I finally understand why people will do everything in their power to build and then want to burn it all down.
Let me illustrate,
John Doe is a freelance growth marketer. He happened to notice a pattern everyone seemed to be ignoring.
While the whole world was obsessing over multi-million dollar AI SaaS startups. He was looking at small businesses that overthink which tools to use.
So he dropped a thread on X. He wrote “the next massive wave of solopreneurship won’t be building fancy software. It’s going to be hyper-niche AI micro agencies that fix ONE workflow for ONE specific industry, using simple off-the-shelf tools“
With all the hours of thinking + self doubt that comes with making a prediction like this, the first comment remarked his idea as “glorified virtual assistance”.
Talk about a letdown.
But 6 months later, our John Doe was proven right. His predictions got shared across newsletters, podcasts, X, TikTok… basically to anyone who’d listen. Calling it the modern roadmap for entrepreneurship.
He launched a newsletter called The Micro-Agency Playbook And everything he said centered around this point: “Forget building a product. Build a niche workflow agency”
In a few years, everything took a very nasty turn.
Two years later, AI agents became capable of setting themselves up, and the market shifted toward ultra-personalised, and human-curated micro-communities. So while others were finding new ways to scale, he couldn’t acknowledge it. To pivot would mean turning on everything that made him famous.
The part that bugs all of us but very few escape
It isn’t difficult to see that it got personal. And becoming famous will do that to you. The immense pressure to maintain the identity that got you up there is terrifying.
John Doe found a space to occupy. Started doing the work till the market finally started catching up and made him famous. Annnddddd rich too.
But the tech grew, and he didn’t acknowledge it. What got him to where he was became far too attached to his identity for him to part with it.
Looks like a dumb move on paper until you’re under pressure to perform.
He kept being consistent with that identity. Forced to care too deeply because someone is always watching.
If you’ve gone viral before, you know it feels incredible... until you make another post and find yourself compulsively refreshing your analytics, terrified that your next post will kill the high. Before you know it, you’re drafting posts that feel nothing like you.
In a sense, every move you make, consistently, while building your brand is a sort of debt. I want you to understand I’m not saying consistency is wrong. I’m saying it’s a loan. And loans are fine. But loans have terms.
Why it’s cheap early
Someone who just started out on social media is going to rebrand a lot. Change things. Break things. Fix things. Move fast. And no one would even notice.
You get to post whatever you want. You get to revise whatever you want.
You could even post an idea the moment it lands without really thinking it through.
But if you already started out and content is going well, the numbers are moving up and you’ve noticed that X type of post does well.
So now the goal is to max the output of that type of content on your page, so it can reinforce what people think of you (your positioning!).
But then when you’ve succeeded, it starts to feel like a trap. Less breathing room to do something different because if you did, you’d lose most of what you’ve built, retaining only a few people who stay because of you.
One of the cases where compounding sucks
The more you attach things to your identity, the smaller room you get to actually decide who you are.
Like most bad decisions, you don’t realize it until it’s too late.
The compounding effect is immense and terrifying in making us realize this truth.
The more you repeat your positioning, your audience becomes self-selecting. Those who value nuance or depth will go away when you don’t have the bandwidth to produce at such depth.
The promise gone wrong
According to Goffman (in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life), an audience relies on what you do or say as a “promise” of your credentials or intent.
If you change your mind, break that promise, that would lead to a loss of the very trust and attention that served you before. And rebuilding trust is difficult. So damn difficult.
The great belittling of ideas
Plus your positioning gets simpler each time it’s repeated by other people (so your nuance gets stripped by third parties).
You know that to make people believe you, you have to align your content with what they know to be true (and either try to change how they think or let them know there’s a better way).
As people repeat your ideas, they further strip away any remaining nuance to make it easier to communicate or consume or reshare so they can go viral.
Take any world-class thought leader, pick one of their posts, you’ll see their words twisted by people in the feeds with all the nuance that made it good advice, gone. It becomes so simple, and so empty.
Why did you just read that
Because consistency makes change hard. Not to say hard is bad but when you’re consistent and the things you call yourself become part of your real identity, it’s difficult to part with.
It may be that you no longer serve your current audience. Or you’ve moved on to solve a new problem they no longer have and, you’d have to pivot but the decisions you made before keep holding you back.
This is the interesting part. John Doe probably read the same posts others did. He saw the market had moved but he just had a very good reason not to believe them.
The more you attach things to your identity, the smaller room you get to actually decide who you are.
The options
Now, I see three ways out of this, I’ll tell you below but first, you need to know, anyone of the choices is fine. It depends on how you want to live your life.
Servicing, Refinancing, and Bankruptcy.
Servicing it means you keep saying the thing. You get very good at saying it. The income will stay predictable and so will the work. Plenty of people do this for a decade and are fine. The cost is that you’re now maintaining a position instead of holding one, and there’s a difference you can feel around year three.
Refinancing is the public revision. You go back to the people who came for the original claim and tell them what you got wrong, or what changed, and where you’re going instead. It’s the most expensive thing on this list in the short term and the only one that compounds in your favour. You will lose some people who came to you for specifics. Some of them will be loud about it. What you keep is the ones who were following how you think, and those are the ones who follow you into the next thing.
Default is the rebrand. Nobody talks about how survivable this actually is. And it follows after refinancing.
Bankruptcy, a rather less chosen option, is disappearing and coming back as someone else. But it happens far more often than anyone admits. You’ve followed people through it without knowing.
What we’re actually talking about
This is your brand.
Not the logo, or the values document you wrote in a Notion doc two years ago and never opened again. Your brand is the collection of positions you’ve repeated often enough that other people now expect them from you.
Everytime someone recommends you, they’re really recommending one of those positions.
Every client who hires you is buying into one of them.
Every follower who stays is making a small bet that tomorrow’s version of you will resemble today’s.
That’s why changing direction feels expensive.
You’ll be renegotiating thousands of tiny agreements you’ve made overtime. Which means that brand isn’t build once and protect forever.
It’s something you manage.
If you’re the one reading it
Most people find out what they owe when they try to move.
That’s what I do. Brand strategy for founders, coaches and thought leaders who’ve built something that works and can feel it starting to hold them in place. We (you and I) figure out what you’re actually carrying, what it costs to change position, and how to say the new thing without setting fire to the old one.
If that’s where you are, let’s talk.
Note. Plus, The Micro-Agency Playbook is a borrowed name. It doesn’t have anything to do with the real thing. The thread idea I wrote about above was generated by AI. I have the feeling someone actually posted it somewhere. The example I used was a completely fictional one that had nothing to do with the original creator… which I don’t know if he/she exists or not.