A follower stopped me in my tracks

Author

Kevin Szabo
March 16, 2026

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It was not from someone famous.

Just a regular person who had been reading my content for a while and decided one day to send me a message about something I had posted.

I almost missed it honestly.

It came in on a day where I had a few other things going on and I was moving through my notifications quickly without paying much attention to any of them.

Something made me stop on that one and actually read it.

He was not complaining.

He was not trying to catch me out or point out something I had done wrong. He just said something along the lines of your content lately feels like it is written for everyone and I miss when it felt like it was written for me.

I read it twice.

Then I put my phone down and sat with it for a while.

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The thing about that message is that it did not feel like criticism in the moment.

It felt like someone handing me something I had been missing.

I had been so focused on growing, on reaching more people, on making content that would travel further than my existing audience, that somewhere along the way I had quietly stopped talking to the specific person who had been there from the beginning.

I went back through my last thirty or so posts after reading that message.

He was right. The content was fine.

It was decent. But it had gotten broader without me making a conscious decision to go in that direction.

It had drifted toward the kind of thing that anyone could read and find mildly useful rather than the kind of thing that one specific person would read and feel like I had written it about their exact situation.

That drift had happened slowly enough that I had not noticed it from the inside.

What struck me most was that this person had nothing to gain from sending that message.

He was not a client. He was not trying to position himself as a consultant or score points by pointing out a flaw.

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He was just someone who had found something valuable in what I was doing and wanted to let me know when it felt like that thing was slipping away.

That kind of honesty is rare and I did not take it lightly.

I wrote back and thanked him.

Not in a performative way. Just genuinely.

Because that message did something that months of analytics and metrics had not done. It told me something true about what was actually happening with my content in a way that no number on a dashboard ever could.

Numbers tell you what happened.

They do not tell you why or what it means to the person on the other end of it.

After that conversation I made a quiet decision to stop optimizing for reach and start writing for one person again.

The person who had been there from the early days.

The one who found something in the content that felt specific to their situation. That person is worth more to me than a thousand casual readers who skim something on a Tuesday and forget it by Wednesday.

The content changed after that. Not dramatically on the surface.

But the intention behind it shifted and I think people felt that even if they could not name exactly what was different.

My business felt clearer too. The clients I started attracting were more aligned with where I actually wanted to take things.

The conversations I was having were better. Everything downstream from that one small shift in intention started to feel more like the thing I had originally set out to build.

All of that from a DM sent by someone with no following and no agenda.

I think about that a lot when I am tempted to only pay attention to the voices with the biggest platforms.

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The most honest feedback I have ever received about my work did not come from an expert or a mentor or someone with credentials worth citing.

It came from a regular person who just told me the truth because they cared enough to say something.

Do not underestimate those people. They are paying closer attention than you think.

Talk soon,