In December I'm celebrating 12 years of making content.
YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, newsletter — two languages, 18M+ followers. And 2026 has been the strangest year of all of them, because almost nothing went the way I expected.
Here's what actually happened.
We tried to replace video editors with AI. We hired three more people instead.
Everyone told me AI would handle short-form video. We tested every tool available.
The results were fine. The human editors we hired after were better. Not slightly — noticeably better. Do they use AI to help them? Absolutely. Has AI short-form clipping surpassed human taste? Not even close.
What actually changed with AI this year:
Claude Projects running for every platform and every social media project we operate
Research, scripting, repurposing — all faster
Scripts and captions still go through multiple rounds of edits between me and the team before anything goes live
We never copy-paste what AI generates. Every piece of text goes through human hands before it's published. What changed is the speed at which those humans can work — and honestly, that uptick in productivity made me want to hire more, not less. We're actively hiring right now.
If you're starting solo today: I wouldn't hire immediately either. I'd build out Claude Projects for each platform I wanted to run, create my strategy, define my tone of voice, and understand how everything works first. Then hire once the system is clear.
AI doesn't remove the need for taste. It accelerates the people who have it.
In 2022, I figured out what the algorithm wanted from me.
The videos that went viral weren't about my genuine passions. I knew it while I was making them. I kept going anyway because the numbers kept climbing — and stepping away from what was working felt impossible.
I've since removed most of those videos from my channel. Some of them still show up today.
Here's what the data actually says about virality:
A video that hit almost 5 million views brought roughly 1,000 new followers
An in-depth video aimed at a specific audience — not virality — got just over 100,000 views and brought 1,400 followers
Less than a tenth of the reach. 40% more people who stayed.
At some point I stopped optimizing for millions of views and started optimizing for the right audience. The comment sections changed. The conversations got better. I stopped dreading my own phone.
The community you can build a business around is never the biggest audience you ever had. It's the one that's still there two years later.
Every platform matters. Here's the sequence I'd run today.
I'm active on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and newsletter. Here's the order I'd build them in starting from zero:
LinkedIn first (months 1–4)
Text posts only. No camera, no equipment, no excuses.
3–5 posts per week, Tuesday–Saturday, 8–10 AM your timezone
Reply to every comment in the first 90 minutes after posting — this alone tripled my median impressions
The goal here isn't followers. It's finding out what you actually think before you have to perform it on camera.
Short-form clips next (months 4–8)
Take what resonated in writing and test it on camera
Post the same clip as YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels at the same time
You're not producing content yet — you're finding out whether your written voice translates to video
Long-form YouTube (months 8–12)
The only format that keeps paying you years after you post it
I have videos from 2018 still generating AdSense every month
8–15 minutes is the right length for a new channel
Newsletter — start it the same week as your first YouTube video
Beehiiv is free up to 2,500 subscribers
Email is the only platform where no algorithm stands between you and your audience
You own this list permanently
This edition is brought to you by Adobe Acrobat.
I packaged my complete playbook — every platform strategy above, my real content sequencing, and the learnings from 12 years — into a PDF Space in Adobe Acrobat.
Here's what PDF Spaces actually does:
Brings multiple documents together into one branded, guided destination
Adds an AI Assistant you can customize to answer questions about your specific content
Includes an audio overview so readers can listen instead of read
Lets you see who opened and explored your content via engagement insights
Requires zero login from the people you share it with
You can use it to share a content strategy with a collaborator, package a course for a client, or build an interactive playbook for your audience — exactly like this one.
Listen to any document that you create like a podcast on your commute, or just ask it a question and get a direct answer:
PDF Spaces are available in Adobe Acrobat.
Marina 💜
P.S. The 12-year version of this job looks nothing like year one. The tools changed, the platforms changed, the team grew. The one thing that compounded the whole time was knowing exactly who I wanted to talk to. Once that was clear, every other decision got easier.
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