You Probably Don’t Need a Podcast

We're in a Post-Social era now, right? So maybe I should start a podcast. Or go all-in on Substack. Or build a community. But apparently in-person is everything again — so maybe I should prioritise IRL events. Or is it all about the Cosy Web? Or should I double down on short-form while it still works?

I just don't want to miss the next wave.

I hear some version of this almost every week. And I understand it completely. When you're building something, when you're trying to grow, when you're watching other people seem to crack the code on platforms you haven't even properly started yet — the anxiety is real.

But here's what I want to say clearly: the biggest challenge facing founders right now isn't execution. It's noise.

The Roadmap Illusion

We are living through the proliferation and acceleration of trends at a speed that makes clear thinking almost impossible. Social-first. Post-Social. The Cosy Web. The IRL renaissance. Short-form. Long-form. Newsletters. Memberships. Communities. Every channel has a case study. Every format has a guru. Every week brings a new signal about where attention is going and what smart founders should be doing about it.

And we're watching entire business roadmaps play out in public. Podcast → Community → Course → IRL events → Newsletter → Membership. It looks strategic. It photographs beautifully. It generates a lot of content about generating content.

It often isn't strategy at all. Or it is — but for a very different starting point, a very different business model, a very different ambition. The mistake is watching someone else's roadmap and treating it as a template.

What the channel conversation is really about

Here's the thing no one wants to say out loud: if your thinking wasn't landing on Instagram, it probably won't suddenly set the world on fire on Substack. If the ideas weren't cutting through in one format, switching formats isn't the answer. And for the love of god, you almost certainly don't need to start a podcast.

This isn't cynicism. It's a diagnosis.

Because what looks like a channel problem is almost always a positioning problem. And there is no faster way to burn through time, money, energy and headspace than to keep solving the wrong problem with increasing sophistication.

Channels are distribution. Positioning is power. The channel gets your thinking in front of people. But if the thinking isn't distinctive — if there's no clear, differentiated point of view at the centre of it — the channel is just amplifying the noise. More of it, faster, in more formats.

What actually works

Every format works. Every channel has genuine potential. IRL is powerful. Substack has built serious businesses. Communities create remarkable things. Podcasts — the right ones, for the right founders — can be transformative.

But only if they're amplifying something clear.

The founders who build real authority — the ones whose content actually compounds, whose reputation actually grows, who start to own the territory they're operating in — aren't the ones who found the right channel. They're the ones who had something genuinely original to say and then made considered choices about how to say it, to whom, and where.

The sequence matters. Strategy first. Then activation. Then channel. Then scale.

What we're building at The Wild Ones — the thinking behind what I'm calling the Playground — starts from that premise. Not tactics masquerading as strategy. Not roadmaps borrowed from businesses with different ambitions and different starting points. But a clear, expansive strategic position that then opens up into a genuine range of choices about how to build the brand world around it.

The question isn't which channel. The question is: what do you actually stand for, and is it specific enough, interesting enough and differentiated enough to be worth amplifying at all?

Get that right and the channels take care of themselves.

Get it wrong and you can post every day for the next three years and still feel like you're invisible.