A few weeks ago, I watched Jessi Jean blow up on Instagram. If you haven’t heard of her, she is the creator behind the mega viral Yap Challenge. Back in November 2025, she started a brand new Instagram account and committed to posting short form content every single day. After gaining hundreds of thousands of followers, she launched the formal challenge to teach her audience her strategy and recently celebrated a multi million dollar launch.
I’ll admit, I wanted a piece of that! Not necessarily the Instagram success, but I did want to get as many eyes as possible onto the wellness app that I have been building. So I decided to give posting daily “yap” videos a solid shot.
Chile, I lasted about two weeks before I quickly realized that wasn’t for me!
In between building a tech company, parenting, caregiving, and everything else that demands my attention on a daily basis, I don’t have the capacity for it. And I’m willing to bet you don’t either.
Here’s the thing, this isn’t really a new strategy. Absolutely no shade to Jessi Jean because what she has been able to accomplish is ICONIC, but the idea of talking to the camera everyday isn’t necessarily a new concept. Creators have been pushing volume for years. What’s changed is that platforms like Instagram started rewarding users with monetary incentives for posting more, so now our feeds are flooded with everyone sharing their opinions, their expertise, and their daily lives through short form clips, all chasing the same algorithm.
But there’s a real problem here that I feel not a lot of people are aware of.
So many of us are spending so much time trying to create more and grow more that we don’t realize it’s stressing us straight into burnout. And worse, I think the constant push to create more has forced us to neglect actually building relationships with the audience we already have.
Which, if I’m being honest, was the whole reason most of us became creators in the first place.
We didn’t start this to become content machines. We started this because we wanted to connect with people and to have a space to freely express our creativity.
Trying to fit yourself into a posting strategy you don’t have the capacity to maintain might actually be the reason your content isn’t converting the way you hoped.
You can’t build trust with someone when you’re too depleted to actually show up as yourself.
I want to be clear, I’m not saying daily posting doesn’t work. At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game, and the more you post, the more likely you are to get in front of more people. But it makes me question if that type of strategy is actually realistic for someone with no team? Even Jessi Jean recently said she needed to take time off from posting, which tells you something about how sustainable that pace actually is, even for someone whose strategy is working.
Here’s what I want to push back on.
Do you actually need to go wider in order to build a successful business? Or could that same energy be better spent building a product people genuinely want to use, and building real relationships with the people who already trust you?
Have you heard of the 100 true fans concept? It’s built off Kevin Kelly’s original 1,000 true fans framework, and it essentially argues that if you have 100 people who trust you enough to invest in your work, that’s all you actually need for a successful business.
I think short form content has made it harder to build those kinds of relationships. It’s great for discovery. It’s great for getting in front of new people. But it doesn’t have the depth needed to build real community, and community is what actually sustains you long term.
So how do you go deeper instead of wider?
I wholeheartedly believe the answer is long form content.
Short form is constantly thrown at us from every direction, which means it rarely gets the space to hold real weight. Long form gives you room for storytelling, for nuance, for something your audience can actually walk away with. There’s only so much impact you can make in 90 seconds.
Long form should be your anchor. Short form is what captures attention and points people back to it.
And yes, creating strong long form content takes more time upfront. But more and more creators are proving the results are worth it.
Take Lenny Rachitsky. He’s built a million dollar publication through his Substack, Lenny’s Newsletter, along with an accompanying podcast. His Instagram is nothing but clips repurposed from his podcast interviews, pointing people back to the long form work.
Colin and Samir built an entire media company from one YouTube channel, and they were recently in a Lexus commercial because of it.
And one of my favorites, Emma Gannon, has built a thriving writing career without ever needing to rely on chasing social media growth.
I genuinely believe the creators and founders who last are the ones who commit to long form content, not the ones chasing whatever the platform is rewarding this month.
Which is exactly why I’ve made a change in how I’m showing up online.
I’m focusing on Substack and YouTube as my main platforms going forward. Not because depth is trendy right now, but because it’s the only way I know how to actually build a relationship with you. And if I want to help you finally break the cycle of burnout and make rest a daily priority, that starts with us actually having real conversations, not me throwing content at you and hoping something sticks.
The older I get, the less appealing keeping up with every social media trend and algorithm change becomes. I’ll still show up on Instagram, but I won’t be pouring my energy into chasing “what works” anymore.
This is actually the same philosophy I’ve built DEW around.
I’m not trying to build a wellness company that serves everyone. There are more than enough of those around. I’m building it for the women who are done chasing burnout as proof of hustle and are ready to actually make rest a daily priority. If 100 women trust DEW enough to use it, to actually build it into their lives, that matters more to me than 10,000 people who downloaded it once and forgot about it.
DEW is a wellness and burnout prevention app for exhausted women entrepreneurs, and we’re launching in September! You can now join over 100 other women entrepreneurs on the waitlist!
If depth is what you’re actually looking for too, I’d love to have you in our space!
I just launched a new series over on YouTube! The UnHustle is where I’m documenting my journey to becoming a wellness tech founder. In this first episode, I’m sharing how severe burnout led me to shutting down my entire business, how the year I spent healing led me to building DEW, and my hopes for the future!
Subscribe to the show on YouTube! New episodes drop on Sundays.
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