🪤 3 Traps of an Insta-Bae Business & How to Avoid Them

Amelia [00:00:01] [Sparkly synth music begins to play, overlapping with the introduction to the episode] Welcome to Off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:00:08] [Music continues to play as Melissa Kaitlyn Carter begins to sing] Let's go, off the grid. Okay! Let's go, off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go, off the grid.

Amelia [00:00:24] [Singing fades out but synthy sounds continue] Have you ever wished that you could have a successful business without social media? Well, you're in luck. I'm Amelia Hruby, writer, speaker, and founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio.

Amelia [00:00:34] On this show, I share stories, strategies, and experiments for growing your business with radical generosity and energetic sovereignty. Download the free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig. That's b-y-e-i-g and join us in doing it all Off the Grid.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [00:00:56] [Music gets louder as Melissa Kaitlyn Carter sings again] Let's go, off the grid. Okay! Let's go, off the grid. Okay! I know that you want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go, off the grid [music fades out].

Amelia Hruby:

Hello, and welcome or welcome back to off the Grid, a podcast for small business owners, creatives entrepreneurs, freelancers artists, writers, and influencers who want to leave social media without losing all your clients or your income or your creative work.

Amelia Hruby [00:01:34]:

I'm Amelia Hruby. I am your host and fellow explorer on this journey of doing business in alignment with our values and free of the influence of social media algorithms. If you're new to the show, I want to make sure you know about the free resource I created just for you. It's called the Leaving Social Media Toolkit, and it includes a five step plan for leaving any social platform, my list of 100 ways to share your work without social media and a creative marketing experiments database to help you plan quarterly marketing experiments that grow your audience, nurture your community, and sell your offerings. You can get all of that for free at softersounds.studio/byeig. And if you've already got the Leaving Social Media Toolkit, you are in the cool kids club of over a thousand people who've claimed the resource and, at the very least, thought about the ways that their business can engage with social media differently. Whether you're leaving social media or not doesn't really matter to me. I'm happy to have you here listening to the show and downloading the Leaving Social Media Toolkit.

Amelia Hruby [00:02:52]:

Frankly, it's just a great marketing resource that will help empower you to make your own choices around marketing and to have a little less know. Daddy Zuck, Mark Zuckerberg, Mr. Meta, Elon Musk himself, and the founders of all of these other social media platforms in your head, whispering that you have to be there when you're making your marketing calendar or when you're not making a marketing calendar and maybe think you should be, but instead are just scrolling through and then haphazardly throwing something up on Instagram. I've been there. There's no judgment. But the reason I make this podcast is to help you do things a little differently. So before I dive into today's episode, which is going to be about the three traps of an Insta-bae business and how to avoid them.

Amelia Hruby [00:03:39]:

Before we get there, I just want to remind you that if you're listening live, The Refresh is happening in a few weeks in less than two weeks, in fact. And I would love to have you join us for my three workshop series, where we will refresh your relationship with social media and chart a new algorithm free path forward for your business. How will we do that? Well, over the course of three days, we'll begin by releasing any fear you might have around marketing without social media. I'll be joined by podcast guest and my dear friend and collaborator, Grace Allerdice to do some energetic work and visualizations around facing our business fears and stepping into the future with energetic sovereignty. Then we will identify your Big Three, or the Three C's, as I like to think of them. Your core offers, core channels, and core collaborators that will help set your business up for success in the season ahead. And on our third day in our third workshop, we will make a beautiful map of your business ecosystem that connects your marketing, your messaging and your offerings or products such that you see how everything is intertwined. Interrelated and interdependent in a way that allows you to channel your energy, your effort, your attention to the places that you want and need to in the fall.

Amelia Hruby [00:05:04]:

We've got a great group signed up already, and I'd really love to have you with us when we kick things off on August 22. So go ahead and head to the link in the show notes to sign up to get all those workshops and recordings and a discord community for only $99. It's going to be a great time and I can't wait to see you there.

So now that I've told you how we can hang out together later this month, let's go ahead and dive into today's episode on the three traps of an Insta-bae business and how to avoid them.

Okay. I feel like the first thing I need to do when I talk about an Insta-bae business is define Insta-bae, because I'll be honest, I definitely was not familiar with this term and did not know what it means until I was reading Jenny O'Dell's book Saving Time earlier this spring. And in that book, she introduced me to this term “Insta-bae,” where she says, I'm quoting here in 2017, the term Insta-bae, a word that combines Instagram and haeru, which means to shine, originated in Japan as an adjective to describe something that would perform well on Instagram. She goes on to cite a study that talks about how millennials were choosing their travel destinations based on Instagrammability or their Insta-bae qualities.

Amelia Hruby [00:06:25]:

But I think that for me, my mind immediately went to business. To me, an Insta-bae business is a business that looks great online, specifically on Instagram. Of course, that's kind of built into the phrase a business that looks great on Instagram. But I'm thinking about it a little more broadly. A business that looks great online is an Insta-bae business. Or a business that is designed specifically to look great online is an Insta-bae business.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself—Amelia, I don't care if my business looks great on Instagram. It's really not that important to me. I don't need it to look amazing online, whatever. But what I would also say to you is that if you are on social media, you are being influenced by these Insta-bae business traps, because the messaging of the Insta-bae business is showing up in the content you consume and in the other businesses that you interact with and that you see being successful on social media.

So I noticed as I was working on this episode that some of these Insta-bae business traps are even in my internal monologue, even though I haven't been on Instagram for over two years, they're still in there. And it comes from really, I think, the way that just the influencer model in general spreads around online business and tells all of us that there are certain things that are important for having a successful business that, in fact, I think may not matter that much at all.

So this episode is for all of us who've been impacted by online business influencers, whether we feel like we're concerned with running an Instabate business or not. So this is what we're going to unpack today in this episode on the three traps of an Insta-bae business. I'm going to talk about what I see happen when people who are very online or who have grown followings or businesses on Instagram specifically, but also social media more generally — what happens when you try to grow a business from that place and then perhaps eventually want to disentangle yourself from that business.

So let's walk through these traps one at a time. I'll tell you what the three are before we go into each one.

The first trap of an Insta-bae business is I need to have X number of followers before I can have a business. That is a thought that has probably run through many of our minds, and we'll unpack it in a moment.

The second trap of an Insta-bae business is that your success is measured by vanity metrics. Talk about what those are and go deeper into that.

And then the third trap of an Insta-bae business is that your pricing is determined by your follower count how many followers you have specifically, that the more followers you have, the more valuable your offerings are and the more you can charge.

We'll go through each of those one at a time, and then at the end, I'll talk a little bit about some of the ways to avoid these traps and hopefully run a business that feels better to you.

Okay, back to trap number one. I need to have X number of followers before I can have a business. So in my mind, one definition of an influencer is a person who gets paid to recommend products and who makes a living off of either paid sponsorship or affiliate payouts for selling certain products. But I think in the era of Insta-bae businesses, in the era where every influencer is a business owner is in and of themselves a business, I think this influencer model also includes most any position where you need to have a certain number of followers before you can sell something. That thing in the traditional influencer model is someone else's product. But I think in the Instagram influencer model, that thing might be a course, it might be a painting, it might be a book proposal.

Amelia Hruby [00:10:22]:

The trap is this way of thinking that I need to have this many followers before I can sell what I want to sell, before I can have this business that I want to have. And so whether you're thinking this internally or being told this externally, if the first step of your business is to grow your following, you are likely going to end up in this Insta-bae business trap. And let me tell you, this is where my heart goes out to everyone out there who wants to get a book deal, because so often, myself included, what I was told is that you need to have a certain number of followers in order to get a book deal.

And that is the trap of the Insta-bae business. It's the trap of this new influencer model where our follower count comes before our creative output or before our business offering. So that's trap number one.

Amelia Hruby [00:11:27]:

Trap number two. The second trap of an insta-bae business is that your success is measured by vanity metrics.

So to me, a vanity metric is a metric that looks really good, but perhaps doesn't mean a whole lot or doesn't have the impact that you desire it to have. So there are so many different metrics of success out there in our lives, in our businesses, on social media. The primary metric is follower count with podcasting, it's downloads, with newsletters, it's subscribers. And all of these metrics are helpful in their own way and flawed in their own way. Sometimes they can be vanity metrics, sometimes they can be really meaningful metrics.

But the thing about all of these metrics is they're all marketing metrics. And I think that in our business, two of our most important metrics are always going to be revenue and profit. And those are not marketing metrics. They're sales metrics. Revenue is how much money has your business brought in, and profit is how much is left after expenses.

So if you don't know how much money you bring in aka your revenue, or how much more you make than you spend aka your profit, then somewhere along the way you've fallen into this insta-bae business trap off just looking at vanity metrics and measuring your success by your vanity metrics, and it may feel great to get those numbers up. Let me tell you, it felt really good when Off The Grid crossed 30,000 downloads recently. I was like, Hell yeah, it gave me such a boost. I felt so good about it. But at the end of the day, what I'm more interested in is how many tickets I've sold to The Refresh or how many people have bought a coaching package with me, because those are the metrics that are helping me make sure that all my work in my business supports me financially.

Amelia Hruby [00:13:12]:

Now, does everything you're doing need to support you financially? No, but you'll hear me talk about in a second, then it just might not be a business endeavor. And so for a trap of an insta-bae business, the trap is that your success is measured solely or mostly by vanity metrics.

And I'd say the other thing to mention here is that you may just not be looking at metrics at all. And that is, I think, a different sort of trap for a business owner that, in my mind, could be due to many different factors. I often think of just some avoidant tendencies that might live within us to not look at our metrics at all.

And I think that's also where social media can really get its hooks in us a little bit, because the follower count is such a prominent metric, particularly in an Instagram profile, right? The placement at the top of the profile really puts that metric in your face. So even if you're somebody who traditionally avoids metrics or doesn't like to look at your revenue or isn't really up to date on what your profit is, you're still seeing that metric of follower count if you're on Instagram. And so you might start to tap your success more into that metric than into other metrics just because it's so in your face. And that is definitely an insta-bae business trap.

Amelia Hruby [00:14:23]:

Okay, let's go to our third trap. The third trap of an insta-bae business is that your pricing is determined by your follower count. This, to me, is all about social currency. So with this trap, you might feel like you can't charge much money if you don't have a lot of followers, because in your mind, the follower count gives you credibility. And so if your follower count is low, then you don't have a lot of credibility, and you can't charge very much. And this often leads to setting your prices really low in a way that will never actually reach your goals or your desires for how your business can support you financially. I see way too many people who tell me that they want to be self employed or they want to replace their job with the income from their creative work, and then they go sell a $50 thing to an audience of a few hundred people.

Amelia Hruby [00:15:22]:

And that's a beautiful thing that you've sold that $50 thing to your audience of a few hundred people. But there is a huge gap between the few hundred or $1,000 you might make doing that and full time self employment. And what I'm always trying to do on this podcast in my consulting or coaching work is to help people see what do you really want and are these steps that you're taking going to get you there? So if what you really want is to replace your job income with self employed income, selling that $50 thing to your audience of a few hundred people isn't going to get you there. And to get us back to the trap. The trap there is that you might be charging only $50 for that thing, because you're thinking in your head like, I don't have the audience size. That gives me the credibility to charge a lot more, when in fact, your small audience size from a numbers perspective, might mean you need to charge a lot and only work with a few people because there are only a few people in your audience, but you charge a lot more so that you can be meeting your goal of replacing your income. So again, this third trap is that your pricing is determined by your follower count.

Amelia Hruby [00:16:37]:

So to review, I went through those so fast I thought it would take me longer. But here we are, always bringing you a clear, concise take over here at Off The Grid. So the three traps of an Insta-bae business — Number one, that you need to have a certain number of followers before you can sell something. Number two, that your success is measured by vanity metrics. And number three, that your pricing is determined by your follower count.

So how do we avoid falling into these traps? Well, let me take them one at a time.

Rather than believe that you need to have a certain number of followers before you can sell something, I'd love to see you sell something that's suited for the number of followers you have. And perhaps I'd love to even consider if you need any followers in that process. Followers are not the only way to have a community or a group of collaborators or clients or an audience.

And so to avoid falling into the trap, this first trap of an Insta-bae business, believing that you need a certain number of followers before you can sell something, I think we start by interrogating whether we need followers at all and what size of community or audience is appropriate for the type of thing that we are selling.

To avoid that second trap of success measured by vanity metrics, I think we need to get really honest about the metrics that are important to our business. I already mentioned that I think revenue and profit are two core metrics of any business if a business. But they're not the only metrics. And I would love for us to also be considering less traditional metrics in our definitions of success. For instance, this year, one of my metrics for success is how many days off, how many days I'm taking off from work, specifically how many weekdays I am taking off from work. I set a goal of taking eight weeks off this year, and I am really trying to hit that number. That is one of my metrics for success.And let me tell you, it matters way more to me than how many Instagram followers I ever had.

Amelia Hruby [00:19:00]:

And to avoid our third trap of the Insta-bae business, this trap of pricing based on your follower count, I think to avoid that trap, we price based on the value of our product or offering and our financial goals for what our work and our business will provide for us. And that'll be different for everybody. You may have a business that you want to replace your full time income, or you may have a business that you just want to make a few hundred bucks on the side each month. But I think that our pricing should be determined by that combination of the value of what we're selling and our goals in making it instead of by the number of followers that we have.

Now, here's where I want to end this episode. I think that the biggest trap of the Insta-bae business, what it all boils down to is that most of the time, if we are building a business the Insta-bae way, we're not really building a business. We are building perhaps a brand.

Amelia Hruby [00:20:16]:

Perhaps we're building the illusion of the business. Perhaps we're building a performance. More often, we're building a hobby or an art project or a profession or a calling or a following or an audience, but we're not typically building a business.

I think that building in the Insta-bae way has a lot more to do with being pulled into these funnels of the mega influencers and trying to be like them than it does with actually identifying what we have to offer to the world and building a business around where our unique offerings meet the needs of our communities.

So when I say that building a business the Insta-bae way means you're probably not building a business at all, it probably makes sense to ask, what is a business? Well, my handy dandy Google search tells me that a business is the practice of making one's living by engaging in commerce. So making your living by selling things, that's a business.

And with an Insta-bae business, if you've fallen into these three traps that I'm outlining, rather than making your money by selling things, what you're doing is growing your follower count to a certain amount so you can sell something, measuring your success by vanity metrics instead of by your sales and pricing based on your follower count instead of on the value of what you are selling.

Amelia Hruby [00:21:36]:

So these three traps of the Insta-bae business keep you from having a business when instead you could remove yourself from Instabae-ness, instagrammability and work on running your business.

How do you avoid these traps? Well, in a sentence, you create something valuable. You price it based on its value and your financial goals, and then you share it with everyone you know and get it in front of lots of folks you don't know yet and get them to buy it.

Is it easy? Not necessarily. Can it be easy? Totally. Does it look easy on Instagram? Absolutely.

But that has way more to do with the Insta-bae part of it than with the business part of it. And when we get caught up in the Instabae-ness, the instagram ability of our business rather than the business itself, that most often happens at the detriment of our business.

Amelia Hruby [00:22:34]:

And it's why so many of us who are trying to share our work on Instagram end up feeling so alienated and disillusioned and disconnected from our work.

So if you are listening to this and you're like — Shit, Amelia, I definitely have fallen into that Insta-bae business trap for sure. Rest assured that you're not alone. I have experienced every one of these. And in my time on Instagram, I fell into these traps a lot in my thinking and in my practices. And that's the whole reason I made this podcast, is to help more of us pull out of pull away from social media and doing business in the Insta-bae or the social media way and instead create businesses that can be successful and sustainable on our own terms.

So if you want support doing that, join me in The Refresh this month. And if you're listening in the future, head to the show notes and figure out what else I'm offering that will help you create a business that can support you in the long term in alignment with your values, in alignment with your talents, in alignment with your pleasures and your joys.

Amelia Hruby [00:23:46]:

In The Refresh, we will do the work of energetically clearing these Insta-bae traps, this desire for Insta-bae ness, and then we will turn to the business fundamentals of identifying the core offers, core channels and core collaborators that will help us succeed. And maybe social media is one of your core channels or not. But what's so important, what will keep you from falling back into the insta-bae trap if you stay there, is that we will have clearly identified the core offers that you are selling and the core collaborators that will help you sell them, and the other core channels where you can be sharing your work in an algorithm free space. And then on the third day of the refresh, we take all of this and turn it into a map of your business ecosystem, where you can see how your marketing, your offerings and your community all interconnect.

And I can tell you from my experience teaching this last year that that third day is magical. And everyone who joins and makes the map starts to see the places that they're doing work in their business that's disconnected from everything else they're doing, or see the ways that they're putting all their energy into one thing that turns out doesn't actually even sell anything. Or the way that they're putting all their work into making this one beautiful offering and the totally forgetting to ever sell it. The epiphanies and AHA moments and beautiful light bulbs going off all over the refresh last year was so inspiring and the reason I decided to bring it back this month.

Amelia Hruby [00:25:24]:

So if you're listening in real time, head to the show notes. Learn more about the refresh. Sign up to join me. It's only $99. You get three days with me live, as well as an online community where we can check in. You can ask me your questions, I'll put my eyes on your business and give you thoughts and advice and feedback and whatever else you might need to head into the fall feeling supported and aligned and free of all these insta-bae business traps that we talked about today.

Thank you so much for tuning insta off the grid. I am so grateful that you spend your precious time with this show, that you lend your sacred attention to these episodes.

Of course, I'd love to see you at the refresh. But if that's not your vibe, I'd also love if you could head to wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave a rating and review so that other folks can see how much you enjoy it. And we can spread the word and help more and more of us run successful, sustainable businesses off social media.

That's really what I want. I want to see you thrive. I want more and more and more and more and more people in my community of folks doing business without social media and I want you to be one of them. So thank you again for being here. I'll be back next week and until then, I will see you off the grid.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [Melissa Kaitlyn Carter begins to sing over sparkly synthy sounds] Let's go off the grid. Okay! Let's go off the grid. Okay! I know that you really want to put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go off the grid.

Amelia [Music continues to play softly] Thanks for listening to Off the Grid. Find links and resources in the show notes and don't forget to grab your free Leaving Social Media Toolkit at softersounds.studio/byeig.

Amelia This podcast is a Softer Sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter and our logo is by n'atelier Studio.

Amelia If you'd like to make a podcast of your own, we'd love to help. Find more about our services at softersounds.studio. Until next time, we'll see you Off the Grid.

Melissa Kaitlyn Carter [Melissa Kaitlyn Carter sings the new theme song again] Let's go off the grid. Okay! Let's go off the grid. Okay! I know that you really wanna put your phone away. Yeah! Let's go off the grid [sparkly synthy sounds fade out].