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I spend about 15 hours a week creating content. Not sure if any of it actually matters.
Posted by on March 19, 2026 at 12:07 pmI've been at this for a few years now. Read the books, watched the gurus, bought into the whole "content is king" thing. 10-15 hours a week across platforms. Research, writing, recording, editing, posting, commenting.
The math seemed simple: create value → build audience → profit.
Here's what actually happened.
YouTube videos sit at under 100 views for months. My last one from 36 days ago has exactly 75 views. I get maybe one or two comments if I'm lucky, usually zero.
LinkedIn stopped sending leads entirely. Not sure if AI killed it or the algorithm just moved on.
I did manage to get 50 people on our startup waitlist in a few weeks, mainly from X and Reddit. But I can't actually prove which platform drove those signups. Just guessing.
Meanwhile I'm burning hours consuming other people's content. Instagram, YouTube Shorts, X. Thousands of pieces in an hour just scrolling.
Not even for research. Just habit. My brain defaults to scrolling when I should be doing actual work.
The stuff I actually learned from? Creators I followed years ago when I was starting out. I don't even watch them anymore. I got what I needed and moved on.
Now I'm just scrolling to fill time or because my brain is too fried to focus.
And that's the worst part. My brain is so fried from content mode that I can't focus on my kids the way I want to. I'm physically there but mentally still stuck thinking about the next post or what I should be creating.
I keep waiting for a signal that any of this is working. A comment showing someone used what I taught. Clear data on which platform actually drives results. Anything.
Instead it just feels like throwing time into a void.
Maybe the real issue is I'm optimizing for everything and nothing at once. YouTube for long term. X and Reddit for short term. LinkedIn because I'm supposed to. No clear goal means no way to tell if 15 hours a week is an investment or just expensive procrastination.
Anyone else feel like they're playing a game where nobody explained the rules?
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1 Reply
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Because discovery is broken across the internet, people cannot find what they want and people who create product and services cant find customer, almost like its orchestrated.
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I went through almost this exact loop and the fix for me was brutal but simple: I stopped treating content as the work and made it prove it could earn its time. I cut from posting everywhere to one main channel and one side channel, then every post had to point to one thing I could track like replies, demo calls, waitlist signups, or email joins. If I couldn’t tie it to that, I stopped doing it.
What worked for us was making one solid piece a week, then clipping it down instead of inventing fresh stuff for every platform. I also put a hard cap on consumption because scrolling was wrecking my attention way more than creation was. Buffer helped with batching, Plausible gave me cleaner attribution than guessing, and I ended up on Pulse for Reddit after trying a few because it caught threads I was missing that actually turned into useful conversations. If 15 hours isn’t giving you signal, I’d cut it to 5 and force clarity.
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I’ve been dealing with the same thing lately. No matter how much i try and how much research i put behind, it feels indeed just like throwing time into a void
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Dude I feel this so hard. I got to the point where I was spending more time tweaking and cross-posting than actually building the thing I care about. The endless scroll guilt hits different when you’re supposed to be “working” but your brain is mush. I ended up switching most of my social stuff over to PostClaw to just batch it all at once because I literally couldn’t keep up and was burning out. Not perfect, the UI’s a bit clunky sometimes, but not having to rewrite the same post for every damn platform saved me hours and honestly my sanity. Still don’t know if any of it “matters” but at least I don’t lose entire afternoons to fiddling with scheduling tabs anymore
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What’s your startup about? Have website? I’m a serial founder both hardware and software. Maybe I can check what you’re doing and give some brief advice
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Someone explained marketing to me like this before and I now use it as a prism to look through whenever I feel like I’m mindlessly scrolling, pushing out content that no-one is listening to or just feeling like I don’t know what I’m doing. At it’s core marketing is just storytelling.
If you forget all the data for a second, views, watch time, all of it. Fundamentally you are trying to write a story. That story of course needs to be interesting, it needs to be written in a way that the people you want to read it want it, and anyone who reads it wants to read it at the right time. I may take this metaphor too far; your target market is basically your audience, you’re not writing a complex book about the ingenious design of the aluminium can for an audience who primarily cares about flower arranging, you’re writing it for people who care about weird engineering marvels. Your language, the tone, the information you convey all should be tailored towards the specific audience that you are trying to get to read your book. You are also giving it to them when and where they have the time, energy and capacity to read it – platform and content type. Someone sat on a long ass train journey is more likely to be reading and absorbing than someone at a concert.
Imagine that every piece of content you make is part of this larger story, how is it drawing your readers along and keeping them engaged. Thats where your pillars of content come in, they aren’t restricting you but guiding your content to make sure it fits within the overall structure, of course you detours (like jumping on cultural moments) but those are just side-plots and shouldn’t take away from the main story.
The fundamentals of story writing apply to each piece of content too, your hook is like your introduction. I think I had plenty of writing classes where the teacher would say to me that even if the story is interesting they didn’t get past the intro. Luckily rather than just words we get to use visuals, sounds and also… words. Tapping into psychological tricks to basically stop someone in their tracks and go where tf is this story going next. Paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 are the body of your content, the information that you are trying to convey. Remember that the body isn’t just random information, its developing the story. Finally, and this is where the metaphor kind of breaks down, the conclusion is what you actually want people to do after they’ve consumed your content, its short and punchy and leaves an impression. You have to motivate often times super content fogged people to switch on and actually do something.
I take this framing and use it to scroll through content, maybe someone is the car niche has incredible story pacing – how can I use that and adapt it. Someone in the music industry has sick intros that hook me in instantly – can I turn that into something for myself.
Apologies for the waffle and hope it helps
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