Last week I published a detailed guide on migrating from Evernote to Obsidian. It covers the entire process:

• How to export your notes cleanly

• How to set up capture tools so you can keep forwarding articles and receipts and thoughts straight into your notes vault

• How to troubleshoot what breaks

• How to convert your notes to any format you want (including Word and LibreOffice)

• What the actual trade-offs are.

If you’re paying for Evernote and increasingly annoyed about it, or if you’ve been meaning to leave but didn’t know where to start, this is the roadmap. It’s 5,800 words, includes screenshots, and costs just AU$10 on Gumroad.

The core idea: Your notes should live in a format you own, not in a format a company rents to you. Markdown is readable forever. It works offline. No subscription creep, no acquisition drama. I’ve been using this system now for three months. It’s genuinely changed how I think about tooling.

And my notes remain mine, not AI fodder.

If you’re interested, the guide is here:

https://thebananastand.gumroad.com/l/evernote-to-obsidian

If you’ve got questions before buying, reply to this email (or DM me) and I’ll answer them.

Earlier this year I cancelled three online subscriptions: Google, Microsoft, and Evernote. This wasn’t a cost-cutting exercise, though the numbers made the decision obvious. I was paying AU$713 a year for three services I barely used.

Microsoft had crammed Copilot into everything and charged me for the privilege, yet I opened 365 maybe twice a month. Google Workspace was worse; I’d paid for tokens I never touched. Gemini and NotebookLM are excellent but the rest of the suite sat there, unused and expensive.

Evernote was different. I actually used it. But the problem wasn’t the price alone; it was what the price represented. Every year, Bending Spoons raised it. Every year, my notes, stored in their proprietary format, on their servers, locked behind their API, became slightly more expensive to keep. I was renting access to my own thinking and the landlord kept raising the rent.

The real frustration wasn’t the money. It was the feeling of being held hostage. My notes existed in a format that only Evernote could read. If I wanted to leave, I’d have to figure out how to extract them. If Evernote shut down, or pivoted, or got acquired by someone worse the Bending Spoons, I’d have no choice but to accept it or lose 17 years of notes.

And underneath all three cancellations was something deeper: I was tired of being a datapoint in Microsoft’s and Google’s revenue streams. They give us software tools, for sure, but their real business is making us all into a product. Every search, every document, every note gets hoovered up, analysed, sold, used to train models. I was paying for the privilege of being mined. The software was the bait.

And, like good unthinking consumers, we kept paying. Every year. As the subscription went up and they crammed in more useless bloat we never asked for.

I know digital anonymity is dead. Everyone knows it. But knowing something and accepting it are different things. So I started looking for alternatives.

I’m old. I remember a time when people bought software instead of renting it. We got a floppy disk or a CD, installed it, owned it. Everything since then has been a steady march toward subscriptions and lock-in, toward companies owning the infrastructure and us bait fish owning nothing. I wasn’t going to reverse that entirely, that ship sailed long ago, but I could at least stop funding the worst offenders.

The replacements are surprisingly good. LibreOffice for Microsoft 365, free. A second-hand HP Prodesk replaced Google Drive and OneDrive. Fastmail replaced Gmail for AU$85 a year. And my Obsidian system replaced Evernote for US$30 a year (Obsidian itself is free, the email2obsidian service is the only cost).

The Evernote replacement matters most. Not because Obsidian is perfect (it’s not) but because it solves the core problem: my notes live in a format I can read and understand. Markdown is just text. Markdown works in any text editor forever. No company can lock it down. I own it, and it lives only on hardware that sits in the same room I do.

That changes everything.

P.S. I wrote a guide about my migration off Evernote and onto Obsidian, and how I replicated all Evernote’s key features on the Obsidian platform. If you’re considering the same move, the guide is here. Future guides will cover the decoupling (as much as possible) of Microsoft and Google from my tech stack.

You built the thing. You launched. You waited.

Nothing.

A silence so complete it feels personal. It’s like the internet looked at what you made, shrugged, and went back to watching someone else’s content.

No one tells you that the launch is not a discovery event. It never was.

The idea that you build something, announce it to the world, and watch the world show up is a myth. It has everything to do with survivorship bias, because the people whose launch everyone envies had an existing audience. They are the survivors.

They delivered three years of consistent output that preceded their overnight success. Everyone just sees the success and says, ‘I could do that.’

So let’s talk about what discovery actually is, because it’s not an event. It’s a system. And right now, you probably don’t have one.

The attention problem is a volume problem first

Your instinct when nobody’s watching is to make the thing better. Polish the website. Refine the offer. Rewrite the about page. This feels productive because it’s within your control, but it’s displacement activity. The market can’t tell you your offer is weak if the market doesn’t know the offer exists.

Before you fix the thing, you need enough people to see the thing. That’s not a quality problem yet. That’s a distribution problem.

Attention, in practical terms, means one thing: showing up in places where your specific reader already spends time, repeatedly, with something worth reading. That’s the whole formula. There’s no shortcut buried in it.

The ‘specific reader’ part matters more than most people realise. If you write for everyone, you write for no one. The founder who’s Googling ‘why is my cash flow broken’ at 2am is a specific human with a specific problem. Write for her. Write like you know exactly what her sleepless night feels like. Broad topics attract broad audiences; broad audiences don’t convert.

Consistency is the mechanism, not the goal

Most people treat consistency as a character virtue: either you have the discipline, or you don’t.

But that’s the wrong frame entirely.

Consistency is a compounding problem, not a willpower problem.

One article does almost nothing. Ten articles do a little. Fifty articles, published over twelve months in the same place on the same topic, build something that search engines index, that readers reference, that other writers link to. The fifty-first article gets seen by more people than the first ten combined because the infrastructure around it is bigger.

But it can’t be consistency, full stop. There must be substance. Consistency without substance is noise. The internet is drowning in content. What it’s starving for is ‘idea density,’ the ability to pack a short piece of writing with so much signal that the reader finishes it and thinks ‘I wish I’d written that.’ That’s the bar. You have to ask yourself, ‘did I give someone an idea they’ll still be thinking about on Friday?’

You find idea density at the intersection of two things: problems your reader genuinely has right now, and ideas you actually find interesting. If you’re writing about something that bores you, the reader feels it. If you’re writing about something you love but nobody cares about, that’s journaling, not publishing. The overlap between those two circles is where the good stuff lives.

The discipline question is irrelevant. The real question is, ‘have I built a publishing system I can maintain when I’m tired, busy, or uninspired?’ Because a mediocre article published on a bad day beats a perfect article that never gets written. Every time.

The channel decision is where most people get stuck

Being everywhere is how you burn out without building anything. So don’t be everywhere. Pick your place and go deep.

Choosing a channel is about understanding what kind of creator you’re trying to be, and what kind of work compounds over time.

Dan Koe draws a distinction that’s worth thinking about. Level 1 creators chase trends and virality. They’re optimising for reach, for numbers, for the dopamine hit of a post that blows up. Level 2 creators, the ones he calls ‘brilliant nobodies,’ have real ideas and genuine depth, but they refuse to learn distribution because they think marketing is beneath them. So they stay invisible. Level 3 is where you want to be: a creator whose every piece of content connects back to a central mission. Every article, every post, every short-form fragment points toward the same north star. Readers don’t just consume the individual piece; they start to follow the thread.

That throughline is what makes a channel choice matter. Pick one primary platform and treat it like your job. One place where your reader actually lives, where you can publish consistently, and where the content has some shelf life. Social media posts evaporate in hours. Long-form articles on Substack or a well-maintained blog compound over months. The effort you put into a good piece in January can still find readers in October.

Your secondary channel should amplify the primary, not replace it; a thread on X linking back to the full piece, a LinkedIn post excerpting the key idea.

The mechanics are simple. Write the thing, publish it in your primary place, share a piece of it somewhere else, then repeat.

Do this every week for six months before you decide it’s not working.

Six months is the minimum viable commitment

If you quit at week eight because the numbers are small, you’ve paid the full cost of starting but collected none of the return. The founders who get traction are not smarter or better writers. They’re just still in the room at month seven.

Think of the writers you were watching when you started. Half of them have gone quiet. Not because they failed publicly. They just stopped showing up one week and never came back. Nobody announced it. The feed just moved on.

The audience you want to reach has been burned before by people who showed up for a few weeks and disappeared. Don’t be another one. Trust is built by simply not quitting. Every time you publish when it would be easier not to, you’re making a deposit into a trust account that pays out later, slowly at first, then all at once.

Nobody knows you exist yet. That’s not a verdict. That’s just where you are in the timeline.

Build the system. Keep going.

Subscribe now

The Invisible 37%: the prospects who enquired, took your time, and then drifted back into research mode because life got in the way. They’re a leak in your business, and you already paid for their attention. Stop chasing new clicks and start a low-friction conversation with the gold mine you already own.

Most business owners are addicted to the hunt.

They wake up thinking about the ‘New.’ New clicks. New enquiries. New ‘Buy Now’ customers.

They pour thousands into Google Ads and LinkedIn campaigns, and fight a bloody war for the top 3% of the market.

According to Sabri Suby’s Larger Market Formula1 at any given moment only 3% of your market is ready to buy. And they will buy, because you and every of of your competitors is chasing them

The other 97%? Dismissed as ‘junk,’ ‘tyre-kickers,’ or ‘lost deals.’

But there’s a segment within that 97% that represents the single biggest leak in your business.

It’s the Invisible 37%. This graphic, page 78 of Suby’s book, explains it:

Do you see where the 37% is?

37% Didn’t Just Disappear, They Moved

The Invisible 37% holds two groups:

• Information Gathering (17%)

• Problem Aware (20%).

Six months ago, these people were in your top 3%. They enquired. They downloaded your lead magnet. They sat through a discovery call. You prepared (and they received) the proposal.

Then, life happened. A budget got cut, a project got delayed, or a competitor’s shiny ad distracted them.

You marked the deal ‘Lost’ and moved on.

But they didn’t stop having the problem. They just moved back down the pyramid. They’re still researching. They still need help. They sit there forlornly, a record in your CRM, waiting for a human to tap them on the shoulder. If you aren’t that human, you’re just warming them up for your competitors to close later.

The Marketing Black Hole

Why do we ignore the 37%? Because there’s always more new leads coming in. Because the salesperson got told ‘no’ the first time, and doesn’t want to beg another call.

But the math doesn’t add up. The Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) for that top 3% is skyrocketing. You are outbidding everyone in your industry for the same tiny slice of the pie, and it’s a race to the bottom for you all.

Meanwhile, you’ve already paid to find the 37%. You paid for the click. You paid for the lead capture. You paid for the initial sales person’s time.

Ignoring these leads is like buying a gold mine, digging halfway, and walking away because you didn’t find a nugget in the first 10 minutes.

Educate Me

In his book, Suby talks about the need to ‘educate’ the middle of the pyramid. Marketing agencies position this as ‘send them a 40-page whitepaper or a fancy glossy newsletter.’ Which, of course, they’re happy to produce for you.

Wrong.

The 37% don’t want more content.

They want a conversation.

They want a low-friction way to figure out if what you’re offering is what they want.

They want to take their time before they spend their hard-earned cash.

You want the sale. The prospect says, ‘Not yet.’ Your salesperson hears, ‘No,’ and moves on to the next prospect.

Sales process done, lead marked ‘Lost.’

But it’s not always lost. For whatever reason, the timing wasn’t right. Or some higher-priority thing came up. Or they didn’t trust your salesperson. Or - and this is common - they just wanted a bit more time to think things through.

Re-engage

Even if it’s been months, you can easily and respectfully re-engage with your once-warm prospects.

It’s all about putting the sales pitch to one side and simply asking if they’re still interested.

The smart tool is a simple, plain-text question that looks like it came from a human on your team:

‘Hey [Name], I’m cleaning up my files and your name came up. Are you still looking for help with [X]?’

That’s not salesy. It’s respectful. It’s courteous.

For the person who’s been vacillating in the ‘Information Gathering’ (17%) or the ‘Problem Aware’ (20%) phases for six months, it’s the bridge they need to move up to the ‘Buy Now’ (3%).

This Is Real

Your abandoned leads list is an asset. Like any asset, it decays if it isn’t maintained.

Data rots. Domains get weak. Relationships go cold.

Your list of 1,000 dormant leads holds value. There’s statistical certainty of found revenue. Even if 75% are truly gone, the remaining 25% represents weeks or months of sales.

You paid to get those names on your radar. The 3% will come your way regardless, but that 37% represents a bumper harvest.

You’re nursing a flat white you can’t afford while your Stripe notifications stay silent. You call yourself a founder but you’re really a hobbyist with dreams and an ego.

I worked with a bloke who arrived in Australia with his family, a pair of shoes, and a shirt that had seen better days. He didn’t spend his time building a personal brand or worrying about his aesthetic. He begged his fortnightly pay in advance so his family could eat. He looked desperate because he was desperate. Today, he owns his home in a leafy Sydney suburb and sleeps like a baby while you lie awake wondering how to pay for LinkedIn Premium.

This is the lesson: The difference between a successful new business and a dying dream is the amount of shame the owner is willing to swallow.

During the early formative months, consider the ancient art of bartering.

Bartering is the oldest trick in the book because it works. It worked before the Lydian Empire invented money, and it will work when we create money’s replacement.

Maybe you think you’re above bartering. It spoils your flex and anyway, trading your valuable skill for a bit of plumbing or free office space is beneath your ‘professional’ standing.

Pride is a parasite. It eats your potential and hollows your bank account. Real entrepreneurs don’t wait for a line of credit; they chat to the person behind them in the coffee line and find out what they need.

If you have no cash, you have time. If you have time, you have a service. Bartering is a cheat code because it bypasses the tax man and the banking system entirely. Bartering your time or expertise is a skill that no one can take from you. It works for people who actually want to survive, but it takes guts to get over yourself,

Ask everyone for help until they either give you a roadmap or the finger. Shame is a luxury you can’t afford when the rent is due and your sales are zero.

If you can’t trade a bit of your expertise for a bag of groceries, then your expertise isn’t worth nearly as much as you tell yourself it is. Stop acting like a success and start doing what is necessary to become one.

You're frustrated. Because the topic area that fires you up, that you want to write about, it's more crowded than Hyde Park on a sunny day.

You think the noise is overwhelming. You think you need a Marshall stack at 11 to get heard over the clamour of a thousand other creators, all hawking the same generic dream.

Wrong.

A crowded market is not a threat, it's a signal. The smart crowd knows how to turn that signal into useful information.

They take that silver-plattered dataset and pull it apart. It tells them exactly where the money is hiding and how everyone else is failing to grab it.

The not-so-smart (or the brave, or the foolish) look for a space where the competition is minimal or non-existent. Well, there's nothing new under the sun, folks.

All they've found is a ghost town where nobody else is selling. It's very likely a place where great intentions are converted into a graveyard of failed ideas.

Look for the unfulfilled gaps and leave the blue oceans for others. Saturation provides a complete map of competitor behaviour. Most people see 10,000 rivals and try to be 5% better or $10 cheaper.

That is a slow death. A race to the bottom that no one wins.

Instead, look for the one thing they all refuse to do or fail to recognise. There's always something to uncover.

When the entire industry moves in a single direction, they leave a vacuum in the opposite direction. Your job is to fill that vacuum with something that makes their offerings look like last week's lunch.

High-end example: Peter Steinberger created OpenClaw in November 2025. In February 2026 it was 'acquired' by OpenAI. Some sources suggest the deal for Steinberger was in the range of $2-15 million.

Check out some of the players in your field. You won't have to look far to find short, low-value videos designed to bait eager n00bs into some rehashed, mediocre $300 course.

It's a tired, transparent trope. Everyone hates it, but they do it over and over because they lack the imagination to move beyond the crowd.

Don't be one of them, please.

If you want to win, give the entire course away for free. No email gates, no hoops, just 6 hours of raw, unfiltered value sitting on a public platform.

Top-of-head examples: Anything from Alex Hormozi. Caleb Ralston's personal brand video:

These two guys know their stuff. It's a clever highjack that builds an audience of thousands while their competitors try to guide jaded leads towards upsell after upsell.

Don't overthink.

Get a piece of paper.

On one side, write down just 3 things your competitors do that make your skin crawl. On the other side, write the exact opposite.

Then figure out how to make the opposite real.

If they spout premium and exclusive, be gritty, informal, and accessible.

If they post high-production-value AI videos, use your iPhone and record yourself in your car.

This is your unique space. It stops the drift towards the boring middle ground where brands go to be ignored. It gives you permission to be the loudest, weirdest person in the room.

A simple system for publishing content when you couldn’t be jagged to produce anything. No inspiration required. Just the specific steps that work when your brain is offline and you still need to hit send.

You wake up and the idea of writing anything makes you want to throw your laptop into the ocean.

Maybe you’re sick. Maybe your relationship just imploded. Maybe you’re just empty and you don’t know why. Doesn’t matter. Your newsletter goes out Thursday and it’s Tuesday night and you’ve got nothing.

Here’s something to ponder. Inspiration is for people who don’t have bills to pay.

Professionals don’t wait for the muse. Professionals have a protocol for days when their brain refuses to cooperate. This is mine. You can steal it.

The truth about publishing when you’re broken

I’m not going to tell you to take a walk or practice gratitude or journal about your feelings. You can do that on Friday when the work is done.

Right now you need to publish something. Not your best work. Not work you’re proud of. Just work that exists and meets a standard you can live with and your audience expects.

The protocol I’m about to give you produces mediocre content. That’s the point.

Mediocre content published on schedule beats brilliant content that never ships.

Your audience doesn’t need your masterpiece this week. They need to know you’re still alive and still showing up.

You can write something good next week when your brain works again.

Step #1: Open the emergency file

You should already have this file. If you don’t, make it now before you need it.

Call it ‘Emergency Content Bank’ or ‘Brain Dead Archive’ or whatever keeps you from opening it when you’re feeling good. This file is not for your best ideas. This file is for the ideas you can execute when you’re at 30% capacity.

Here’s what goes in it:

• A list of 10 questions your audience asks repeatedly. Not interesting questions. Obvious questions’ ‘How do I start?,’ ‘What if I’m scared?,’ ‘Is this normal?’ The questions you’ve answered so many times you could do it drunk.

• A list of 5 formats that require no original thinking. List posts. FAQ compilations. Myth-busting articles. ‘Here’s what I learned this week’ roundups. Templates you can fill in like a form.

• 3 screenshots or saved articles that made you angry or confused in the last month. You don’t need to know why they’re wrong yet. You just need raw material.

If your emergency file is empty right now, take twenty minutes to fill it. Do it while you still have some brain function left. You can’t build a lifeboat while you’re drowning.

Step #2: Pick the path of least resistance

Look at your emergency file. Which item makes your stomach churn the least?

Not excitement. Not inspiration. Just the absence of nausea when you think about writing it.

That’s your topic.

Don’t try to write something good. Try to write something that won’t make you close your laptop, pick up your phone, and doomscroll for three hours.

Pick the easiest question. Pick the simplest format. Pick the screenshot that requires the smallest amount of analysis. Whatever.

Set the bar so low that even your current broken brain can step over it.

Step #3: Use the template

Here’s a structure that’s a whole lot better than a blank page. Not wondrous, but it works.

Opening (50-75 words): State the problem in one sentence. Add one concrete example of what this problem looks like in real life. That’s it. No setup, no throat-clearing, no building tension. You don’t have the energy for that today.

Middle (400-600 words): Answer the question or explain the concept. Use the simplest language you can. Pretend you’re explaining it to someone who just asked you at a bar. Even better, ELI5 (explain like I’m 5). No metaphors. No clever transitions. No fancy words. Just information in the order it needs to be said.

If you’re stuck, try this framing:

• Here’s what most people think.

• Here’s what’s actually true.

• Here’s why the difference matters.

• Here’s what to do about it.

Four paragraphs. One point per paragraph. Connect them with ‘but,’ or ‘so,’ or ‘this means.’ Surely you can handle that?

Ending (50-75 words): Restate the main point in different words. Then stop typing.

Don’t write a conclusion that ties everything together. Don’t end with an inspiring call to action. Don’t try to drop something profound. Just stop when you’ve said what you came to say.

Step #4: Add a disclaimer then send it

At the bottom of your post, add this, ‘I wrote this while running on empty. If it helps, good. If it doesn’t, there’s always next week.’

Or some version, in your voice. Give yourself permission to publish something imperfect. And give your audience permission to skip this one if they want.

Some won’t skip it. Some appreciate the honesty. Because some are also running on empty when they read your work. Everyone has days like these.

Send it before you talk yourself out of it.

What this protocol does

This protocol says nothing about producing amazing content. Nope. It’s about keeping your publishing streak going when you don’t feel like it..

Streaks matter. Not because consistency is a virtue, but because stopping is dangerous.

If you skip one week, skipping two weeks gets easier. Skip three and you’ve trained yourself that publishing is optional. Skip a month and you’re not a creator anymore.

The protocol keeps you in the game on days when you can’t play well. It keeps your name in your audience’s inbox. It keeps your muscle memory intact so when your brain comes online, you don’t have to rebuild momentum from zero.

You will publish mediocre work using this system. You should publish mediocre work. Mediocre work published is better than brilliant work-in-progress.

Besides, no one expects you to hit it out of the park with every article you publish.

Inspiration comes from doing the work, not before it. Write your way into clarity. Don’t wait for clarity before you write. That rarely happens.

Try it next time

I’m sorta hoping you’re reading this article on a good day, good enough to get step #1 under your belt.

Because sooner or later you’ll have bad day. A bad week. A period when everything feels pointless and you can’t remember why you started this in the first place.

Happens to us all.

So open the emergency file. Pick an easy option. Follow the template. Add the disclaimer. Hit send.

Then go do whatever you need to do to improve your day.

You’re $3k short for Monday’s payroll. Here’s what to do this weekend to survive without losing your team or facing legal action. Not theory. Survival.

You check your bank balance Thursday afternoon and your gut hurts. Payroll processes overnight Monday. You’re three grand short. Maybe more.

This is not the time for a business pivot.

This is not the time to reassess your pricing strategy or read another chapter of that book about cash flow management you bought six months ago.

You need to move money, now, and you need to do it without torpedoing your business in the process.

Here’s what works when you’re staring down a payroll shortfall.

Stop lying to yourself about the timeline

You don’t have a week. You don’t have five business days. You have Friday, the weekend, maybe Monday if you’re lucky.

Sit down. Open your banking app. Write down the exact number. Not the rough estimate. Not ‘around three thousand.’ The actual shortfall to the dollar.

Now write down when the money needs to clear. Not when payroll gets processed. When it needs to be sitting in your account, cleared and ready. If you use a payroll service, that’s probably Monday midday. If you do manual transfers, you have until Monday close of business.

The number and the deadline. That’s your entire world for the next 72 hours.

Rank your payment obligations by legal consequence

Not all debts are equal when you’re in crisis mode.

Wages are non-negotiable. The Fair Work Ombudsman does not care about your cash flow problems. Pay your employees late and you’re opening yourself to legal action that will cost you more than the shortfall. Employees can and will report you. The FWO moves fast on wage theft claims.

Superannuation comes second. Yes, it’s legally required. Yes, the ATO will eventually come for you if you don’t pay it. But you have more runway before they notice. The quarterly1 super deadline gives you breathing room that weekly or fortnightly wages don’t.

Everything else - suppliers, contractors, your own drawings - comes after that. You negotiate with suppliers. You delay contractor payments. You skip paying yourself. You can’t skip paying wages without risking everything.

This isn’t how to run your business long-term. This is triage. You stop bleeding first, then you bandage the wound.

Call the people who matter before they call you

If you’re going to be late, tell your employees now.

Not Sunday night. Not Tuesday morning when the money doesn’t hit. Now.

The message is simple, ‘Payroll will be 48 hours late. The money will be in your account by Wednesday morning. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.’

That’s it. No long explanation about client payments falling through. No justification about how tough the market is. No promises that this will never happen again.

You’re giving them information they need to plan their week. Some of them have rent, mortgage, or loan payments due. Some of them have direct debits set up. They need to know now so they can move their own money around, call their bank, adjust their own plans.

Transparency here buys you something valuable: the chance to keep your team. If someone’s first indication that you can’t make payroll is when their account sits empty on Tuesday, they’re updating their resume by Wednesday. If you tell them early, with a clear timeline, some of them will stick around.

Some won’t. That’s the cost of running out of cash.

Liquidate whatever you can liquidate today

That invoice you were going to chase next week? You’re chasing it today.

Call the client. Not email. Call, ‘I need to reconcile my accounts before end of week. Can you process that invoice today?’ Most clients can push through an early payment if you ask directly. Some will say no. Ask anyway.

That equipment sitting in your office that you’ve been meaning to sell? Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree, whatever. Price it below market value. You need cash today, not top dollar next month.

Your personal savings account? Yes, that too. I know you’ve kept business and personal separate. I know you’ve been disciplined about not mixing the two. Break that rule now, fix your systems later. Loan your business the money. Document it properly so you can pay yourself back. But get the cash moved today.

This is the uncomfortable part. You’re going to feel desperate doing this. You should feel desperate. You are desperate. Desperation focuses the mind.

Sell what you can sell. Call in what you can call in. Move what you can move. The goal is to close that three thousand dollar gap before Monday lunchtime.

Build a system that stops this happening again

You’ll survive this week. Most people do.

Then you need to make sure you never have this weekend again.

Open a separate bank account on Tuesday. Figure out, on average, what % of your gross expenses (including cost of goods sold, if you have those) is payroll and superannuation. Call it your payroll account. If you don’t know, start with a figure like 30%.

Every dollar that comes into your business from this day forward, 30% goes into that account immediately. Before you pay suppliers. Before you pay yourself. Before you do anything.

Treat that money as already spent. Because it is. It’s your employees’ money, you’re just holding it until payday.

This is not sophisticated financial planning and definitely not optimal cash flow management. This is the system that keeps you out of Fair Work trouble and keeps your employees from walking out.

If the income doesn’t cover all your expenses including payroll, your business has a revenue problem not a cash flow problem. But that’s a different article.

Right now, you have a weekend to find three thousand dollars. Start making calls.

There’s a special shade of orange Substack uses for its growth charts.

Do you know it?

It’s a bright, optimistic, happy colour, and it’s been artfully designed to trigger the same receptors in your brain as a slot machine. You open your dashboard, you see the line going up and to the right, and you feel, well, validated.

You think, ‘It’s working. I’m making it.’

Then you tab over to your banking app, and it’s not so much fun anymore.

The orange line says you are a media mogul. The bank balance says you are unemployed.

This cognitive dissonance, the gap between Audience and Income, is where most creators die. They starve to death while standing on a stage, receiving a standing ovation from people who haven’t paid anything to be there.

Let’s break the spell of the dashboard.

Let’s stop looking at the subscriber count as a score and start looking at it for what it actually is. A liability.

The liability of free subscribers

This runs counter to everything the Growth Gurus chirp endlessly at you on X. They tell you to ‘build the list.’ They tell you ‘attention is the new oil.’

They’re lying.

Attention is not oil. Attention is a fire hazard.

A free subscriber is not a customer. A free subscriber is a stranger who’s vaguely agreed, some time in the past, to let you shout at them once a week.

In exchange for this permission, you incur Audience Debt. You feel the pressure to perform. You spend hours writing, editing, and formatting to keep them entertained. You worry about your open rates. You censor your more radical ideas because you don’t want anyone to unsubscribe.

You’re working for them. But they’re not paying you, and likely never will.

If you have 10,000 free subscribers and zero revenue, you don’t have a business. You have a very loud, very demanding volunteer job. You’re running a charity for doomscrollers with internet access and time on their hands.

The maths of the ‘starving viral’

Let’s look at two hypothetical creators.

Creator A writes about ‘The Future of Work.’ They write sweeping, philosophical threads that get retweeted by venture capitalists. They have 25,000 subscribers. Their Revenue Per Subscriber is $0.00. They pay their rent by dipping into savings and telling their parents that ‘big things are coming.’

Creator B writes about ‘HVAC Repair for Small Business Owners.’ Their writing is dry. It has typos and is formatted like a dog’s breakfast. They have 400 subscribers, 85% of them from the northern hemisphere where people have winters. They sell a $50 PDF called ‘The Winterisation Checklist.’ 10% of their list buys it every November. They make $2,000 in a weekend.

Creator A is famous.

Creator B is solvent.

Which one do you want to be on the 15th of the month?

The internet is piling up Creator A corpses. They die chasing vanity metrics. They optimise for width (how many people see me?) instead of depth (how many people trust me enough to whip out a credit card?). They build a massive machine that consumes energy but produces nothing but noise.

They would make more money refilling greengrocer shelves at night (maybe they do, to make ends meet).

So…

Stop building a media company and start building a shop

This is The Banana Stand.

The name may be a dated meme, but the philosophy behind it is dead serious. We’re not here to fuck spiders. We’re not here to ‘express our inner truth’ (save that for your gratitude journal).

We’re here to run a shop.

A greengrocer doesn’t care if 10,000 people walk past the window and give a thumbs up. The greengrocer cares a lot about the three people who walked in and bought bananas.

This thinking demands a fundamental shift in your priorities. And in the process, forgetting most of the Growth Guru kruft you’ve been fed for years.

Stop obsessing over your headlines and start obsessing over your offer.

Stop checking your Growth and start checking your Conversions.

If you posted an article today and nobody bought anything, you did all that work for free. Return on Investment equals zero. That’s bad business in anyone’s terms.

The occasional misfire is fine. I get that. If nothing else, they build goodwill. Doing it every week is suicide.

The month of death

Here is the only metric that really matters. You won’t find it on your Substack dashboard.

When do you run out of money?

I don’t mean a vague sense of ‘I have a few months.’ I mean a specific month. October. January. December. Or best of all, never.

If you don’t know the month, it’s like flying a plane with the fuel gauge taped over because looking at it makes you anxious.

This is truth. You can’t fix a situation you haven’t quantified with cold hard data.

Most creators hide from this number. They treat their finances like a magical mystery box. They hope that if they just write one more viral post, the money will somehow manifest.

But hope is not a strategy. Hope is an opiate.

Wake up.

Look at the numbers, as ugly as they may be.

Know exactly how much your Tax Drag is (the money you owe the government that sits in your account pretending to be yours).

Calculate your True Hourly Wage to know if all your vaunted expertise earns you less than a street cleaner.

Look, these figures may be awesome. You could be making serious bank. Or not. If nothing else, knowing these numbers helps you find and focus on the areas of your business that give the best return on your time.

The ask

I’m not going to ask you to share this article. Exposure doesn’t pay my bills, and it doesn’t pay yours.

I’m going to ask you to audit yourself.

Look at your last five emails. Did you ask for the sale? Did you offer a solution to a painful problem, or did you just offer ‘content’?

If you’re tired of guessing, I built a tool for this. It’s not pretty. It’s a Google spreadsheet.

It asks you to input your cash, your revenue, your burn rate, and your taxes. It spits out your Month of Death in bright red text.

It costs AU$36 (inc GST).

That’s the price of four lattes and a croissant to share.

Or, it’s the price of sleeping through the night because you finally know exactly where you stand.

GET THE CASH FLOW WORKSHEET

Welcome to your Banana Stand. Get back control of your cash.

That’s your banana stand.

The Name

In the TV series Arrested Development, the Bluth family owns a banana stand on the pier. It’s small, it’s unglamorous, and the patriarch George Bluth keeps telling his son Michael there’s always money in the banana stand. Michael ignores it. He’s focused on bigger things. He wants to build something real.

The banana stand burns down. Turns out there was money, the folding in-your-wallet type, hidden in the walls.

Don’t be a Michael. Because we’ve all got a project we dismiss as too small, too niche, too unglamorous to take seriously. We walk past it every day looking for something bigger. And the thing we’re ignoring has been quietly waiting, full of potential we haven’t bothered to count.

Why It Stalls

Our banana stands go nowhere for one of three reasons, and if you’re honest with yourself you already know which one applies.

The first is fear of failure dressed up as perfectionism. The project isn’t ready yet. The branding needs work. The website needs another pass. You’ll launch it properly when the timing is right. The timing is never right because a project that never launches can never fail, and that’s exactly the point.

The second is distraction. Something shinier appeared. A new platform, a new idea, a new opportunity that felt more urgent. Your banana stand got deprioritised once and then again and then it became the thing you’d get back to eventually.

The third is the scariness of building in public. You told people about it. Or you didn’t, because you were afraid of what they’d think. Either way, the imaginary audience that judges you, laughs at you, asks ‘how’s it’s going’ when it’s overtly not going anywhere? Oh, the embarrassment. Much easier to stall and never ship.

These aren’t character flaws. They’re just patterns.

Banana Stands Are Everywhere

Look around and you find them in every form: book manuscripts sitting at 60,000 words with no ending in sight, ecommerce stores that went live and then went quiet, software projects that never made it to version 1.0, newsletters that published four issues before the author ran out of steam, online courses built in full but never promoted, social accounts that posted furiously for six weeks and then fell silent.

The graveyard is enormous. And everyone you admire has at least one project buried there.

This Is Mine

I’m Mark. The Banana Stand started as a Substack newsletter in late 2024, casual and exploratory, the kind of thing you do when you’re testing whether an idea has legs. Then life intervened and it went quiet for longer than I intended.

The difference this time is intent. I’m not resurrecting this as a hobby. I’m building it as a real business: a content ecosystem with WordPress at its core, a newsletter audience here on Substack and Medium, and a product catalogue on Gumroad of short, practical PDFs that solve immediate problems for people running small businesses. The business is being built intentionally and properly, in public, with the same systems and thinking I write about each week.

I’m building The Banana Stand alongside you. When I tell you that half-arsed projects can become real ones, I’m not blowing smoke. I’m doing it right now. You’re reading the evidence.

What To Do With Yours

No need to burn it down and start over. No need to rebrand or start a new platform with a better logo. Just make one decision: is this worth finishing, or is it worth releasing?

Finishing means recommitting with a real plan, a real timeline, and the willingness to ship something imperfect.

Releasing means acknowledging it served its purpose as a learning exercise, closing it down cleanly, and moving on without guilt.

The one thing you can’t keep doing is leaving it in the half-life.

‘The Whole Game’ Series

I wrote three articles to act as content cornerstones of The Banana Stand. I call the topics they introduce by the tag, ‘The Whole Game.’

Here are the three:

One: Foundation - Before You Build Anything, Get These Four Things Right

• Thing 1 - Your Head

• Thing 2 - Your Why

• Thing 3 - Your Ethics

• Thing 4 - Your Customer

Two: Proof - You’re Not Ready Yet (Here’s What You Still Need)

• Thing 5 - Know What You’re Walking Into

• Thing 6 - Earn the Right to Charge

• Thing 7 - Know Why You and Not Someone Else

• Thing 8 - Test Before You Bet

Three: Systems - The Difference Between A Business And A Hobby Is A System

• Thing 9 - Cash Is The Only Number That Actually Matters

• Thing 10 - Visibility Doesn’t Happen By Accident

• Thing 11 - Selling Is A Habit, Not An Event

• Thing 12 - The Dip Is Real And It Will Find You

I really hope you get value from The Banana Stand, and I would love for you to subscribe. It’s free, always will be, and every Sunday you’ll get a new article that’s especially relevant to new business founders like yourself.

Most business advice assumes you’re playing a long game. Series A funding. Seven-figure exits. A personal brand so polished it doubles as a mirror.

But you? You’re just trying to figure out how to survive next month.

Because that’s the reality of running a small business. Your small business. It deserves solid advice built specifically for you, and others like you. What you don’t need, and what you won’t find here, is empire-building frameworks filed down to fit.

The Fantasy They Sold You

The gurus promised six figures in six months. Passive income from a hammock. Scale to seven figures while your ‘systems do the work.’ Their courses cost more than your monthly revenue. Their Instagram posts are performance art shot in rented offices.

Meanwhile you’re checking your bank balance at 11am Thursday to see if you can pay the rent on Monday.

Nobody in that world talks about the months you sold nothing. Nobody mentions the clients who ghost you after three invoices. Nobody hands you a spreadsheet that tells you which supplier gets paid late this month and which one can’t wait.

Here’s the thing the gurus won’t say out loud: businesses don’t fail because the idea was bad. They fail because the person running them ran out of money before they figured out how to stop running out of money.

That’s the whole game. Everything else is commentary.

The Banana Stand exists because someone needs to say that clearly, repeatedly, and without trying to sell you a mastermind.

Solvency Beats Growth

Always. Every time. No exceptions.

You can grow a broke business into a bigger broke business. Plenty of people do it. Growth without profit is just expensive failure running in slow motion, and it looks impressive right up until it doesn’t.

Solvency means you’re still here next month. Still here next quarter. Still here when the slow season ends and the work picks up again. Solvency is boring and it doesn’t make for good content, which is exactly why nobody builds a personal brand around it.

We do.

Cash Flow Beats Revenue

Invoicing $10,000 means nothing if $12,000 hits your accounts payable the same week. Revenue is a vanity metric. It looks good in screenshots. It feels good to say out loud. It tells you almost nothing about the actual health of your business.

Cash in the bank is the only number that matters when things get tight. Because when you have cash you can screw up almost everything else and still survive long enough to fix it. When you don’t have cash, a single bad month can end something you spent years building.

The difference between those two outcomes is usually a system, not a strategy.

A simple system.

Built once, maintained regularly, ugly as hell and absolutely worth having.

Survival Beats Optimisation

You don’t need the perfect tech stack. You don’t need the ideal morning routine or the most efficient productivity framework or a content calendar colour-coded by platform.

You need to not go broke. Everything else is a distraction wearing a strategy costume.

This isn’t a comfortable message. It won’t make you feel good about where your business is right now. But you know what feels worse than an uncomfortable message? Closing your business because you ran out of money while you were busy optimising your funnel.

What This Place Is

The Banana Stand is for the business owner short on payroll who needs answers tonight. For the freelancer whose biggest client just went silent. For the solopreneur whose effective hourly rate is below minimum wage and who doesn’t yet know how to fix it.

We sell systems that stop you bleeding cash. Short, practical, built for people who don’t have time for a course and can’t afford a consultant.

We don’t promise transformation, and we don’t pander to the passive income fantasy.

We care about your cash position. How many months until you’re out of business if nothing changes. What levers you can pull this week, not this quarter.

If you want motivation, there’s an entire industry built to sell it to you. If you want vision boards and vibrational alignment, there’s an army of people who’d love your credit card number.

But if you want to be in business six months from now, you’re in the right place.

There’s always money in The Banana Stand.

As long as you stop setting it on fire.

‘The Whole Game’ Series

I wrote three articles to act as content cornerstones of The Banana Stand. I call the topics they introduce by the tag, ‘The Whole Game.’

Here are the three:

One: Foundation - Before You Build Anything, Get These Four Things Right

• Thing 1 - Your Head

• Thing 2 - Your Why

• Thing 3 - Your Ethics

• Thing 4 - Your Customer

Two: Proof - You’re Not Ready Yet (Here’s What You Still Need)

• Thing 5 - Know What You’re Walking Into

• Thing 6 - Earn the Right to Charge

• Thing 7 - Know Why You and Not Someone Else

• Thing 8 - Test Before You Bet

Three: Systems - The Difference Between A Business And A Hobby Is A System

• Thing 9 - Cash Is The Only Number That Actually Matters

• Thing 10 - Visibility Doesn’t Happen By Accident

• Thing 11 - Selling Is A Habit, Not An Event

• Thing 12 - The Dip Is Real And It Will Find You

Most Substack advice tells you to pick a niche and post consistently. Show up every week. Grow your subscriber count. Trust the algorithm.

You’ve probably tried that. You’ve probably also noticed that the posts getting the most traction aren’t yours; they’re meta-content about how to grow on Substack, written by people whose entire business is telling other people how to grow on Substack. The ‘yay, first subscriber’ Notes. The ‘write what you love and the audience will come’ posts. The endless recycled advice about consistency and authenticity from writers whose subscriber count is their only credential.

There’s nothing wrong with your content. There’s something wrong with the architecture underneath it.

Substack Is A Spoke, Not A Hub

Everything published under The Banana Stand name lives permanently at thebananastand.co. Not primarily here. Not on any platform that can change its algorithm, restructure its Notes feed, or decide tomorrow that paid subscriptions need a 15% cut instead of 10%.

Substack is valuable. It puts content in front of readers who follow writers rather than topics, and the Notes feed is a genuinely useful discovery channel. But it’s a road, not a destination. The Banana Stand uses it as an attention spoke: a surface that brings readers to the hub, not a home that replaces it.

When you treat Substack as your canonical content home, you’re building equity in Substack’s platform. The day they change the rules, and they will, you find out how much of that equity was actually yours.

The Hub And The Other Spokes

WordPress at thebananastand.co is the canonical home. It’s indexed, searchable, permanent, and owned outright. Every article published here also lives there. That’s not duplication; it’s architecture.

Medium at med.thebananastand.co reaches a different reader: someone who follows topics rather than writers, who reads actively rather than subscribes passively. It’s another road to the same hub.

Social channels amplify what’s already been published. They don’t originate content; they distribute it. One post, multiple surfaces, all roads leading back to the same place.

The mistake most Substack writers make is treating the spoke as the wheel. Build the wheel first. Then add spokes.

AEO, Not Just SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is still worth doing. But it’s no longer the whole game, and anyone still selling you a pure SEO strategy in 2026 is working from a playbook that’s ageing faster than they’re admitting.

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is what happens when you build content for the way people actually search now: not typing keywords into Google and scrolling ten blue links, but asking questions directly to AI tools and expecting a direct answer. ChatGPT. Perplexity. Google’s AI Overviews. The search behaviour has shifted and most content strategies haven’t caught up.

The Banana Stand is built AEO-first. That means structuring content so that answer engines can read it, parse it, and serve it as a direct response to a question. SEO still matters for long-term organic discovery. AEO is what gets you into the answers that more and more people read instead of the results page.

The practical difference: SEO optimises for ranking. AEO optimises for being quoted. Both matter. The order of priority has changed. Most Substack writers aren’t optimising for either one.

The Product Layer

The free content exists to be genuinely useful on its own. Every article at The Banana Stand gives you something you can act on today without buying anything.

The product catalogue on Gumroad takes that further. Short PDFs priced between $17 and $47, each one solving a specific acute problem: cash flow gaps, client payment systems, pricing your time correctly. Not courses. Not communities. Systems you implement once and use indefinitely.

Occasionally a deeper problem warrants a deeper document: a long-form guide with templates, timelines, and worked examples that sells for considerably more. Those appear when the problem is big enough to justify the depth.

What’s Coming

The architecture behind this ecosystem goes deeper than this article describes. The relationship between content structure, search visibility, and answer engine positioning is something I’m documenting in full as a separate publication: a practical guide to building a content ecosystem that gets found in a world where the search results page is increasingly optional.

Not available yet. Subscribers hear about it first.

‘The Whole Game’ Series

I wrote three articles to act as content cornerstones of The Banana Stand. I call the topics they introduce by the tag, ‘The Whole Game.’

Here are the three:

This is the last of three articles that are content cornerstones of The Banana Stand. I call the topics they introduce by the tag, ‘The Whole Game.’

Here are the others:

One: Foundation - Before You Build Anything, Get These Four Things Right

• Thing 1 - Your Head

• Thing 2 - Your Why

• Thing 3 - Your Ethics

• Thing 4 - Your Customer

Two: Proof - You’re Not Ready Yet (Here’s What You Still Need)

• Thing 5 - Know What You’re Walking Into

• Thing 6 - Earn the Right to Charge

• Thing 7 - Know Why You and Not Someone Else

• Thing 8 - Test Before You Bet

Three: Systems - The Difference Between A Business And A Hobby Is A System

• Thing 9 - Cash Is The Only Number That Actually Matters

• Thing 10 - Visibility Doesn’t Happen By Accident

• Thing 11 - Selling Is A Habit, Not An Event

• Thing 12 - The Dip Is Real And It Will Find You

People start a business arse-backwards. They pick a product, build a website, print business cards, and then wonder why nobody’s buying.

These things are the simple mechanics of business. They come easy. But they’re not enough.

It’s the foundation, or lack thereof, that kills them.

Because there’s a phase that doesn’t look like work from the outside. I call it ‘foundation.’

No invoices. No clients. No revenue. But get it wrong and everything you build on top is unstable. I see smart, capable people pour everything into ventures that are doomed before they start, not because the market isn’t there or the timing was off, but because they skip the foundational work.

These are four foundational elements to sort before you write a single line of copy or spend a dollar on anything.

Thing 1 - Your Head

It’s exciting to look at a problem and ask, ‘what’s possible here?’ and realise you could be the solution people are looking for.

Think of the possibilities! How exciting! And off you go, dreaming about the wealth, influence and interest you could generate.

Then, that same night you lie awake while the 2am gremlins hose all over your idea. Listing, one after the other, all the things that will, for sure, trip you up.

It’s sobering, depressing even, to catalogue everything that could go wrong when you make that solution real.

The exercise sounds irrelevant. Until it’s not.

Imagine this. You’re six months in and the horror week happens. Your first big client walks on Monday. Your supplier doubles their prices Wednesday. Your business partner quits on Thursday with no warning.

How you talk to yourself in that moment determines whether you survive it. So prepare early and often.

Fear is a terrible cofounder. It makes you undercharge because you’re afraid of losing the sale. It makes you avoid difficult conversations until they become expensive or even existential threats. It makes you copy what’s already working instead of finding your own angle, because copying feels safer than standing for something unique.

The founders I see that do well aren’t fearless. They’re afraid of the same things we all are. The difference is they don’t let fear drive the decisions. They train themselves to sit with discomfort long enough to think clearly. That’s a skill. It’s learnable. But you have to decide to learn it before things go sideways, because you don’t get the bandwidth to do it during the crisis.

Thing 2 - Your Why

What’s the actual reason you’re doing this? The one you know in your guts, when you can’t get to sleep because it’s not going well.

If your answer is, ‘I want more money,’ or ‘I hate my boss,’ or ‘I want to work from the beach,’ those are surface-level. The things you mention quietly to you mates when you’re doing beers on Friday.

They’re not enough and frankly, they’re bullshit.

These reasons, and others like them, evaporate under pressure. They won’t get you through a bad quarter. Or dealing with a difficult client. Or the misery of doing your quarterly tax return.

Find something meaningful that pulls you forward when the business is pulling you apart.

They’re different for everyone. For some, it’s genuine obsession with a problem. For others it’s proving something to their dickhead neighbour who just leased a used Porsche. It could be to build something the kids can get behind, or never again kow-towing to your comb-over cardigan-wearing ex-boss.

It doesn’t have to be noble or magnanimous. Keep is to yourself, you don’t have to share it with anyone. But it has to be real for you, not borrowed from someone else’s LinkedIn post.

Thing 3 - Your Ethics

Before you talk to your very first prospect, decide exactly how you’ll behave when it’s inconvenient to be honest.

Because that moment will come. A client will ask if you can do something you’ve never done. A supplier will offer you a better margin if you don’t ask too many questions. A competitor will do something shady and it’ll work for them, at least in the short term. You’ll be tempted to follow. Everyone is.

A great business runs almost entirely on word of mouth, especially early. Word of mouth is just trust that travels. You either build it or you don’t. And here’s the thing about reputation, it doesn’t degrade slowly. It collapses immediately. One bad story told by one angry customer spreads faster than a hundred good ones, and the internet makes sure it stays there.

The question isn’t whether you’re a good person. You probably are. The question is whether you’ve decided in advance what you won’t compromise on, so you’re not making that call in the middle of a cash flow crunch when the pressure is highest and your judgement is worst.

Write it down. Seriously. A half-page that says ‘here’s what I will and won’t do.’ You don’t have to show it to anyone. But having it means you’ve made the decision once, clearly, when you were thinking straight.

Thing 4 - Your Customer

Who they are, what keeps them awake, what they’ve already tried, why it didn’t work, and what they’d pay real money to fix. Fall in love with the problem before you fall in love with your solution.

Most founders do this backwards. They come up with something they think is clever, then go looking for people who need it. Sometimes that works. Often it doesn’t, and you end up spending your time and resources selling something the market never asked for.

The businesses that get traction fast are the ones that solve a problem people already know they have. Not a problem you diagnosed for them. Not a problem they recognise if only they understood their situation better. A problem they’re actively searching for help with right now.

Talk to people before you build anything. Not to pitch them. Not to validate your idea. Just to understand what’s actually going on for them. What are they struggling with? What have they tried? What did they hate about it? What would ‘fixed’ actually look like in their life?

That conversation, done twenty or thirty times, tells you more than any market research report. And it costs nothing but time.

‘The Whole Game’ Series

This is the first of three articles that are content cornerstones of The Banana Stand. I call the topics they introduce by the tag, ‘The Whole Game.’

Here are the others:

Two: Proof - You’re Not Ready Yet (Here’s What You Still Need)

• Thing 5 - Know What You’re Walking Into

• Thing 6 - Earn the Right to Charge

• Thing 7 - Know Why You and Not Someone Else

• Thing 8 - Test Before You Bet

Three: Systems - The Difference Between A Business And A Hobby Is A System

• Thing 9 - Cash Is The Only Number That Actually Matters

• Thing 10 - Visibility Doesn’t Happen By Accident

• Thing 11 - Selling Is A Habit, Not An Event

• Thing 12 - The Dip Is Real And It Will Find You

You have a mindset centred on the way things really are. You have powerful reasons for starting your business and a good understanding of who your customer is. And you know what you will (and will not) do to lock in your success.

That’s a damn fine beginning. But there’s still a bit to do before you hang your shingle and throw open the doors.

Because there’s a second phase between ‘I want to start a business’ and ‘I am running a business.’

I call it ‘proof.’ It’s basically lining up your ducks before you spend anything by testing, in your mind and on paper, the core hypotheses of your business idea.

You think they’re self-evident. But it’s funny how sometimes, they just fall over when they’re fully thought through. Like ducks in a sideshow shooting gallery.

Most founders rush through this phase or skip it entirely. They treat preparation as paperwork, experience as optional, and launch with just the vaguest sense of what makes them different.

Then they wonder why the first year is so brutal.

Thing 5 - Know What You’re Walking Into

Preparation is more than a checklist. That’s a lie propagated by the business-in-a-box brigade. Nope. Real preparation means sitting down and thinking hard about the uncomfortable questions before someone else forces you to answer them under pressure.

What does your cash flow actually look like for the first twelve months, not the optimistic version? Who are your real competitors, not the ones you’ve dismissed because your thing is ‘different’? What does the market already pay for this kind of problem to be solved, and is that number enough to keep you solvent?

The businesses that hit their wall in year one usually see it coming. They just looked away because, you know, things will get better tomorrow.

I can’t stress this enough. Real preparation is the discipline of not shying away from the uncomfortable scenarios that could bring your business to its knees. And thinking through what you can do if they actually come to pass.

There’s value in preparation. Mike Tyson famously said, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ Yeah. Plans are like that. But their true value lies in the discipline of planning, not the plan itself.

Thing 6 - Earn the Right to Charge

I’ll put this bluntly. You can’t position yourself as a life coach at twenty-two with nothing behind you but enthusiasm. Clients pay for your judgement, and judgement comes from having been wrong enough times to know what right looks like.

You don’t need decades, but you do need enough quantifiable experience to build a credible case for why someone should trust you with their problem. A few years as an employee in your target industry. A track record of specific, measurable results. Case studies that aren’t hypothetical.

Experience means competence combined with confidence. There’s an ‘Oh, shit’ moment that hits underprepared founders when a client asks a hard question. It’s in their face. Clients know it, consciously or subconsciously.

Underprepared founders lose the unlosable deals and torpedo their reputation in the process. Before the business even gets the chance to build one.

The ones who don’t panic are the ones who spent years doing the work in someone else’s business, before starting their own. They’ve answered hard questions before. Maybe not the exact ones, but close enough.

When you’re light on experience the best answer is to be honest about the gap and close it deliberately. With intentional action. Take the job that teaches you the thing you’re missing. Consult under someone more experienced before you hang your own shingle. Do the work before you sell the work.

Thing 7 - Know Why You and Not Someone Else

You should already have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). It should never be ‘we put the customer first’ or ‘quality you can trust’ or any other corporate wallpaper that could be applied to any business in any category anywhere.

A real USP answers one specific question: Why should this particular person, with this particular problem, choose you over every other option available to them, including doing nothing?

If you can’t answer that in one or two sentences, without using the word ‘quality’ or ‘passionate,’ you don’t have a USP. And without a USP you’re a ‘me too’ business. You compete on price by default, because price is the only differentiator left when everything else looks the same. Competing on price is a race to the bottom, and someone with lower margins or deeper pockets always wins it.

Your USP lies in the overlap between what your customer desperately needs, and what you can genuinely deliver, and what your competitors either can’t or won’t do.

That overlap exists for every business. Finding it takes honesty, some customer research, and a willingness to stand for something specific rather than appeal to everyone.

Thing 8 - Test Before You Bet

The dumbest thing in business is build something nobody wants. The second dumbest thing is finding that out after you’ve spent eighteen months and your savings on it.

Testing isn’t just a startup concept. It’s applied common sense. Before you commit to a product, a price point, a positioning, or a channel, you find the smallest possible way to put it in front of real people and see what they do.

Pay attention to what they do, not what they say. They tell you your idea is great. They tell you they’d definitely buy it. They are, almost without exception, lying. It’s their laziness, not malice, that’s talking. Because saying ‘sounds interesting’ is way easier than saying ‘I wouldn’t pay for that.’

Money is truth. A waiting list with a deposit. A pre-sale with ten buyers. A landing page with a ‘buy now’ button that you actually fulfil. These are tests. They cost almost nothing and they tell you more than any amount of market research.

You don’t get to decide what the market wants. The market decides. Your job is to ask it the question as cheaply as possible, and then listen to the answer even when it’s not the one you wanted.

‘The Whole Game’ Series

This is the second of three articles that are content cornerstones of The Banana Stand. I call the topics they introduce by the tag, ‘The Whole Game.’

Here are the others:

One: Foundation - Before You Build Anything, Get These Four Things Right

• Thing 1 - Your Head

• Thing 2 - Your Why

• Thing 3 - Your Ethics

• Thing 4 - Your Customer.

Three: Systems - The Difference Between A Business And A Hobby Is A System

• Thing 9 - Cash Is The Only Number That Actually Matters

• Thing 10 - Visibility Doesn’t Happen By Accident

• Thing 11 - Selling Is A Habit, Not An Event

• Thing 12 - The Dip Is Real And It Will Find You.

The foundation is solid. You’ve done the work to prove your idea deserves to exist. Now you open the doors.

And this is where founders find out the hard way that wanting to run a business and actually running one are different things. The first two phases were mostly internal work; thinking, testing, positioning, preparing. This one is about what happens every day after you start. It’s less romantic. It’s more important.

Four things separate the businesses still operating in three years from the ones that quietly disappear. They’re not glamorous. Nobody puts them on a vision board. But get them right and you have a business. Get them wrong and you have an expensive hobby with a logo.

Thing 9 - Cash Is The Only Number That Actually Matters

Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash is reality.

You’ve heard some version of that before. Most founders nod along and then go back to watching their revenue number because it’s the big one, the exciting one, the one that sounds impressive when someone asks how the business is going. Meanwhile the cash account quietly empties and one Thursday morning you can’t make payroll or cover the supplier invoice and suddenly none of the revenue matters at all.

More businesses fail from cash flow problems than from bad ideas.

A profitable business on paper can go broke in practice if the timing between money going out and money coming in gets out of sync. A client who pays sixty days late. A tax bill you didn’t set aside for. A slow month that follows an expensive one.

Cash intelligence means knowing, at any given moment, exactly how much cash you have, exactly how much you need to cover the next thirty, sixty, and ninety days, and exactly what levers you can pull if those numbers don’t reconcile. It means separating your operating cash from your tax obligations from day one, not when the accountant asks for it. It means understanding cash velocity; how fast money moves through your business, where it slows down, and what that costs you.

Here’s the bit most people miss. Available cash keeps you solvent, obviously, but less obvious is that it determines your growth rate. A business with strong free cash moves on an opportunity when it appears. It hires before the rush. It weathers a slow quarter without the panic decisions that compromise the business down the track.

A business running on empty has no options. Every decision gets made under duress, and decisions made under duress are almost always bad ones.

Build the cash buffer before you need it. Treat it like a fixed cost, the same way you treat rent. Every week, before you pay yourself anything else, a percentage goes into a separate account and you don’t touch it. Start at ten percent. Move it to fifteen when you can. The discipline feels unnecessary right up until the moment it saves you.

Thing 10 - Visibility Doesn’t Happen By Accident

You can have the best product in your category, yet go broke in obscurity. The market doesn’t reward quality, it rewards awareness of quality. They’re different things.

Marketing is a system you run from day one, even when it feels premature, even when you only have three clients, even on the weeks when you’re too busy delivering work to think about finding more. Especially then, actually, because the feast-and-famine cycle that kills small businesses almost always traces back to marketing that only happens when the pipeline is empty.

The system doesn’t have to be complicated but it has to be consistent. One channel, worked properly, beats five channels worked sporadically. Pick the place where your customers already are and show up there with something useful, every week, without fail. Not when you feel inspired. Every week.

Thing 11 - Selling Is A Habit, Not An Event

Most founders who are good at their craft are uncomfortable with selling. They treat it as a necessary embarrassment rather than a core business function. So they undersell, or they wait to be asked, or they do a brilliant job for a client and then forget to ask for the referral or the next engagement.

Revenue generation is a system too. It’s a pipeline you fill deliberately, a follow-up process you run consistently, a conversation you get comfortable having even when it feels pushy. It never feels less pushy, by the way. You just get better at doing it anyway.

Thing 12 - The Dip Is Real And It Will Find You

Seth Godin wrote about it. Every founder who has been in business longer than two years has lived it. There is a period, sometimes several periods, where the problems accumulate faster than the wins, where the enthusiasm that carried you through the early days has worn down to something that feels closer to obligation, where you genuinely wonder whether any of this is worth it.

This is not a personal failing. It is a structural feature of building something from nothing. The dip is where most businesses stop, not because they ran out of money or customers, but because the founder ran out of will.

Personal resilience isn’t about being relentlessly positive. It’s about having a system for the bad periods the same way you have a system for cash or marketing. It means knowing your warning signs before they escalate. It means having one or two people you can be honest with about how hard it actually is. It means building recovery into the schedule rather than treating rest as something you earn after the next milestone.

The founders still in business in year five aren’t tougher than the ones who quit. They’re just better at recognising the dip for what it is: temporary, normal, and survivable.

‘The Whole Game’ Series

This is the last of three articles that are content cornerstones of The Banana Stand. I call the topics they introduce by the tag, ‘The Whole Game.’

Here are the others:

One: Foundation - Before You Build Anything, Get These Four Things Right

• Thing 1 - Your Head

• Thing 2 - Your Why

• Thing 3 - Your Ethics

• Thing 4 - Your Customer.

Two: Proof - You’re Not Ready Yet (Here’s What You Still Need)

• Thing 5 - Know What You’re Walking Into

• Thing 6 - Earn the Right to Charge

• Thing 7 - Know Why You and Not Someone Else

• Thing 8 - Test Before You Bet.

You, me, everyone - we all have a ‘banana stand.’ It’s not fancy, or unique, and it’s unlikely to put a dent in the world. But it’s your dream business. The problem, though, is that your personal banana stand isn’t quite finished yet. It’s just limping along, not growing, not shrinking, just somewhere in between. You’re confused, frustrated and angry, and you’re not sure where to go from here.

But how do you turn a not-quite-ready dream business into a real, revenue-generating powerhouse?

By taking advice from someone who’s been where you are now, figured it out, and decided to share every step of it. In this Substack newsletter, The Banana Stand.

I’m Mark, the founder of The Banana Stand. I have 40 years of business experience behind me and I know the patterns and pace of good business practice. I started The Banana Stand to help you turn your would-be-killer business into a true income-producing asset. Through the articles you read right here and the occasional, low-cost PDF - I guide you towards the the skills, systems and proven practices that turn your dream business into a real one.

The Banana Stand is for you whether your business is a one-person digital-nomad operation, a book, blog or newsletter, an ecommerce store, or a bricks-and-mortar shopfront.

Free subscribers get access to every article when it’s first published. One sharp article every Sunday, something you can actually use before the week is out.

Paid subscribers get full access to a growing archive of past Banana Stand articles, so you can dive deep on any problem, anytime. Plus, paid subscribers receive a standing 100% discount on all PDF guides.

Founder subscribers have all of this plus direct, founder-only email access to me personally so you get direct, personal answers when you need them most.

What she said. It’s true.

Welcome to the back office

If you’re new here, know this: scrolling through the feed is inefficient. You’ll find random articles about burnout mixed with technical guides on tax tactics. That’s a bad way to learn.

Your personal Banana Stand should follow a specific sequence if you intend it to be revenue-generating. You can’t optimise a business that doesn’t exist. You can’t scale a business that’s bleeding cash.

Follow this order

Phase 1: The Mindset (read these first)

Before you touch a spreadsheet, you need to kill your ego. These essays explain why your subscriber count is a trap and why we prioritize boring cash over exciting viral hits.

1. Your Subscriber Count Is A Vanity Metric

   • The premise: Why we treat subscribers as liabilities until they become customers.

   • Coming Wednesday, January 7, 0100 UTC.

2. Anatomy Of A $1,000 Mistake

   • The premise: I set money on fire so you don’t have to. A look at the Laundromat philosophy of newsletters.

   • Coming Wednesday, January 14, 0100 UTC.

Phase 2: The Infrastructure (Plumbing)

Once you accept that you’re a business, you need the tools to act like one. Don’t write another word until these systems are active.

1. The ‘Dead Inside’ Protocol

   • The system: How to ship content when you hate writing.

   • Coming Wednesday, January 21, 0100 UTC.

2. The 10-Point Cash Flow Audit (AU$12 or free for you)

   • What this is: A brutal assessment of your solvency.

   • Download it here. Free if you use the link, AU$12 if you don’t.

Phase 3: The Armory (Paid Tools)

I don’t sell subscriptions. I sell speed. You can build these tools yourself if you have 50 hours to spare. If you want to save the time, buy the tools.

• The Cash Flow Forecast Sheet (AU$36):

  • What this is: The exact Google Sheet system to calculate your Month of Death, manage your runway, estimate your Tax Drag, and calculate your true Hourly Rate. Harsh, hard data you need to know.

  • Download it here.

• The Sponsor Pitch Deck (AU$60):

  • What this is: The ugly, high-converting slide deck I use to close deals.

  • Download coming soon.

A note about contacting me

I don’t do ‘coffee chat.’ I don’t do ‘pick brain.’ If you have a specific question about a specific financial bleeding point, reply to any newsletter. Email me at admin@thebananastand.co. Leave a comment if you’re on the app. I read everything.

Now, over to you.

Most Substack advice is a pyramid scheme of hope. You read articles about how to ‘find your voice’ and ‘build a community’ from people who are only famous for telling you how to get famous.

Meanwhile, your bank account is bleeding red.

You have 400 subscribers. You have a logo you paid $200 for. You have a content calendar. But if you stop typing for two weeks, your income drops to zero. You don’t have a business; you have a demanding hobby that is slowly eating your savings.

Welcome to The Banana Stand

I am not here to teach you how to write poetry.

I am not here to help you ‘go viral’ on X.

I am the janitor and the mechanic.

I am here to fix things, and clean up the mess behind the scenes so you can actually pay your rent.

The philosophy: cash flow over clout

The internet tells you to chase Growth. The Banana Stand tells you to chase Solvency.

Growth is a vanity metric. You can’t buy groceries with ‘impressions.’ You can’t pay taxes with ‘engagement.’ The only thing that matters is the delta between the cash hitting your income account and the cash leaving your transaction account.

If you want to know how to gain 10,000 subscribers in a week, go read the other guys. If you want to know how to organise your P&L so the tax man doesn’t destroy you, stay here.

What you will get

I write about the unsexy, mechanical plumbing of the Creator Economy.

• The metrics that matter: How to extract the few hardcore numbers that tell you exactly how your business is travelling (hint - they’re NOT inside your financial statements).

• The systems: How to publish when you feel dead inside.

• The assets: How to turn your archives into digital products that sell while you sleep.

• The truth: Pinpoint the few crucial activities that make (and lose) money.

The business model (read this, it’s important)

I will never charge you for a subscription

There is no ‘paywall.’ There is no ‘premium tier.’ There are no ‘secret sections.’

I believe that gating information behind a monthly fee creates a perverse incentive to churn out filler content just to look busy.

Everything I write on The Banana Stand is free. Always will be.

How I make money

I sell tools. Checklists, spreadsheets, guides, processes, and audit protocols.

If you read an article and want to fix the problem immediately, you can buy the tool. If you want to build it yourself, you can do that too.

I give you the recipe; I sell you the Aogami knife.

Who is The Banana Stand for?

• The panic-stricken: You quit your job to write, and now the reality of health insurance is setting in.

• The accidental mogul: You have an audience, but you are still managing your finances in the Notes app on your phone.

• The realist: You know ‘there’s always money in the banana stand,’ but only if you know where to look.

Subscribe. It’s free. You get good useful stuff in your inbox, nominally once a week. Sometimes more, sometimes less.

And it might just save your dream from the financial dumpster bin.

There is a moment in every Substack creator’s business that defines their future solvency.

It isn’t when they get their first subscriber.

It isn’t when they go viral.

It’s the moment they look at their bank account, see $2,000, and decide to buy a new ergonomic chair, forgetting that $600 of that money belongs to the government and $400 is for next month’s software subscriptions.

This is ‘Financial Soup.’

Most solopreneurs operate out of a single transaction account. Revenue comes in, groceries go out, Netflix subscriptions are deducted, and client payments are received.

All to and from a single bank account.

It is a warm, simple, chaotic slurry of money. You feel rich on the 1st of the month because the balance is high, and you feel poor on the 15th because the rent hit.

You’re making decisions based on the current balance, not the available cash.

This is how businesses that are technically profitable go bankrupt. They spend their tax money on tacos and trivialities.

Be smart, right from the get-go. Spend the 15 minutes it takes to set up the three bank accounts I describe below.

The problem with ‘Profit First’

Mike Michalowicz wrote the bible on using multiple accounts for different business purposes. His book, Profit First, is mandatory reading.

But Mike wrote that book for plumbing companies with five vans and a payroll. He recommends opening five, sometimes six, distinct bank accounts: Income, Profit, Owner’s Comp, Tax, Opex, and (maybe) GST.

If you tell a writer who’s making $800 a month to open six accounts, they’ll just say ‘yeah nah’ (for the non-Australian readers, this means ‘never gonna happen’).

Nope. They won’t do it. The friction is too high. It’s too complex, and the granularity doesn’t add value.

So our Substack creator leaves things as they are. They stick with single account soup, and get crushed at tax time.

Let’s strip the system down. Your Banana Stand is not a mighty corporation; it’s a guerrilla outfit. You don’t need a financial cathedral, you need 3 (and maybe 4) buckets.

The 3 account protocol

For a Substack creator doing less than $75,000 a year, you need exactly three buckets. No more, no less. This creates just enough friction to stop you from being stupid, without enough administrative drag to make you quit.

Account 1: The Airlock (Income)

This is your reception desk. Every single dollar you earn, from Substack, from Gumroad, from freelance clients - it all lands here.

Don’t get a debit card for this account. If the bank sends you one, cut it up. This account has one job: to catch the money and hold it. It creates a psychological airlock between earning and spending. Just because the money hit the account doesn’t mean you buy the chair.

These are the rules:

1. You never spend from this account. The only way money ever leaves this account is by you logging on to your banking app and transferring it to The Vault (account 2) or Feed Bag (account 3).

2. Every Thursday, flush it out. You move (via your banking app) every cent out to those other two accounts (and no others). The balance ends up at zero.

Handy tip for Aussie readers:

Register for PayID and link it to this account. Keeps the scams away.

Account 2: The Vault (Tax)

This is the most critical account in your life. It protects you from jail and bankruptcy.

Money in The Vault is dead to you. It does not exist. It belongs to the government. You collect it and hold it for them.

These are the rules:

1. You never spend from this account. The only way money ever leaves this account is by you logging on to your banking app and transferring it to your Feed Bag account (account 3)..

2. Every Thursday, you take 30% of everything in The Airlock and move it here. No trickery, no ‘but I have deductions,’ no bargaining. If you made $1,000, you move $300.

3. At tax time - once a quarter, once a year - you transfer your calculated tax payment to the Feed Bag account and immediately pay your taxes from there.

4. Anything left over after you’ve paid your tax (there will be some, because legitimate business deductions reduce tax payable) is a bonus tax refund. Buy that chair, spend a month in the Maldives, whatever - it’s your money!

The psychological relief this provides is better than a drug. At tax time you don’t panic. You don’t lose sleep. You don’t have to hustle extra freelance work to pay for it. You just open the Vault and send the funds you’ve carefully squirrelled away.

Handy tip:

Make this account really inconvenient to withdraw from. Use a high-interest savings account at a different bank, or a term deposit, or buy into a cash ETF. You know when you need to access it (tax time), and you transfer it into your Feed Bag account before tax due date. Fast access is not essential.

Account 3: The Feed Bag (Expenses)

The remaining 70% goes here. This is your operating reality.

This is where you pay for your domain name, your hosting, your subscriptions, and anything else that is related to you running your Banana Stand.

And most importantly, this is where you pay yourself.

In the strict Michalowicz method, ‘Owner’s Pay’ and ‘Operating Expenses’ are separate. But for a newsletter writer, you are the main operating expense. Your overhead is low, so separating these two piles of cash at this stage is a complication you don’t need.

If The Feed Bag runs dry, you either stop spending or lump in some personal cash (this hurts). You don’t raid The Vault. You don’t borrow from The Airlock. You stop. You wait until you sell something else. Or you pump in extra cash.

This makes you focus on your real Banana Stand income, not your gross revenue.

The fourth bucket

I said earlier that you need three buckets.

If you report income in a country that has GST (goods and services tax) or VAT (value added tax), you may want a fourth bucket.

I’m going to double click on the Australian situation here because that’s what I’m most familiar with. But if you’re in another GST/ VAT country, it should work pretty much the same way.

If you run any business at all, the very first thing you must do is register for an Australian Business Number (ABN). It takes minutes and costs nothing. You have a choice then or any time after, to also register for GST. The choice goes away if you earn AU$75,000 or more through your ABN (you must then be GST-registered).

Earn less than AU$75,000? My suggestion is - hold off registering until you get close to that figure.

When you are registered for GST:

• You become a tax collector. You add 10% to the price of every sale, which is you collecting revenue for the government.

• You have to file a simple tax return (business activity statements, or BAS) every quarter, and pay anything that’s due.

• On the plus side, you get to credit the GST component on the supplies you buy from other businesses.

These three things add paperwork complexity, and complexity is what we all want to avoid.

You are small. Enjoy being small. Stay under the radar. Keep your banking simple, until the law forces you to complicate it.

Account 4: GST (Sales tax)

Is it really needed? Maybe not.

There are two approaches if you’re GST-registered (ignore if you’re not):

1. Set up a fourth bucket and call it GST. Before transferring money to the Vault or Feed Bag accounts, you transfer the GST component (in Australia, 10%) to the fourth bucket. Then, 30% of the remaining to the Vault and 70% to the Feed Bag. This is the Michalowicz way.

2. Stay with the three buckets and instead of 30% to the Vault, transfer 36.5%. The remainder goes to the Feed Bag. Why 36.5%? You sell for (say) $100 ex GST. But you have to add GST, so customer pays $110. You transfer $10 + $30 = $40 to the Vault. And $40 / $110 = 36.5%. Done.

You still use the Vault for tax, but now there’s enough for GST plus the tax on whatever you pay yourself. Plus you get interest! Plus you have some cash left over for an extra tax refund! Winner grinner chicken dinner!

Clean it up

If your Banana Stand money is mixed in with personal money, you’re not running a standalone business. You’re a hobbyist.

Go open the three accounts. It takes 15 minutes online. Name them: Airlock, Vault, Feed Bag.

The next time you sell a PDF for AU$36, put $10.80 in The Vault the following Thursday.

It feels ridiculous. It feels like Monopoly money.

But at tax time, when you look at that account and see $2,000 sitting there earning interest and ready for the tax man, you feel smug and safe.

That feeling is worth chasing.

P.S. Rule #1 of The Banana Stand 10 Step Cash Flow Audit: ‘Church and State Separation,’ don’t buy tacos with your business card. If your expenses are a soup of personal Netflix and business software, you cannot optimise. Separate the accounts today. And while you’re at it, use the button below to get the 10 Step Cash Flow Audit totally free (AU$12 value)!

GET THE 10 STEP CASH FLOW AUDIT

Today I surfaced a quote by Scott Berkun. Scott’s on Substack, by the way. His tag is @berkun, and he’s well worth your follow.

He wrote this in a Note back in July:

It’s clear enough, isn’t it? Write what you want to write. Everything else flows from this.

I’ll take this further. Everyone here can write, that’s the baseline. Yet not every author on Substack can write well. Unless you’ve had formal training in journalism or creative writing, chances are you need to put in big hours to get your writing skills from beginner, to acceptable, to master writer.

No criticism intended. We all follow the same path and it’s an easier path for some than for others.

Along that path you will see the advice, ‘write for your avatar.’ Your avatar is, of course, a potpourri of personalities that comprise your ideal reader. It’s a fictional profile that outlines their demographics, behaviours, motivations, pain points, and goals.

‘Successful businesses,’ you’re told, ‘use avatars to create products, services and marketing campaigns that resonate with your target market.’

The problem is, though, that your ideal reader is only ideal some of the time.

People are multidimensional. Your hotshot CEO works hard, yet Thursday nights he plays pickleball and every second Sunday he spends with the grandies. Your stay-at-home sourdough baker sings in a church choir and rides motocross every Tuesday morning.

Even you. You write on Substack and interact with others via comments and Notes. That’s your thing, your 5-9 job.

But it’s not 24/7. You are also an employee, a spouse, a parent, someone’s son or daughter, and you like pizza (but only once a week) You’re not an avatar. You’re a real person. Just like your ideal reader is a real person.

Look, avatars are fine. They are a great visualisation tool to keep your writing focused. But if you want your humanity to shine through, also write about human things. Let them know that a real live person, not some soulless and fact-based AI, assembled the words they’re reading.

Full disclaimer. I have three avatars I write to, and a niche that pretty much decides the lane I want my newsletter, The Banana Stand, to stay in.

Then, articles like this happen. They bubble up out of nowhere, and they have almost nothing to do with my niche or my target audience.

I don’t care. I write and publish anyway.

Even if my words are clumsy and there’s no revenue-generating ‘call to action’ embedded. Because I now have another 511 words out in the wild that didn’t exist a couple of hours ago.

Scott’s quote made me pause when I read it earlier today. Now I’ve been able to give it context and think it through to the point of being able to write about it coherently.

That’s a win, don’t you think?

P.S. No AI megajoules were consumed in the writing of this article.