I Am a Builder Who Does Not Like Social Media: Notes on Marketing in 2026
A Note on Expertise
I'm not writing as an "expert" or claiming to have all the answers. I'm a builder sharing my journey on what worked, what didn't, and what I learned along the way. The tech landscape changes constantly, and with AI tools now available, the traditional notion of "expertise" is evolving. Take what resonates, verify what matters to you, and forge your own path. This is simply my experience, offered in the hope it helps fellow builders.
I have spent years working in marketing. Social media management, Google Ads, keyword research, funnel strategy, full-stack digital marketing across different clients and companies. I am not a stranger to this space. I know the tools, I know the patterns, I know what "good" looks like in the traditional sense.
And I am going to say something that most people in this industry will not say out loud.
Marketing in 2026 is a black box. Nobody really knows what works anymore. The people who say they do are either selling you something or repeating advice from an era that is ending. This post is my honest attempt to describe what has changed, why it is hard, and why I do not have a clean answer at the end.
How it used to work
The old model was not simple, but it was legible. You optimised for Google. You did your keyword research. You built content around what people searched for. You built backlinks. You ran paid campaigns on platforms where you could measure cost per acquisition directly. You tracked your funnel.
If you were willing to pay for proper tools, you could actually see what was happening. Ahrefs, SEMrush, UberSuggest, and the other serious SEO platforms gave you real data. You could see which keywords your competitors ranked for, which pages earned them backlinks, which content was pulling traffic. You made decisions on evidence.
That world is not dead, exactly. But it is no longer the whole story, and for a lot of businesses, it is no longer the main story.
What changed
The biggest shift is that AI has inserted itself between users and the web. When someone has a question now, a significant portion of the time, they do not click through ten search results. They ask ChatGPT or Claude or whatever AI is embedded in their browser, and they get a summary with a few citations. The answer is delivered. The user does not visit your site unless they need the full context.
This has not killed traffic. It has changed what traffic means. Being cited by an AI is a new kind of visibility. Not being cited is a new kind of invisibility. And the rules for who gets cited are not published anywhere.
Educational content has been hit hardest. If your business is built around "people search for how to do X, land on your article, and convert," the AI has quietly become the middleman. It reads your article, summarises it, and gives the user what they need without the user ever arriving at your page. Not because anyone decided to replace you. Because that is what the technology does by default.
The hardest part is that you cannot just optimise harder. The old SEO moves still matter, but they matter differently. Authority on Google, backlinks, content depth, all still contribute. But they feed a system that is now summarised by another system, and what comes out the other end is not something you can measure with a clean funnel report.
The tools have run out of answers
The serious SEO platforms are still good tools. They still show you what they have always shown you. Keyword volumes, rankings, backlink profiles, competitor analysis. All of that data is still real.
What has changed is the translation layer between that data and the decision you need to make. Before, if you saw that a competitor ranked number one for a valuable keyword, you could reverse-engineer what they did and try to do it better. Now, even if you do that perfectly, you do not know if AI summarisers will cite you or them. You do not know if the keyword still drives the same behaviour. You do not know if the users who used to land on that page are now getting the answer somewhere else.
The tools tell you what happened. They are less useful for predicting what will happen next, because the substrate underneath them is shifting.
The social media problem
This is the other half of the story, and it is where solo founders without a social media presence really feel the pain.
If you already have an audience on Instagram or LinkedIn or YouTube, you can promote whatever you build. Your existing followers are a distribution channel. You post, they see it, the algorithm rewards engagement, and the flywheel keeps turning. For founders who started as creators, this is a huge advantage.
If you are starting cold, the path is much harder. Social platforms reward accounts that have been active for years, that have followers who engage, that produce content in formats the platform is currently promoting. There is no shortcut to any of that. The idea that you can spin up an account today and build meaningful reach in a few months is, for most people, not true.
And the advice available online does not help much. I have read, watched, and tested a lot of social media marketing content over the last few years. The overwhelming majority of it falls into one of two categories. It is either clickbait from people who do not actually know what they are doing, or it is honest commentary from people who do know, and who admit that the current state is opaque even to them.
The genuine experts are worth following. What they generally say, when you listen closely, is "here is what used to work, here is what might still work, and here is the honest admission that the algorithm is a black box and we are all feeling our way through." That is more useful than the confident clickbait. It is still not a playbook.
The agent automation myth
There is one more thing I want to address, because it comes up constantly.
You will see people claiming that AI agents can now run your social media for you. Post on your behalf, engage with audiences, respond to comments, manage your whole marketing presence while you sleep. The implication is that marketing can be automated away, and if you are struggling with it, you just need the right agent stack.
This is, to be blunt, not how any of these platforms work in practice.
Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and the rest are strict about third-party automation. They ban bot-like behaviour aggressively, and "bot-like" is defined by the platform, not by you. An agent posting on your behalf is a bot in their eyes unless it is using an approved partner integration, and those integrations are limited to specific actions, usually at specific frequencies, with specific terms.
Bots can work for a while. Then the platform detects the pattern and your account gets suspended. If that account is the distribution channel you have been building for months, you have just lost the thing you were trying to grow.
The honest version of this is that you need a human in the loop for most social media work. A real person creating content, a real person posting it, a real person responding. You can use AI to help draft, structure, and plan. You cannot hand over the account. Anyone telling you otherwise is either selling you a tool that is about to get caught, or has not been in this long enough to have seen an account killed.
The automation posting story
Let me make this concrete with a recent example.
I signed up for a tool, a social media scheduling service, to automate posting my LinkedIn content across a month. The platform is reputable. It is approved by Meta. It has a user interface that looks professional. I paid fifteen pounds.
Over the last ten days, four or five of my scheduled LinkedIn posts have failed to publish. Each time, I received an email telling me there was an error. No remediation offered. No explanation of the cause. No suggested fix. Just "this did not go through."
I am not telling this story to single out this company. I am telling it because it is representative. Even the legitimate, approved, paid tools in this space are operating on fragile infrastructure. Platform APIs change. Permissions expire. Scheduling fails silently. The tool cannot really explain why because the tool does not really know. It is sitting between you and a platform that can revoke access at any time for any reason.
This is the operational reality of social media marketing in 2026. You pay for services that partially work. You build scheduling systems that fail without explanation. You accept a certain amount of delivery failure as the cost of doing business. That is what the tool is. It is not an indictment of the tool's builders. It is an indictment of the environment they are trying to build tools for.
Where this leaves a builder
I am a builder. I love making things. I am not a natural social media personality, and I never will be. The default advice for founders like me, "just get on X and post every day," has never resonated, and at this point I am confident it would not work even if I forced myself.
So where does that leave the actual strategy?
Honestly, I am still figuring it out. What I have landed on so far is this. Invest in the things I can control and that compound over time. Write real, useful content on my own domain, because that is where I actually own the audience relationship. Make sure what I write is the kind of material an AI would cite, because that is the new distribution. Build products that solve genuine problems, because word of mouth still works for things that actually work.
For the rest, social reach, paid acquisition, community building, I accept that I may need help. That means either finding a partner who genuinely understands this space and wants to own that side of the work, or building systems that reduce the manual load without pretending they will eliminate it. Neither of these is a fast solution. Both are more honest than pretending an agent will handle it.
What I would tell another founder
Not confident takeaways. Observations from inside the fog.
Do not trust anyone who tells you they know exactly what works. If they knew, they would be doing it quietly and printing money, not selling courses.
Traditional SEO tools still matter, but they answer fewer of your questions than they used to. Use them for research, not for strategy.
Write for humans and for AI. Clear structure, useful information, authoritative sources, all help on both fronts. This is not a reason to write boring content. It is a reason to write carefully.
Do not hand your social accounts to bots. When they get detected, you lose everything you built. Use AI to help draft. Post as yourself.
If social is not your strength, know that early and plan accordingly. Either find someone to partner with on that side, or double down on channels you can control.
Accept that marketing in this era is expensive in time, unclear in feedback, and without a playbook. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not paying attention.
This is part of a series about building products as a solo founder. Earlier posts cover why I built Havnwright, how I think about content as a solo founder, and the other half of shipping. More coming.
About the Author
Alireza Elahi is a solo founder building products that solve real problems. Currently working on Havnwright, Publishora, and the Founder Knowledge Graph.