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Tekton Social

Project Status:

ABANDONED

Tekton Social Branding

Tekton Social was my first attempt at building a business that wasn’t just directly freelance. Ironically, it was still very much just freelance work. It just so happened that this particular flavor of freelance work was centered around ”social media management“.

oh wow. Yes, I know. Very different. Much business value.

I had very high hopes for Tekton Social, but as things sometimes go, I found that it conflicted with some core values. Namely:

For these reasons, I quit, and I’m quite happy with that decision.

I could not measure the ROI of my work

Social media management, you might be shocked to know, is notoriously difficult to measure as far as ROI is concerned. You pay someone a few hundred bucks per month to add photos, write copy, think about long-term strategy for “connecting with your core fans”. But in truth—there’s very little way to measure that impact. Anyone can throw ad dollars at the wall, and a few can optimize an ad campaign. But if you’re paying this companies hundreds or even thousands of dollars every single month to do that, what would the result have been if you did it yourself? It’s a chore at best, but does it bring in revenue? For 99% of businesses out there, who don’t have the extra capital to burn it’s a cost-center, not a profit-center. So if I could not measure how valuable my work was—how could I charge based on that?

I wanted to solve a real problem, with real results

The companies I worked with to manage social media weren’t brands, they weren’t influencers. They were small, mom & pop shops that were on social media “because they’re supposed to be on social media”. Don’t get me wrong, you should have the basic of a schedule, an “About us” page perhaps, and maybe even post photos of some of the reasons people pay you money (i.e. what do you do?). But why would you pay someone a few hundred bucks a month to do that for you? That’s the questions I could not answer. It was a false problem being peddled by other social media managers, and I just couldn’t justify doing it.

The problem lies somewhere between the promises and reality. Ideally, sure, your ad campaigns should beef your business up. But in reality, it’s VERY hard to measure real results with ad campaigns. It’s next-to-impossible to know if your campaign was affected by seasonality, copy, images, ad-targeting, or perhaps you just sell a shitty product that no one is interested in buying. So we’re basically throwing darts.. blind-folded. And the business owner is holding the target with their hands up to avoid taking a dart to the face.. which.. eventually they will.

I do not want to make the world tangibly worse

I believe whole-heartedly that social media is a blight upon this world and that it is not in your best interested to use it. So why would I spend my precious time trying to help people spend more time on it? Truthfully, I hadn’t fully considered that when I started the business. I was certain that I’d be helping business owners improve their businesses—producing tangible results that helped them feed their families, pay their employees, and build a better world. A very idealistic picture. Unfortunately, reality was not at all like that. So I quit.

Conclusion

For these reasons, I found it very hard to justify the prices that would’ve kept Tekton Social in business. I could still do the work for a loss, and help these business owners turn around truly abysmal online presences, but I would not make any money doing it.

As with all things on this site, my opinions may change in the future. But for now, I’m very happy with this decision. It has allowed me to focus on high-leverage projects that actually utilize skills that I enjoy such as software engineering.

I still work with small business owners, but now I leverage my writing, my software engineering skills, and my network to bring increased value to small business owners.