Why Most Platforms Fail Part-Time Builders

Last week we talked about what I call the 20% shift.

That conscious action of directing a part of your best strategic thinking and energy away from your career into building something which compounds outside of it.

Over time those ideas start attracting opportunities that would never appear inside a single career path.

I’ve been writing on substack for about a year and half now.

I’ve been through many ups and downs. I wrote into the void for 3 moths without hearing so much as an echo back. I’ve had several notes go viral which brought in so much attention I considered deleting them.

In between those two extremes I’ve experimented with almost everything the ecosystem encourages. I’ve joined and left masterminds. I’ve done coaching calls. I’ve launched products. Some failed. Others made thousands of dollars.

At the moment I’m in the process of developing a paid tier, and along the way I’ve watched the platform move through several cultural shifts — waves of optimism, waves of cynicism, and tsunamis of new strategies and anxieties around growth visibility and traction.

But underneath all of that movement, one pattern appears again and again.

The people who already have demanding full-time careers struggle the most with consistency. Writing well and writing consistently requires time, energy and attention. After a full day of meetings, finding the time, and more importantly the mental energy, to sit down and think clearly enough to write feels impossible.

I recognise this pattern in myself as well. Some evenings the last thing my brain wants to do is think clearly enough to write a paragraph, so most of my essays take shape in the mornings before work.

The tension here is not just about time and energy. It is also about intent. Writing can remain a private act of expression, or it can become a way of building something that extends beyond the page, something which leads to other opportunities and creates a form of optionality.

As things have developed many of the major platforms require so much time and attention that it is very hard to grow anything part time. Most of them reward constant output making it extremely difficult to build up anything in the evenings and weekends.

It is easy to conclude from this that you must develop a content schedule and post repeatedly even when you have nothing to say. But that assumption is largely a reflection of how most modern platforms are built.

Substack, in an interesting way, was built around a different rhythm, one that, favours those who write slowly and with more deepth.

The Internet Learned to Reward Speed

This is not really an essay about Substack. It is an essay about how different media environments shape the people who participate in them and who your own behaviour attracts.

Most of the platforms that came to dominate the past decade were built around speed, novelty and dopamine loops.

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and LinkedIn all reward the same basic behaviour of attention seeking.

Algorithms amplify what is trending in real time. The more extreme and sensational the more likely it is to spread.

Inside that environment it is the influencer who thrives. The person who can turn anything into content in real time and add just the right amount of controversy to keep engagement strong.

Over time this architecture reshaped our expectations of creative work online. We began to assume serious participation required constant output.

For writers this creates a peculiar kind of psychological pressure.

Writing is not a real-time medium. Ideas tend to develop slowly through observation, experience and reflection rather than reaction to the news cycle.

When you try to write inside a system designed for speed, the mismatch becomes obvious. You begin to feel behind, because the rhythm of your thinking does not match the rhythm of the platform.

This dynamic is not entirely new.

When newspapers industrialised in the nineteenth century, speed began to dominate the economics of attention. Telegraph networks and faster presses created an environment where being first mattered enormously.

The publication that reported an event fastest controlled the conversation. Magazines evolved partly as a response to this pressure.

They appeared less frequently, often only once a month, but offered something different. Instead of controversy they offered interpretation, reflection and deeper arguments. Readers were willing to wait for depth.

That distinction matters because the modern internet rebuilt the newspaper model. Feeds reward novelty, reaction and velocity.

Subscription writing belongs to a different structure. It changes the relationship between writer and reader.

The central unit is no longer the passing impression inside a feed. It is what you might call “the return”. Where a reader chooses to come back. They opt into a voice and a sensibility. The writer is no longer competing only for a moment of interruption. They are building a relationship organised around continuity in a semi-private space.

That difference sounds subtle, but it changes the incentives in a profound way.

This article of mine from 2024 still gets comments from new readers and they are overwhelmingly constructive comments.

Forget about "adding value": 6 lessons from 6 months of Substacking

If you’ve spent any time on other platforms you will realise how unusual that is. First of all, that an old article still surfaces, and that it is not attacked by bots or cynics or just people having a bad day.

A subscription environment allows both the reader and the writer to slow down take a deep breath and articulate ideas without having to scream at the top of your lungs.

This does not mean that every newsletter platform is pure, or that the internet has suddenly become hospitable to depth in some uncomplicated way. Every platform develops its own status games, distortions and pressures. But what I have noticed here is that the culture is more introspective and less aggressive.

That is why the 20% shift begins to make more sense here. Because, in at least one corner of the online world, the architecture has moved a little closer to the actual rhythm of writing. Meaning that your ideas can accumulate into something that resembles intellectual assets.

Writing is the process through which experience becomes intellectual capital.

Nothing changes, then everything changes. What I’m trying to get across here is that over time ideas that accumulate begin to behave like leverage. Your writing attracts conversations, relationships, and occasionally opportunities that would never have appeared otherwise.

Writing has changed how I see the world.

Conversations that would once have faded from memory now stay with me a little longer. My interactions at work with colleagues and customers, synthesised with what I read, feeds into my world view and become potential material for new stories.

The act of writing doesn’t just capture experience. It sharpens the way you notice it and in that way writing is the process through which experience becomes intellectual capital.

Most people move through life accumulating experience passively without ever taking the time to reflect and capture key moments of insight. Meetings happen, patterns appear, frustrations repeat, but the insights remain implicit.

Writing interrupts that process.

When you write regularly, experience stops dissolving back into distant memory and begins to accumulate as ideas. Conversations, observations, and small moments from daily life start to reveal patterns. Over time those patterns turn into perspectives.

That is the real function of the 20% shift.

You are not trying to become a prolific creator overnight. You are simply redirecting a small portion of your attention toward extracting ideas from the life you are already living.

In practical terms this usually means three things.

First, you start paying attention differently. Work, institutions, culture, conversations all of this becomes potential material.

Second, you begin capturing ideas as they appear. Notes scribbled between meetings, observations during the week, fragments that slowly develop into essays.

Third, you publish at a rhythm that matches the natural speed of thinking rather than the speed of the feed. For many people that means writing once a week or even twice a month.

None of this requires abandoning a career. In fact the opposite is often true.

Many of the most influential thinkers used writing simply as a tool for organising their thoughts. Paul Graham built and sold companies long before his essays became widely read.

Naval Ravikant’s writing expresses a life spent investing and building businesses. Even further back, Marcus Aurelius wrote what later became Meditations while leading the Roman army on campaign.

None of these people set out to become writers. They wrote because writing helped them think.

Seen from that perspective, the 20% shift begins to look less like a career change and more like a cognitive practice, a way of extracting ideas from the life you are already living.

You are not starting from a disadvantage. A person embedded in real life. Someone who is working a job and raising a family is surrounded by raw material. Writing simply becomes the mechanism that extracts ideas from that material and turns them into something structured and shareable.

Over time those ideas begin to accumulate, and once they accumulate, they begin to behave like leverage.

Ideas → Articulation → Leverage → Optionality

None of this happens overnight. But over the years something subtle begins to change. You are no longer relying entirely on a single structure for your identity or your future. You are building something alongside it.

That is the real meaning of the 20% shift. Not an escape from work, but the gradual construction of intellectual assets that compound over time.

I’ll start to open up how I’ve been structuring this in the weeks to come, because there is a repeatable process through which experience becomes expertise, and expertise becomes intellectual assets.

Until then, have a great week.

Ben,