5 Mistakes I Made Trying to Start My Maker Channel

In 2018, I started posting content on Instagram with the hopes of becoming a Maker influencer.

Like many, I posted consistently once per day—thinking I was too cool for hashtags or strategies—and had next to no success for several weeks. After 1 year, I had grown from 0 followers to 1,000 and grew to 5,000 after another year. This is where I made my biggest blunder of thinking I should shift focus from Instagram to YouTube and lost all traction I once had.

As I've been looking to my new strategy for 2026, let me share the 5 biggest mistakes I made when starting out on social media that held me back from successfully growing.

Mistake 1: Vaguely Defined Audience

Starting out, my target audience was "people", which is incredibly vague and unhelpful.

Instead, I should have niched down to exactly who I wanted to be making content for. I incorrectly believed that niching down would keep my content from more people, but instead I was making content for everyone, which really meant no one.

Mistake 2: Vague Value Proposition

When I was posting videos on Instagram and YouTube, the value was people being inspired and learning a little along the way.

Sounds fine on paper, but has no thought in it. Instead, I should have identified a specific value that people would get, which would have also made it more clear how to create other metadata such as titles and thumbnails later.

Mistake 3: No Long-Form Video Strategy

I had no strategy and just posted videos as I finished them whenever they were finished.

I thought that posting "more" would be better than being consistent, but because I had no strategy in place, I posted fewer videos than ever. I'd overthink the timing constantly and try to string it along so that "next month", I'd post more (but "next month" would never come).

Mistake 4: Naive Short-Form Video Strategy

My short-term strategy consisted of taking a long-form video and chopping it up as much as I could into shorter videos for Instagram.

Most videos assumed that people had watched the previous one and would want to continue, but it was all about the workshop sounds and just doing a piece of the project. Yes, breaking projects up into multiple pieces can work, but what I should have done is work on posting an entire single component, not just randomly picking shots to pull out.

Mistake 5: Zero Focus On Written Content

Finally, I completely neglected written content, including the descriptions on Instagram and YouTube.

I told myself that my projects and video content "should speak for themselves," which assumed my projects and video were amazing—they were not. Yes, a significant shift to video has occurred over the last 15 years, but people are also reading more than ever and written content can be a massive competitive advantage when few others are focusing on it now.