Have you ever walked into a room and immediately known you were supposed to feel out of your depth?
That’s how I felt at my first marketing mastermind, about 25 years ago. I went in expecting a gathering of people like me, experts, writers, teachers, and practitioners who use language to connect with other human beings.
Instead, I found a room full of people who were very much into spreadsheets. They passed them around with charts and models, nodding at each other with the knowing look of initiates who had learned the secret handshake.
The spreadsheets were only part of it. I can make my way around a column or two, if I’m forced.
The real challenge was the vendors.
During their demonstrations, they’d lower their voices, and with the kind of reverence you’d normally reserve for a confessional, start dropping phrases like “behavioral intent mapping” and “friction-aware sequencing.” Phrases minted that morning. And they were stress-testing them on us.
A few people in the room nodded and wrote them down. Nobody wanted to be the one who asked.
Take the man who walked us through a tool that, once I stripped the labels off, turned out to be a way to send a follow-up email at a set time.
Yet, like a magician casting a spell over the room, he’d renamed the basic steps three or four times on the way to that easy task, and by the end that simple task had acquired a price tag that was directly tied to how hard it was to relabel.
Turns out that wasn’t a one-off. It’s how the business works.
I’ve since watched this play out many times—the dramatic pivot to the screen, where a company rep points to a slide with too many rings and arrows and, instead of explaining, lets the complexity work its magic. By the end, the entire room was asking about pricing before he’d finished packing up.
That day, I was curious enough to stick around. And I left with some genuinely useful material buried underneath layers of jargon – which made me wonder, even then, why it had to be buried at all.
New Buzzwords, The Same Fog
A few years ago, ChatGPT was everywhere, and X was full of AI prompting threads. So when I got the chance to attend another mastermind, it felt like the right moment to reorient.
A digital Smartboard had replaced the whiteboard, and the air was filled with fresh buzzwords. And as the day progressed, a familiar feeling washed over me: I’m not sure I belong here, and neither do most of the people who follow me.
I finally realized what made both of those rooms so uncomfortable.
After all, whether you’re selling your expertise, your services, or a blend of both, the principles behind Indie-expert marketing remain fairly simple and haven’t changed much in thirty years: build a website, send emails, post on social media. Really understand what makes your audience tick and create content and offers they want.
They Don’t Sell Simple…
When you’re a tech company making serious money from doing simple things, you can’t simply teach others how to do those simple things.
Instead, you complicate it. You add more layers, rename the pieces within the layers with fancy titles, and obfuscate what those things actually do—for you and for anyone else.
That’s how entire industries have scaled. They used language designed to manufacture just enough fog to extract money from people who didn’t understand the fog, under the cover of expertise.
And if you didn’t understand it, that was on you.
Every time I leave one of those rooms, I think about all the gifted, capable people who walk out and don’t come back.
They decide that if this is the kind of fluency required to succeed online, that price is too high. How many of them were right on the verge of creating something great before the complexity convinced them otherwise?
Understanding how we got here helps.
The Sea We Swam In
I like to think of the last thirty years of online marketing as a series of waves, each wave total and all-encompassing, and impossible to see clearly from inside it. Swim with the current, and it carries you. Swim against it, and it exhausts you.
The problem was that none of those currents were built for everyone.
At any point on the following 30-year timeline, when you wanted a teacher to show you how to build a business online, you didn’t just pick a tactic. You stepped into an era.
And depending on which era you came up in, you’d build a presence just like that era told you to. Every era’s teachers will show you how to swim in their current and try to convince you it’s the only body of water.
Swimming in someone else’s current keeps you paddling inside their banks, but all that motion says nothing about where you’re going or why.
The problem was, the current was never the point. You were.
The Five Waves: A Brief Unofficial History of Online Marketing
To figure out where you fit best now, it might help to vastly oversimplify Internet marketing’s history, as told by someone who lived through it all.
Before we dive into these waves together, here’s some context: I was there when the first browser appeared, working with experts to build and index their first websites in Netscape.
From that very first wave, the message never changed: your expertise, your voice, your home base, your audience. Hold onto these four basics, and no wave, no matter how big, can pull you under.
Every few years, the newest technology got louder, and more people got swept up chasing it. And regardless of the wave, a small group of us were building from the shore.
Most of the people I work with still are.
Wave One: The Techie Era (1994-2004)
First, the techies had the run of the place: the people who dreamed about calculus in school. They created the tools, they made them run, and for a decade or more, the World Wide Web was their workbench.
They built stuff only other techies could use and understand, stuff that pretty much left the rest of us out of the conversation.
Then they started teaching other techies how to sell stuff on the Internet, and an industry was born. If you didn’t speak the language, you weren’t the student.
Because the product was the technology itself, many Internet teachers taught people how to make money online by teaching others how to make money online using the latest shiny platform or gadget.
If you weren’t fluent in tech, you watched from the shore – and wondered if the web was just not for you.
The sea we swam in: if you can’t build it, you don’t belong here.
The shore we were building from: build your site, index your expertise, help your people find you. Lots of people were doing exactly that. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked. We weren’t sitting the wave out. We were building on the part of the beach that wouldn’t wash away.
Wave Two: The Marketer Era (2004-2011)
Seeing how much money tech-geeks were making online, marketers flooded the web, creating a new gold rush. They quickly realized they could only sell stuff if the tools were easier to use and access, so they started telling the techies what they wanted to see.
An uneasy alliance was forged.
The offer and the funnel were the product, and you were the inventory. What you sold didn’t matter. Really, it didn’t.
Many people with real expertise tried to become marketers that decade. Most felt like a fish out of water the entire time.
The sea we swam in: pick something – anything – and sell it.
The shore we kept building from: our community kept publishing on their own sites and adding people who resonated with them to their email lists. A new tactic bobbed to the surface every week, and we added the few winners to our stack. The people who kept writing and emailing had clients and sales long after each new tactic sank.
Wave Three: The Copywriter Era (2008-2015)
Then the writers arrived. They had made a fortune selling stuff through advertising and direct mail, and the Internet was a fresh stack of blank pages.
And when copywriters joined forces with techies and marketers, they created the first Internet Marketing millionaires.
They promised us that with enough of the right sparkling words, you could convince anyone to buy anything. That pitch is shakier now because LLMs have made words cheap.
Fortunately, judgment grows even more valuable.
The sea we swam in: the right words will save you. Become a great copywriter or hire one, and the rest is details.
The shore we kept building from: We didn’t become copywriters; we borrowed what we needed and left the rest. We already marketed the way they were trying to write — through relationship, connection, and a voice that didn’t have to be manufactured. They were reverse-engineering a language we already spoke.
Wave Four: The Platform Era–the Rented Decade (2012-2022)
Then the platforms showed up and shifted the landscape again: Don’t build your own online home, move into ours with convenient monthly rent and a variable lease.
Social became your rented storefront, and the algorithm your new landlord. All-in-one tools promised an app could become your entire business, classroom, list, store, and “home”, as long as you never left their building.
Many smart experts started building entirely on rented platforms. Sure, it seemed convenient – but those platforms were crowded, and the address was never actually theirs.
This wave rewarded the consistent poster and the person willing to perform daily on stage inside someone else’s system. But if your work was slower, deeper, or harder to turn into a daily reel, the algorithm had no particular interest in helping you find your people.
Wave Four Built “Satellites”
All-in-one platforms and social feeds are wonderful satellites that orbit around your home base. They are a risky place to build your whole business. Your followers live at the landlord’s. Your list, your site, your source of truth – that’s the house you own.
The sea we swam in: show up where the crowd already is, post and keep up with the algorithm, and hopefully you’ll grow. Let the platform keep the keys to the front and back doors.
The shore we kept building from: people in our community who owned their home base, their site, their list, their expertise, kept thriving through it all. Others were rebuilding from scratch every eighteen months.
Wave Five: The Techies Return–The Machines Learn to Talk (2022 – )
The people who think in systems rushed back riding a new wave, this time carrying even shinier toys. With AI, coding, drafting, and building got cheap. Shipping a hundred sort-of-okay posts got easier.
Wave One spreadsheet energy all over again – only now the spreadsheet writes the posts, codes the site, and answers the FAQ.
Those old previous-wave paradigms stacked against you were supposed to be dying. Instead, it put on a hoodie and called itself an AI agency playbook, or a “replace yourself with agents” funnel.
This wave rewards the fast mover, the tinkerer, the person who genuinely enjoys optimizing a system for its own sake.
If what you bring to the world is wisdom, presence, and hard-won experience – things that don’t prompt well – the invitation to “just automate it” can feel less like a solution and more like an insult.
The sea we’re now swimming in: prompt it, automate it with agents – or fall behind. Again.
The shore we’re still building from: wisdom, presence, and a body of work that doesn’t prompt well. People like us are not behind on agents; we’re still building the house those tools are supposed to serve.
The Pattern Has Been Repeating for Thirty Years
It’s the same environment in a different decade, the same country with a new official language, and the same feeling that none of this was ever written for us.
If you’ve felt any of this too, know there’s nothing wrong with you. You weren’t failing to keep up. You were being recruited, again and again, into a role that was never yours to begin with.
Every wave that swept through invented its own language, and you were never a native speaker. Many genuinely talented people have stood at the edge of each wave, watched the crowd rush in, and decided the problem was them.
And it’s not like you haven’t tried: you built the funnels, and hired the copywriters. You jumped on the latest platform, posted constantly for a year, then watched the algorithm shift beneath you and push your work under layers of shiny Reels.
You may have even shown up to the mastermind and nodded along. And something inside you kept saying, “This still isn’t me.”
If that was you, that wasn’t failure; it was a mismatch.
Why None of the Waves Were Built for You
Each wave was built by and for a specific kind of person. If you’re an Indie-expert – a practitioner, a writer, a coach, or a teacher — someone whose value lives in what you know and who you are — you were always being asked to speak the industry’s language in a world that rewarded only its native speakers.
Your own language was never the problem.
The engineer crowd and the human-connection crowd aren’t chasing the same thing. They never were. Each group solves different problems for different people.
Fortunately, it’s become clear that in a world drowning in automation, Indie-experts who lead with story, relationship, and real trust aren’t an endangered species.
They’re increasingly the only ones worth finding.
Watch what happens during each new future wave that rolls through. The people who kept their heads down and tended to their expertise platform, grew their list, kept writing, and kept showing up didn’t get washed away when the wave broke. They were still there on the other side. Still findable. Still growing.
We were never stranded on the shoreline. That’s where we built.
Wave Five Just Made It Undeniable
AI can produce content, replicate tactics, and automate almost every technique the previous four waves were selling.
What it can’t produce is you: Your story, your judgment, your particular way of seeing the world. Your decades of watching what actually moves the needle for people.
The Expert’s Platform has been the foundation of my work with clients since the first browser appeared. It didn’t need AI to validate it. It just needed time, and a little noise to clear.
Yes, AI has made the engineers more powerful. It has also made authentic human voice rarer. Those two things tend to move together. And the second one is worth paying attention to.
What was always true is now harder to fake, and for the people who’ve been building something real, that’s a long-overdue advantage.
The web is still full of people looking for a personal solution – in search, in communities, in the questions they now ask a chat box.
They are not starved for more fluent paragraphs; those are now plentiful and free. They are starved for more individuals willing to step up, be themselves, share the best of what they have to offer from lived experience, and create value around it.
You Were Never the Problem, You Are the Solution
Thirty years, five waves. Each one arrived with a new script and the same unspoken demand: become fluent in this, or get left behind.
Most people memorized their lines before they noticed the story wasn’t even theirs. Some of us kept auditioning anyway, trying a new role with each wave, a new platform, a new set of moves, wondering why none of it fit as we watched the people these roles were written for sail past without looking back.
That feeling told you the story was never written for you. You were never supposed to become a techie, a marketer, a copywriter, or a platform native.
Another wave is cresting right now, and like all the others, it’s asking you to become anything other than what you already are.
What if you have a passion for the classics, baking, mountain climbing, yoga, or your medical practice? Swimming in this year’s current would mean you’d have to stop being who you are now. But who you are now is what the world needs, and it’s what people will value and pay for.
There’s a Different Kind of Fluency
You have expertise or knowledge, and you want to build your online body of work. The value you offer the world reflects your passion, art, and creativity.
Finding your place online doesn’t mean becoming an engineer. It means not losing sight of what makes being online worth it in the first place: your voice, your message, and years of hard-won expertise nobody else has.
To do that, figure out what you already have, clarify how to say it, and let someone else focus on the dashboard.
Here’s what that looks like right now:
Let’s say a journalist is looking for a source and finds your articles cited, and runs your name through an AI tool. Someone in your field gets referred to you and wants to check you out before they call.
In each one of those moments, the question they’re asking is the same: is there a real person here, with real expertise and depth, or is this just one more polished surface?
Google and the new AI answer tools use the same criteria: They want a named person with a real website, real articles, and a track record they can point to.
The tools and their searchers don’t want a Substack someone signed up for last spring, or a LinkedIn page untouched since 2022. They want a home you own, with your name on it, that shows you’ve been doing this for a while.
The gap between those two things, the polished brochure and the expert’s authority platform, is huge. Fortunately, closing that gap is much less complicated than the tech world makes it out to be.
Your Expert’s Platform: What Actually Belongs to You
Each era will teach you to embrace its obsession, its coded language and cool tools, snappy copy, a posting habit inside an app, and a prompt stack.
Few teachers will help you consider the foundational strategy and principles that always work for experts like you, no matter how the supporting tools and trending tactics change. This shortsightedness isn’t necessarily those teachers’ fault. Most never had to build a system to succeed online as themselves, because the latest wave’s trend was their platform and product.
The best of them get it – the ones who teach that it’s the personal connection and the relationships you build. Most don’t.
- Tools-only people get lost when the tech stack changes.
- Feed-only people discover the newest hot platform comes with a steep lease with terms they never agreed to.
- Both end up creating bland content anyone could write.
Publishing on your Experts Platform home base is simple enough for anyone willing, and it’s essential for sustainable online success.
Using the custom agent stack or chasing algorithms is optional. You don’t have to master tech, marketing, copywriting, or the algorithm of the month. This is especially true now: A huge service industry still exists to support you – and now a lot of that hired help will also answer to a prompt.
The emphasis has shifted to what’s been missing in all of this – and that is you.
Your Expertise Was Always the Product
No one else can tell your story or create the products you will make. No one else has your unique message, voice, and personality. No one else can draw the crowd you will draw online.
AI can imitate a voice, but it can never replicate your practice, your work with patients, your life experiences, or the lessons you’ve learned.
For now, the internet is awash with two flavors of the latest wave’s obsessions: one crowd is publishing more than ever and sounding like no one. Another is struggling for visibility on rented land with someone else’s name on the lease.
There’s a third option: your name, your home.
Your own site and email list are the foundation. Social, video, podcasts, Substack, the all-in-one platform of the moment: these were never home. They were always the satellites pointing back to your home base.
Twenty-five years ago, I walked into that first room already drawing that distinction. The people around me were running the calculus; I was doing something different. Both things are still worth doing.
I shared all this history not just out of nostalgia. The point is so you stop chasing fluency in this year’s wave and stick to what survived all five: your voice, published somewhere you own.
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