Engagement farming was soul sucking

Lessons learned from social media marketing & reharnessing my founder mojo

In April, I launched a major update that introduced a new content marketing strategy: Wanderly can now create specific books and characters! I then turned to social media to leverage these new capabilities and to find a golden ticket for user growth and product-market fit. I leaned in for five months and learned a lot, but ultimately, it left me with little return on my efforts, and it drained my founder mojo… so I had to stop.

Learning to Feed the Machine

I started by posting every day. I knew this wasn’t efficient, but I also knew that it was a great forcing function to learn and build my marketing muscles. It also helped me learn what I didn’t know, so when I finally talked to friends who work in social media and took this class, I knew what questions to ask.

During this time, I learned a few things:

• Definitely add captions, esp. captions that work well for a thumbnail.

• Extremely short video (3-5 sec) increases total views but makes it harder to get an idea across.

• Constructed images (where I packaged up my assets into posts) didn’t do well for me. All text slideshows of provocative questions & answers worked better.

• I could never get “trending audio” to work.

• Making AI videos kind of poisoned the algorithm against me on multiple platforms.

The hardest lesson to learn was about myself. I’m a bit of a perfectionist. I’d also spent over a decade at Google pursuing polish, and was rewarded for it. Social media, especially in short-form video to parents, wants the complete opposite. It wants raw content that speaks to core needs and emotions.

At first, I bought some new outfits, did my hair, and put on makeup. I sought out tools to make my camera angles better. It was all armor as I did this incredibly uncomfortable act of filming myself for the benefit of the algorithm.

During this time, I also tried to study other content creators. Becca Bloom, almost a parody of polish, exploded earlier this year. I tried to study her and quickly learned that she juiced her following with a content team and giveaways. I followed a lot of mom influencers and tried some of their tactics, but didn’t feel comfortable with the way many of them leveraged images of their kids for content. My favorite creator I found was Jorge Rivera-Herrans, the creator of EPIC: The Musical¹. I loved his goofy enthusiasm for his own art, but he was comfortable with being on camera in a way that felt alien to me. Overall, it felt like every shoe I tried on didn’t fit.

As I produced more content, I learned more sophisticated tactics, but that feeling of discomfort never faded. I learned:

• Posting every day doesn’t matter (ironically, given my starting point).

• A good hook (first 3 secs) + the right hashtags (aim for 10K - 100K posts per hashtag) is where the game is at.

• There are lots of tools that aim to help you, but they can’t put lipstick on a pig.

• You can use separate TikTok accounts & Instagram Trials to trial what the algorithm likes, and then post to your followers (it increases the quality of your feed and doesn’t poison the algorithm against your main account).

• If a post isn’t doing well, don’t be afraid to delete it, tweak it, and try again.

I trudged along with roughly 100 views per post (what you get for free on TikTok), and I continued to learn from the scraps of engagement I got, even though I hadn’t found the golden ticket yet.

Thumbnails of my early TikTok posts. The whole family got involved (thanks to my husband, Tyler, and my youngest daughter, Selena)

Getting Raw for the Algorithm

I got my first “aha” moment when, on a whim, I just did a selfie video while leaning over my kitchen counter. The background was just my ceiling. I put a controversial article headline as an overlay and tried to get sassy. Result: I finally started getting non-friend views and likes.

In my next post, I took things a step further. I posted a confessional + audience question about a Wanderly story that made Alanna, my eldest daughter, cry.

I wasn’t trying to make her cry. I take story requests from friends, and a mom of two boys asked me for a story about affirming boyhood without reinforcing stereotypes. After a lot of noodling, I decided to sidestep stereotypes entirely and focus on a story about identity; ultimately, at the end of the day, we are our choices. I created a contemplative-prose quest where the reader chooses which path to take, how to help a small creature in need, how to overcome a challenge, and how to handle a lost object. The story ends with a summary of each choice and affirms who they are.

When I tried the story with Alanna, something unexpected happened. When her character lost her magic wand in the story, she started to cry. I quietly held her for a few minutes, and then Alanna shared that she’d recently lost a Pikachu card at Pokémon club. She cried a little more, and we had a conversation. Overall, I think the story created some space for her to process her emotions with support. If it hadn’t been for Wanderly, I’m not sure it would have come up, and she would have had to process her feelings differently and alone.

No parent likes to make their child cry, but I also knew that this kind of thing was exactly what the algorithm wanted: authenticity, emotions, and a request for advice —“Should I make the story less sad?” I immediately recorded myself and added a survey to capture people’s attention before they scrolled away.

Instead of getting the average 100 views with a couple of likes, this post got 20x the views and 52 comments. After months of trying to get engagement, it was so fun to finally talk to strangers about what I was building.

In the following weeks, I tried to record myself unscripted any time I felt emotional about Wanderly. I created several more posts that got 10x the usual engagement. But I felt like I was “always on” trying to mine my or my family’s emotions for content that would appease the algorithm. It was exhausting.

Thumbnails of TikTok posts once I started to find my groove. Note how the one AI-video post totally tanked.

Then Gemini Storybook launched…

The Turning Point

I was on vacation with my family when a friend pinged me the blog post. At first, I was worried about Google entering my space, but that quickly switched to horror at Google’s lack of care for child safety in the feature. As a mom and someone who has spent a lot of time in the children’s storytelling and literacy field, I had A LOT of feelings about this launch. It fit all my criteria for great social media content: I was angry, raw, and Google’s missteps were salacious.

I stayed up late and feverishly organized my thoughts. The plan was to write the post, then create social media posts for each point on TikTok and Instagram, and then determine where to focus based on the traction. After I published my last Substack, another friend encouraged me to write an op-ed. Because the post was doing so well (in the end, it reached 90K people), I spent several days polishing the hell out of my Storybook critique and submitted it to the New York Times. Pressing that button was one of the more nerve-racking things I’ve done recently.

The New York Times Op-Ed system tells you to wait 72 hours, so I waited and ruminated. I didn’t sleep well. I didn’t post anything to social media in case it jeopardized my chances of getting published. I think the exercise was overall a good one (it really forced me to articulate what Wanderly is about and what I think AI is and isn’t good for), but it left me feeling extremely spent. When the NY Times ultimately didn’t publish my piece, I began to question Wanderly’s future².

Conflating the NY Times OpEd’s editorial choices with my business success + feeling so down caused some introspection. I had spent the last five months constantly thinking about my appearance and camera angles, trying to come across as unpolished (but still push my agenda), trying to feed the social media machine, facing algorithm rejection, and ultimately, I got very little out of what I put in. Wanderly is only going to succeed if I can stay happy, and my current tactics weren’t making me happy.

Regaining My Founder Mojo

But there was a thing that was making me happy. Quietly over the summer, I’d also been talking to real people in my community.

Here’s the Wanderly highlight of my summer: A preschool teacher (currently my youngest daughter’s teacher and formerly my eldest daughter’s teacher) had offered to give me feedback on Wanderly. Not only was she interested as an early childhood educator, but she was also interested because Wanderly might help her son, who was about to start Kindergarten. I crafted My First Day of Kindergarten, shared it with her, and got the most amazing testimonial:

As a preschool teacher experiencing firsthand the different ways change can impact children, and as a mom of a neurodivergent child transitioning to kindergarten, the kindergarten story has been a super helpful tool to prepare my son for this change. While we build the story together, even for my “non-verbal” son who is expressing a few words, he was able to express the part that was more difficult for him about this new transition BECAUSE of how the book interaction interested him.

It gave me the information I needed to know what he was most anxious about and where I can reassure him more, it was a way for my son to be heard and express his feelings through the fun of storytelling. This helps children prepare visually for a new transition, and while children are resilient, these types of stories can help them to know what to expect, give them security and reassurance to be happy and thrive.

- Maestra Ana

This! This is the reason I built and should continue to build Wanderly! When I thought about quitting in the days after Gemini Storybook launched, I thought about Maestra Ana’s words and the kids who might still benefit from Wanderly, like her son. I realized that getting random likes from a stranger might be nice, but it wasn’t going to translate into the feeling I got when I read Maestra Ana’s words.

So I decided to pivot my strategy. I decided last month to step away from social media and pursue a new go-to-market strategy focused on improving my local community, and using that to fuel future growth (and I’ll tell you what that means in my next post). It’ll be slower, but more meaningful, and ultimately give me the strength to keep going.

As a closing thought: As individuals, I think many of us have learned (or are still constantly learning) not to get swept up in the social media comparison game as we view carefully curated posts from our peers and influencers. I just don’t think I realized how much I was getting swept up in an entrepreneurial version of that, seeing other small businesses talk about their success and thinking that the best way I could grow Wanderly was by building a social media presence. It’s fast and fun if it’s the right growth strategy for a business and their team, but it’s not for Wanderly and me.

1. My family fell in love with the musical + animatics for months. 10/10 would recommend. This was the animatic that started our rabbithole journey.

2. I’m not sure if it had anything to do with my piece being chosen or not, but I submitted my op-ed at the same time as this piece. It’s a rough read, but it's important to the discourse about AI and mental health.