Everyone sees a founder go viral and thinks that’s the way to do it. Post every day, follow the trends, grow your audience, and customers will come.

So they start posting. Nothing happens. They post more. Still nothing.

Then they quietly give up and blame themselves for not being “consistent enough.”

But here’s the thing.

The problem usually isn’t the content. It’s what they expect social media to actually do.

I recently read an article about two teenage founders, and what they’re doing with social media is almost the opposite of what most people tell you to do.

The first one, Michael Satterlee, sells a “tactical reload can holder,” basically a clever can cooler. He posted one low-production video of himself chugging a Dr. Pepper and reloading another into the holder.

No ad budget, no big plan. That video hit 50 million views on Instagram and now the business brings in up to $300,000 a month.

Okay, so that’s the viral story. But the more interesting one is the other guy.

Kirk McKinney and his brother Jacob run Junk Teens, a junk-removal company in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. They brought in about $3 million in 2025.

And what surprised me was they didn’t even start posting on social media until their third year in business.

In Kirk’s own words, not mine: “It was never a part of the foundation. It was always just like a cherry on top, like steroids for the business.”

They built the business the old-fashioned way first. Get to the job quickly, take every job, put the money back into the business.

Social media came later, and when it did, they weren’t even using it to find customers.

They used it to recruit employees.

Kirk said one of the hardest parts of running a blue-collar business is finding people, the team.

So instead of chasing customers on Instagram and TikTok, they used those platforms to attract young workers by showing the job actually looks fun. YouTube played the same role. Facebook was the only one actually bringing in customers.

Same business. Four platforms. Two completely different goals.

That’s the part most beginners skip. They pick a platform, maybe the only one they like, and post the same content everywhere, then wonder why it doesn’t convert.

The actual question isn’t “how do I grow on social media.” It’s “what specific problem does social media solve for my business right now?”

Sometimes it’s brand awareness. Sometimes it’s recruiting. Sometimes it’s building trust before someone buys.

And sometimes, at least early on, social media isn’t the most important thing at all.

If you’re just starting out and not sure whether social media should even be on your list right now, I wrote a full breakdown of how to grow a business without it.

​Read this first before you decide where to focus your time and effort.

Figure out what your business actually needs first. Then pick the platform that solves that specific problem.

Cheers,

Minosh

P.S. If you have a WordPress site, I built a free social sharing plugin. No tracking scripts, no subscriptions. Give Sharelet a try.