Most businesses like ours use social media to grow their reach & scale naturally. We don’t use social media at all: not LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or whatever they’re calling Twitter this week. Instead, we run a newsletter that has steadily grown since 2012, and we put our heads down and work.

On the one hand, disengagement from social media absolutely hurts our business. We could probably find quite a nice following there. We could meet cool humans there. We love cool humans! So this is tragic.

On the other, we very strongly believe that we must exist in right relationship to software, and that doing so absolutely must involve remunerating the creators of that software for their hard work. There is a direct throughline between the flourishing of unpaid social media and our current burning world.

And that’s not the kind of world we want to live in! It’s not the kind of system we want to support. Much like why we never advertise or work for free, we would rather do what’s right and resist all of that, even if it means we’re leaving a lot of money & comfort on the table.

Instead, we do many specific things that help us exist in right relationship to software:

• We code our website ourselves without relying on any other platform or framework.
• We write predominantly in prose, as if you’re here in the room with me.
• The vast majority of our work is in plain text & simple formats that will survive over many decades.
• We run a mailing list. We do so through a fellow independent business – one which eventually became our client.
• We grow organically, through word of mouth.

In disengaging from social media, we’re not only taking a sociopolitical stance. We come to rely on you to become so excited by our work that you feel compelled to tell the world about it.

And it seems to work. Draft has been profitable since its founding, and we live simply & comfortably – knowing we did our small part to make the world better.

— Nick Disabato