Someone DMed me recently asking if I do coaching, or if there’s a paid tier somewhere, what the actual offer is behind all this. And I said no, there isn’t one, this is just free resources for people who are building things, which is true, but it also made me sit there afterward wondering why that’s true, because I don’t think I’d ever said it out loud like that before, I’d just been doing it.
CMH used to be a writing page. Then it was a creativity page, and then it turned into a habits page, and somewhere in the middle of all that I started noticing the algorithm seemed confused about who to show my stuff to, and for a while I genuinely blamed the algorithm for it, like it just hadn’t figured me out yet, it would catch up eventually. But I don’t think that’s what was happening. I think the algorithm was only ever as confused as I was, and it wasn’t picking up on something coming from outside, it was just reflecting the confusion I’d been putting out, because I hadn’t decided who this page was for either.
Which I think is the part people get wrong about consistency, or at least the part I got wrong. I used to think it just meant posting every day, hitting some cadence, but I think it’s really about being a consistent identity for long enough that the algorithm, or the audience, or honestly you, can lock onto who you are. I kept changing what CMH was before anyone had the chance to learn it, so of course nothing stuck.
This week I actually posted consistently on Instagram for what feels like the first time in a while, and my impressions for the month went up by about five thousand. The reels are doing well too, and the part that surprised me is that the ones doing best are just me talking straight into the camera, nothing produced, no editing tricks, only me sitting there saying the thing I wanted to say. So apparently I didn’t need the production value I thought I needed, I just needed to show up.
But if I’m honest, the numbers aren’t really what’s kept me going, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. What’s actually been motivating me is this small group of people I’ve been building with on X, people who are also building things in public, and we mostly just watch each other’s process, see what someone’s working on that day. Sometimes it’s a real update, sometimes it’s me procrastinating out loud instead of doing the thing I was supposed to be doing, and either way it still counts, because it’s keeping me in the habit of making something instead of nothing. There’s no number for that on any dashboard. But it’s the thing that got me through the weeks I wasn’t posting anywhere else.
So when I say the metrics don’t matter, I don’t fully mean it, because five thousand impressions is a real number and I’m not going to pretend I don’t notice it. What I mean is that the metric I track isn’t the one on a dashboard, it’s whether I made the thing, whether I documented it honestly, whether someone going through something similar found it useful. Idea, build it, make it, document it. Somewhere along the way I stopped trying to figure out how to get the most eyes on the page, and just started making what I thought was worth making, trusting that whoever needed it would find it.
Which brings me back to that DM. This was never a funnel with a free layer on top and the good stuff hidden behind a paywall. What you’re getting here is what I actually did, including the parts that didn’t work, including however long I spent not knowing what this page was even for. That’s the whole thing, if you can call it that. It’s free because why not. We’re all basically figuring out how to build projects together.