Be Your Own Media Company (And Build the Community Around You)

When you’re your own media company, you’re not just publishing. You’re building a community around your work – people who learn together, show up together, and bring others in.

Over time, that space stops being just “content” and starts becoming a community, a place people feel part of, not just something they scroll past.

If you’re a small business, creator, coach, consultant, or studio, you already are the media for the people who choose to pay attention to you.

We are engulfed by more content, offers and opinions than ever. The problem now is choosing where to spend our time, trust and attention.

Your job isn’t just to get seen. It’s to become the place people choose to come back to and feel proud to be part of. That means taking responsibility, being creative, and building something people can belong to. 

This happens when there is a direct connection between you and your audience, a newsletter, an ongoing event, a space you host, where it’s more than just creating content. 

This has been one of my biggest lessons. It’s the shift from “doing content” to “being the media.” 

Content is something people consume. 

Media is something people can belong to.

Your role is to create a world people can see themselves in and, over time, reflect the community back to itself. You share stories from others and highlight the connections that are happening because of the thing you’re building. 

These are the paths that turn strangers into subscribers, and subscribers into friends who bring more people with them. 

That’s what it means to be THE MEDIA in your world, and why it matters so much if you want to stay relevant.

I started YATM in 2013 as an experiment to see if I could have a direct link to an audience, where  becoming self sufficient was my primary drive. Not just for me, but for other people too. I wanted to see if you can have a space people come to, that wasn’t wholly dependent on Facebook or Google holding the keys. 

It’s changed a lot since then, but there is still a through-line: notably the weekly newsletter and live events.

Today, the gaps are even wider than a decade ago:

😟 Algorithms decide which tiny slice of your followers sees a post.

😟 AI recycles ideas until our feeds and world sounds the same. 

😟 Platforms tweak the rules and what once worked for you, can change overnight.

What I am banking on for ’26 and what ‘you are the media’ means is making a space people have an affinity with, that represents identity, connection and shared experiences. Get people to come to you and stay with you.

When you become your own media company, you:

☀️ Own the route in
You have a list, not just a following. You can address people directly.

☀️ Control the rhythm
You choose the tempo, not a platform dashboard.

☀️ Become the default choice
When people in your world ask, “Where should I go for this?” your name comes up first.

It means that people are not reliant on the big name, but the connection you have built with the people who want to hear from you.

Here are the core building blocks that I have used over the years. It represents a simple, repeatable system you can take responsibility for.

What you see below is effectively a time stamp from where you start, to finding momentum.

1. Choose your home base.
Where do you want to address people from? For most small businesses, that’s an email newsletter with a simple web home for people to leave their email on your website.

2. Decide your rhythm.
Choose something you know you cannot stop and try to make it weekly, or at a push fortnightly. The reason is because you want people to see you are committed, consistent and serious.

3. Make subscribing a clear path, not an afterthought.
You’re not chasing impressions, you want to build a list of people who said, “I’m here for you.” Treat building subscribers as a focal point in your promotional activity.

4. Use publishing as practice, not just promotion.
It’s not just about having a schedule, it’s there to sharpen your thinking and progress over time. Coming back to a regular publishing place is intended to help improve your ideas.

5. Add live touchpoints.
Find ways where people can come together, so they can meet each in the same shared space. It could be a live session online or a lunch. The turns a “list” into a community and content into relationships.

6. Keep a simple feedback loop.
Look at what’s landing, what resonates or where people are stuck. You let their questions shape the next thing you make.

This is where You Are The Media has lived for years: as a media company in miniature and a community for small businesses who want to promote themselves without relying on algorithms.

This is how you shift from “I share when I want” to “I run a small, focused media operation around the work I care about.”

It Works When You Have Constraints

When you frame your work, it becomes easier for people to recognise you.

It is hard when you stare at a screen for inspiration, which is why building routines start to build progress and give your work shape.

This is what I’ve seen work in terms of building your audience and putting your stamp on things.

For a small business, it could be:

🏠 One main home base. This could be your newsletter, or a podcast or a show. It’s something you anchor everything else to. It also helps you from spreading yourself everywhere. Social is used for distribution and awareness, whereas your home base is to build connection and relationships.

🏠 A signature style. This is the way you talk, the stories you choose, the examples you keep coming back to. Over time people recognise your fingerprints. My style has always been about doing the work and then reporting back. Lived experience has shaped my voice and built my confidence.

🏠 Recurring features and formats. Familiar, settled rhythms help build relationships and act as structured shortcuts. For instance, Lunch Clubs are centred on themes that are relatable to small businesses. The regularity helps people make the association.

🏠 A commitment to experiment in public. Try a new format or segment as a way to involve people. The intention is to take your audience with you so they feel part of it while you figure it out together.

Constraints aren’t there to limit you, they stop you drifting into places that eat up time and energy.

If you don’t actually enjoy making (alongside promoting), it will always feel uphill.

The more your work feels like ‘work’ the more problematic it becomes and the easier it is to replicate. 

To take out the ‘work’ side, it’s about finding the balance between how you make money and what drives you and what you believe in.

When you are the media, it doesn’t mean you step into a space and there are thousands of people ready for you. It doesn’t work that way. It means you have a practice ground for your thinking. Writing, recording, hosting, these are ways of working out what you really believe, not just ways of broadcasting what you already know. 

You build the space for you, as well as other people. It’s there for you to.

– sharpen your ideas

– find better ways to articulate them

– develop a voice people can recognise

– build your own confidence that you do have something to say

What starts to happen is you keep going long enough to be the person that people choose.

For years, “the media” meant big organisations with cameras, studios and editors. Today, it’s you, me and anyone prepared to take the responsibility of showing up seriously.

The return is for you to be the person or small business that:

🙂 Knows who it’s for

🙂 Shows up regularly 

🙂 Speaks honestly about what’s happened to the people who matter

🙂 Enjoys the craft enough to keep going when nobody’s watching yet

🙂 Builds a space people can feel and be part of

You don’t have to wait to be picked or to keep playing for an algorithm that never promised you anything.

The goal is to no longer shout into the void, but talking to your people, directly.

You’re not just using the media, You are the media.