Building your entire business on TikTok or Facebook is like running a restaurant inside someone else’s living room. They can walk downstairs one morning, decide they’re “not feeling Italian food anymore,” and boom—your whole livelihood gets evicted before lunch.
And the craziest part?
Entrepreneurs keep acting shocked when it happens.
Like, “Wait, my reach dropped overnight? My account got flagged for no reason? My audience disappeared even though I did everything right?”
Yes. Because you built your house on land you don’t own.
Platforms don’t care about your “brand.” They don’t care about your grind, your consistency, or your inspirational posts about “showing up even when you don’t feel like it.” They care about:
- keeping people scrolling
- ads
- shareholder happiness
- and if it's Facebook, who the fuck knows what their algo is? They can and will ban you for no reason whatsoever. Ask me how I know.
Your little content empire? Collateral damage.
And look—you can absolutely use TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, whatever. Just don’t pretend they’re your business. If you don’t own:
- the audience
- the data
- the distribution
- the relationship
…you’re basically doing digital sharecropping. You work the field, they keep the land, and if the algorithm gods decide you’re not entertaining enough today, they cut your sunlight and salt the soil.
You and I both know creators who were pulling 5M views per month… until one day they woke up to numbers so low they thought their phone broke. Nothing changed except the landlord raised the rent.
Here’s the truth people don’t want to hear:
Social platforms are attention funnels—not business foundations.
If you’re smart, you drive the traffic somewhere you actually control:
- your email list
- your site
- your product ecosystem
- your community (iffy, though)
Because one email subscriber is worth more than 10,000 “followers” whose visibility depends on a bored engineer adjusting a slider in the back end.
So yeah—post on TikTok. Use Facebook. Ride the waves.
Just don’t confuse surfing with owning the ocean.
The moment you build your business on rented land, you’re one policy update away from becoming a “whatever happened to them?” cautionary tale. And that’s the part people won’t say out loud—but I will:
If your entire strategy collapses because a social platform hiccups, you didn’t build a business. You built a dependency. And dependencies don’t scale. They just break dramatically.
As the old saying goes (about bankruptcy): At first, it's slow. Then it's sudden. Same with sharecropping.