform, filtered to the last 30 days.

• LinkedIn: search the phrase, filter to recent posts.

• Reddit: search the two or three subreddits where that problem lives.

• Substack: search Notes and publications for the topic.

• Instagram or TikTok: search the hashtag plus the problem.

Expected output: a wall of recent posts from real people with this exact problem, or a ghost town. Score 3 if it is busy and recent. Score 0 if it is dead.

Check 2: Is anyone like you already winning here?

Look for two signals at once. First, is anyone adjacent to you already getting real traction, meaning comments and replies, not just likes? That proves the channel works for your kind of thing. Second, is your specific angle still open, or is every version of your take already being shouted by a hundred bigger accounts?

Expected output: proof that people like you can win, plus a gap you can actually fill. Score 3 if both are true. Score 0 if no one wins here, or if your niche is wall to wall noise.

Check 3: Can you sustain what this place rewards?

Every channel pays out for one kind of effort. Be honest about whether it is the kind you can do every week for months.

• LinkedIn rewards written stories and operator lessons.

• Reddit rewards genuine help and zero selling.

• TikTok and Instagram reward video, your face, and a hook in two seconds.

• Substack rewards writing and a real point of view.

Expected output: an honest yes or no on producing that format weekly without dreading it. Score 3 if it fits you. Score 0 if you will quit in a month.

Add the three. The channel with the highest total is your one. Start there. Ignore the rest until it is working.

Build A Strategy Before Selecting A Channel

Your scores tell you which channels are alive and winnable. They do not tell you which one to aim at, because the channel that is perfect for finding customers will be useless for finding investors.

So before you choose, answer two more things. Those two answers, sitting on top of your three scores, are the five inputs that decide your channel.

Who are you trying to reach?

As a solo founder you are not chasing one audience. You have five goals: customers, investors, your next hire, partners, and authority, the slow thing that makes the other four easier. A channel serves some of them and not others, depending on who lives there. This is also where most founders aim at the wrong target, by choosing channels by business model. B2B goes on LinkedIn, B2C goes on Instagram. Wrong axis. LinkedIn is not the B2B channel. It is where professionals go to pay attention. If you are B2C it is probably not your customers, but it is your investors, your next hire, and your partners. If you are B2B it might be all five. Decide which goal is most urgent right now, and score channels for that audience.

What outcome do you actually want?

Name the one action you want from the people you reach. An email signup. A reply to your DM. A warm intro. A booked demo. The outcome you pick decides what winning even looks like on a channel, and it forces a split most founders skip. You need one channel where a stranger finds you, and one where they go deeper once they like you. Discovery, and depth. For Shezaar mine started offline, sixty in person conversations that scaled to nothing but taught me everything. Offline cannot run while you sleep, so it seeds your voice and your first believers. Your one online channel scales the voice you found there.

Run the three checks. Answer those two questions. The five together point at one channel, and now you have a strategy instead of a guess.

Play The Long Game

Know going in that you will most likely not go viral in your first six months, and you should not aim for it. The job after picking your channel is to build slow compounding growth and to learn as much from what flops as from what lands.

As I grow on Substack, I track the platform closely, and I study what is working for other people too. I got tired of doing all of that by hand, so I built a tool that does it for me. It watches the platforms you are weighing, tracks where your specific content and your specific people actually get traction, and by day seven tells you which one to commit to. This open sourced tool drops this Friday, as the next Vibe Coding Lab.

Until then, close four of those tabs and run the channel check.

And remember, consistently putting 20 to 25 hours into one or two channels with a strategy beats half-assed posts on many, every single time.