Have you ever tended a brazier? Lighting the ember is the easy part. Keeping it alive is the work: some charcoal, a shake of the ash, a little air. Step away for a while and you come back to grey. A feed you run alone tends to go the same way. It catches well at the start, and then some week it turns quiet. That isn't laziness and it isn't a lack of talent. There are five places where a lone ember fades.
The blank screen wears you out
A single post asks for more than it looks. You decide what to say, find or take a picture, write the caption, add the hashtags, and remember to do it on the right day. Each step is small. Together, it's fetching the charcoal, shaking the ash and fanning the coals, all by yourself.
So the blank screen wins more often. It isn't that you have no ideas. You have no strength left to pull one out and give it a shape.
Keen on Monday, forgotten by Friday
On Monday you decide this week will be different and draft three posts in your head. Tuesday is too busy to post. On Wednesday you want to make up for Tuesday, so you wait until you can write something better. By Friday you can't remember when you last opened the feed.
That isn't weak will. An ember lasts when someone sits beside it, and in a working shop there's nobody to spare.
The busier the shop, the quieter the feed
Your best weeks are the ones with the most customers. They're also the weeks the feed goes silent, because your hands are full of arranging, wrapping and serving. The quiet weeks are when you finally feel like posting.
It's a slightly cruel arrangement: the better the shop does, the less time there is for the ember. The feed's work doesn't grow smaller when yours grows bigger.
An ember doesn't die because you didn't care. It dies because no one was sitting beside it.
You can't tell what's working
You put the effort in, and afterwards it's hard to say which post reached anyone. When a handful of likes is all you have to go on, it's harder still. It's like fanning a fire without knowing whether it has caught or is only smoking.
With no answer you can hold, effort starts to feel wasted, and it's hard to keep doing something that feels wasted. That's an easy place to quietly walk away.
It takes longer than it should
Say one post takes an hour. Three posts a week is three hours, and they tend to be the hours after closing, when you have the least left. Half goes on choosing the picture, half on the words.
Look at what those hours produce, one small post, and it's hard not to feel shortchanged. This isn't a job that has to take that long.
A way to share the fire
We won't say we keep the ember alive for you. The brazier is still yours. What we can do is share the carrying. Give us a link and we read what you sell, who buys and how you sound, then write a month of posts.
You swipe right on the ones you like and left on the rest. If one is almost right, tell us in words and we rewrite the text and make several new pictures. You start from a choice, not from a blank screen.
Some things aren't open yet. Posting straight to your channels and analytics open one by one during the beta, so for now you copy the text and post it yourself.
The ember stays yours. We'll just share the carrying.
