The reckoning of the cringe lunatic economy

When you have nothing to sell and sell that for too long

Selling nothing to sell nothing

On LinkedIn, everyone pretends that they’re killing it. That’s nothing new, but there is a subgroup that has professionalized that skill. They teach you how to master the most difficult thing in business:

How to gain the most followers efficiently. So you can have a piece of the popularity pie as well.

Followers promise “reach.” Reach promises a career free from the shackles of a job where you must “work.”

It’s another channel to drive acquisition, and specifically, LinkedIn has a lot of intricacies that need to be managed if you want to optimize it. How and when do you post, structure a post, and so forth?

It’s a marketing skill. Understandably, we want to optimize it and avoid the most common mistakes. I also obsessed over it to understand how I drive reach best.

But there is an ugly side to it that is starting to surface. It’s building a business on how to game and optimize the algorithm as a viable business. It’s about selling itself.

And it smells more and more like multi-level marketing. The cringey type.

Pretending to be a business with half the story

There are creators on LinkedIn who created six and seven-figure businesses simply by creating reach. They have gathered the followers.

And now they sell you a course on how to do it yourself. And that’s the business. That’s where the revenue is coming from. They don’t sell anything else.

Do you see the problem?

There is no actual product. I’m not standing here and saying that all of their advice is useless, but to claim that this is a self-sustaining business is saying that marketing without a product is a full business.

The problem is that they use the fact that they make six and seven figures as a validation that their stuff works. They humblebrag about it on the regular.

They have no idea how any of this stuff works except the reach part on Linkedin, and that’s what they are selling back to you.

It’s like a marketing agency saying that by teaching you marketing, you have all the tools to build a successful startup.

Oh nelly. Source: Reddit

I’m not saying that people who teach copywriting or how to master the LinkedIn algorithm are the problem. I’m saying that those who sell you courses on it and pretend you can do this with any other skill have a vested self-interest to believe that, even if the channel is completely wrong.

They use their revenue to prove that they know what they are talking about, but that revenue proves nothing unless you plan to sell courses on LinkedIn and copywriting.

LinkedIn

Let’s take a step back and think about it for a second in the context of LinkedIn. A site that has an algorithm that profits from talking about the same thing to the same audience over time.

The more people that react out of 100, the more your post will be spread. The absolute number of engagements doesn’t matter; the ratio does. If you have a good ratio, you will get more total reach and engagements until your post dies out.

The more often you talk about the same topic and audience, the more likely you will engage a higher ratio. So far, so good.

This also means, in reverse, that any reach that you built up with one topic does not transfer to another.

If I suddenly start to talk about flight simulators to my followers, they simply won’t react, and my posts get almost no reach because I didn’t do that in the past. I talk about product-led growth and leadership, not flight sims.

That’s problematic if you just go into this topic by building outreach without knowing what you want to sell in the end.

Hypocrisy much?

My problem is, they promise you that you can do the same with any of your ideas. And all you need is to book their courses and read their material and money will grow out of your ears.

You will invariably grow followers and create followers. This is a critical part of any business. It’s about distribution, and there’s nothing wrong with it. But it doesn’t prepare you at all in an honest way how to get advising gigs that pay well, how to structure your contracts, or how to run any of it unless you do the exact same thing that they do.

You promise others that they can have as many followers as you if they just read your material and visit your course to gain more followers.

• And the proof that you know how that works? Well, look at your revenue. It’s six figures… maybe you can reach five figures and teach others how to reach four.

That’s the business that works.

It’s turtles… all the way down.

I have always struggled with the marketing side of my business. I have reach, and I monetize it as well occasionally. But the line is very thin where you become a shill or start to pretend a little bit that you have an opinion that you wouldn’t have for free.

The best antidote that lets me sleep well is that only about < 5-10% of my total business is coming from these activities; the rest is from inbound, where I have to create value for my customers.

Aka, going into their companies and moving stuff.

The fertilizer for cringe

Reality will hit you hard in the face that nothing happens magically, whether you have 10k or 20k followers. You still have to actually “work” after getting the reach. You still need to sell a product.

So you optimize even harder to squeeze another 5% of efficiency out of those followers by being systematic about it. You turn into a muppet show of human interaction. Because if you just had another 10k followers, the champagne will flow surely.

So you boost each other. You do fake collabs. You upvote what you would never upvote, so you get another juicy upvote in return. You become really cringeworthy for the likes.

You dedicate 20 minutes at 7 am on the toilet to engage with everyone who has more than 5,000 followers. You start to do comment porn.

This post from Louis Grenier is summarizing it in a great way

And you get those juicy followers. And then someone asks you… how did you get these followers?

“Well, I bought this book that taught me, from John Doelsh. I plan to do my own with time!”

You suddenly have to sell what you sold originally. You’re part of the MLM scheme.

And it wouldn’t pay to admit publicly that it’s not working. The perfect picture is part of the story.

“Influencers”

I sometimes ask myself who is to blame here: the reach gurus and LinkedIn Bros and Sisters who make money with it or the people who try to get a piece of the cake and just make it miserable for everyone by being a rendition of being as fake as they can.

There’s a reason why subreddits like https://www.reddit.com/r/linkedInLunatics/ exist. (375,000 members)

Just. Dial. It. Down.

It’s a caricature of what happens when people are sold to the dream that popularity will somehow generate money.

“If you buy that particular course, you too, can be let in on the secret on how it works!”

Maybe I’m one of the lucky ones who makes so much money that she doesn’t have to resort to these tactics. Perhaps I will, at some point, create a course on how to be a solopreneur, and LinkedIn and other channels will be a part of the story. Maybe I’m sitting on a high horse now myself without noticing.

But if I do, it will be embedded in the full story on how to create a solopreneur career, monetizing a specialized skill that doesn’t rely on itself when to use a channel and when not. Anything less is trying to get away without having a skill that creates real value while hiding most of the context.

I make good money from Substack and my reach from Linkedin, and I definitely use what I learned there for the businesses that I advise, too. But at least I tell myself that it is marketing with the purpose of connecting businesses to efficient reach to solve a very specific problem (B2B Growth for Scaleups).

Quo Vadis Gaius Cringus

There are great copywriters out there that also teach you how to use LinkedIn. Or fantastic marketers teaching you the latest and greatest in marketing messaging.

The difference is that they do not pretend to be solopreneurs who found the secret to solopreneurship by cracking the code to all your distribution problems on LinkedIn by cranking your behavior to maximum questionability and becoming a plastic version of yourself.

Learn copywriting from copywriters. Not from false solopreneurship gurus who oversell what they teach you by turning you into an absolutely fake caricature.

Maybe these are the signs that I’m becoming old? But how is all of this different than what’s happening on Instagram, where people do everything to get likes, no matter how embarrassing it is?

If you keep delivering good, honest value consistently, you might win eventually. No amount of algorithm tricks will ever change that.

It’s hard work either way.