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You are a business owner who wants to prioritize people and planet over profits (without sacrificing success). That can feel lonely—but you are not alone! Join host Becky Mollenkamp for in-depth conversations with experts and other founders about how to build a more equitable world through entrepreneurship. It’s time to change the business landscape for good!
Becky Mollenkamp: Hi Amelia, how are you?
Amelia Hruby: Hi Becky, I am thrilled to be here. How are you?
Becky Mollenkamp: Great. I'm going to share in full transparency for folks because you will be listening to this in a time machine after we've recorded this. And just for, who knows? I don't know that any of this will come up in the conversation, but just so you know, we are recording this the day before the big election and we don't know how it's going to go. You who are listening know how it went. So I don't know that will affect anything that we say here, but just know that because it feels like an elephant in the room right now for everything. Whenever I'm recording anything lately, I'm like, I feel like I have to ground everyone in time and place because they're going to be listening to it and who knows what the world is like in the future Amelia.
Amelia Hruby: No, absolutely. I mean, elections are portals and they're portals we go through like as an entire country,
Becky Mollenkamp: It's that collective experience.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, and like things like the weather and otherwise actually kind of aren't. So it is this like big shift that's gonna happen. Like something is going to change and we are recording this before it has changed and you are listening after it will have changed.
Becky Mollenkamp: Well, thank you for playing along with that. And I'm to start the same place I always do. And I'm excited to hear your answer, because honestly, I didn't know a ton about you personally beyond sort of your business persona until I was researching for this and was so pleasantly surprised to learn how deep your experience with feminism goes. you should know no pressure. I was just excited to hear your answer to your relationship with feminism.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I love this question as a starting point. And it's something I don't get to talk about as much as maybe I used to. So I will just begin by saying that I have a PhD in philosophy with an emphasis in feminist philosophy. So I have a very academic background with feminism.
Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, and we're going to talk more about this in a minute because I'm really excited to hear about what feminism and aesthetics means. But so don't go too far down that part yet because I want to know. But tell me a little bit more about the other parts.
Amelia Hruby: No, absolutely. Yeah, just think that was years of study of feminism in an academic context that really shaped, I think, how I became a feminist. So I grew up in North Carolina, and I would say I grew up in a pretty small community, relatively conservative community. Being a feminist was not something I ever would have said I was. I went to a women's college, but it was formerly a Southern Baptist college. So it was not feminist forward. While I was there, they actually closed the women and gender studies department. There was like one professor who was like really trying to make it happen and it no longer existed by the time I was graduating. honestly, like that didn't really bother me. Like I didn't have any sort of feminist consciousness around gender or sexuality or my experience of the world as a cis woman and how that was impacting me. I think that I had really been trained in this sort of like equality rhetoric. Women and men are equal and I have equal opportunities and therefore everything is fine and we don't need feminism. I think that is definitely like the messaging I was taking in through college. And then I, after college, moved to Chicago to pursue my PhD in philosophy. And when I did that, I started taking classes in a women and gender studies department at DePaul University. And this just really like opened my eyes, mind and heart to just putting language to so many experiences I had had, putting language to like the weird feeling that came up when somebody told me that my department had worked really hard to bring in more women the year that I came in. And like that was, I was kind of like, huh, that pinged weird. I don't know how I feel about that. you know, just many, many, many of the gender dynamics I'd experienced in romantic relationships. And I'm like reading these feminist texts by, you know, originally like Simone de Beauvoir, but then also like Audre Lorde and Maria Ligonis and so many other contemporary feminists. And so I just learned so much and I just felt like I finally had words to explain a lot of the discrimination I had experienced, a lot of the problematic dynamics I had lived through in relationships and a lot of what I was seeing around me, even if they weren't my own individual experiences, the way that I was seeing men be uplifted in positions of power and women not in universities and otherwise. I kind of came to feminism through this academic context, but then that led me into more involved activist work and I became much more engaged in various feminist organizing spaces in Chicago. I started making zines about feminism and selling them at zine fairs around the city. And I started writing a lot about sort of my feminist consciousness raising and awakening. And I created this project that I called 50 feminist mantras at the time. And I was sharing those every Monday on Instagram. And I kind of built a small following and platform around that. And I eventually self-published a book called 50 feminist mantras that collected 50 of the ones I had written. Eventually that book was purchased by a publishing company and I republished it with Andrews McMeal. But I really think throughout what I was always trying to do, like my relationship to feminism was one where I'm always like, have this depth of academic study, but a clear recognition that that is not enough to change anything. Like knowing the things doesn't necessarily shift anything. And so was always trying to both like embed and embody what I was learning into my daily practices and my political actions and community engagement. So that was a lot, but that's my relationship with feminism or how it formed.
Becky Mollenkamp: I love it. And you mentioned Instagram in there, which is fun because we're going to talk a whole lot about social media and not using social media, but it obviously played a part in getting you going and where you are. And I would definitely want to talk about the leap from philosophy, which is every parent's dream for their child, right? To go get a degree in philosophy. The most useful of all degrees. And I say this as somebody who's a journalism major, and how you made that transition from all that feminist rhetoric and learning and into where you're at now with podcasting and things like that. But before we do that, tell me about your, don't know if I guess maybe it was your, it's not a thesis, dissertation, I'm guessing about aesthetics and feminism. When I think aesthetics and I think maybe in the academic sense, it means something different. Just the way things look, visuals. So tell me what aesthetics and feminism means.
Amelia Hruby: I'm used to people telling me they think of aestheticians, like esthetics that starts with an E, which is one context for the word, or the word aesthetics, which broadly we kind of use to just mean style, which is closer to what I was studying. So my dissertation was titled something like Toward Feminist Aesthetics. And I was trying to tease out this feeling I had that there was something relevant in the way that there was something really connected and interrelated and how feminist philosophers were trying to teach us to be more open to other people's experiences and more open to our own experiences. I thought there was something in there that was really similar to these German philosophers I was reading, all like dead white guys from the 18th century earlier, who were trying to say something about our experiences of art opened us to the world in different ways our experiences of beauty, whether natural beauty or beauty and manmade art transformed our relationship to how we think writ large. So my dissertation, I wrote three chapters. There were three conversations I was posing between a German idealist thinker and a contemporary feminist thinker, teasing out these concepts. And so the basic premise of it really had to do with this experience I had at an art museum where I felt like my life radically transformed. I stood in front of this Kerry James Marshall painting and I was able to see myself across like a vast, like identity differences and so much more and be like, wow, the world is opening to all of us in a different way. And we get to choose how we interact with that. And in aesthetics, there's this big impetus to think without conceptualization. So to like see something, experience something and not immediately be like, well, this is that, or this means that, or this is this, like to actually allow it to have that openness of not being conceptualized and to feel that and be with that. And I think there is so much within feminism, certain types of feminism at least, that's trying to say like, we can have these experiences without having to immediately conceptualize, typify, name them. We can be with another person without having to say like, break it down into so many strict identities or so many strict meaning making systems, we can just let it be to a certain extent. And so was trying to understand how what I was learning through aesthetics and the experiences of beauty and sublimity and art might meet what I was learning in feminism and our understandings of gender and sexuality and difference. And so my dissertation was kind of three different ways of looking at that and I did that through the concepts of happiness and love and the erotic and Audre Lorde's work. And I framed the whole thing through my experience that I had with this painting. Writing a dissertation is hard and horrible and no one should ever do it, but it was also beautiful and wonderful.
Becky Mollenkamp: Is it out there for people to yeah, is it out there for people to read anywhere?
Amelia Hruby: You can go read it through the DePaul library if you so like it is online. You can like search my name in their library database and read a copy of it. I would recommend like you can read the introduction. I would not go into the chapters like it is 100 % like philosophy speak, but the introduction and the conclusion really talk more personally about like my relationship to these things and why they matter to me. And I think that could be of interest. And I can probably find you a link for the show notes to how to access that.
Becky Mollenkamp: Does everything that you sort of learned in that time and that you were processing in this way? Does it show up for you now? Like is it still does it feel relevant? Is it like part of your work and part of your life now?
Amelia Hruby: I'd say yes and no. Like I think that those years of study and writing my dissertation like changed who I am as a human being. And that's clear in my relationship to feminism, like I wasn't a feminist. I wouldn't have called myself one. I would have probably actively said I'm not one when I went into my program. And I think that by the time I came out, it's like one of the most important aspects of my political work. But I will say, I don't think about philosophers. I've forgotten so much of what I knew. I I had to read fluently in French and German to write my dissertation, and I could not do that anymore at all. That is totally gone. But in terms of how it reshaped how I think about the world and how I approach the world, that is still with me. And I think it's even with me at Softer Sounds. Like when I call the studio a feminist podcast studio, and I'm sure some people see that and they think it's a sort of shallow identity marker thing that I'm doing. But for me, it's like a very deep commitment to the way that I think listening is a very radical act. And I think it can be done in exactly this way I was teasing out in my dissertation because listening, I think, has a lot more openness. Often we will hear things without understanding what they are, I think there's more spaciousness there before we conceptualize or understand in a way that when we're looking at something, we're trained to have perhaps a quicker perception and conceptualization. And so there's like a lot of philosophical thought related to feminism behind even calling my podcast studio feminist podcast studio.
Becky Mollenkamp: That was definitely one of the things I want to talk about. So we're going to get there too. But since we're there, one thing I noticed too on your website is that it says ‘your attention is sacred.’ And that sort of feels like aligned with what you're saying around listening and that presence, being present, and how being present frees you from so much of that binary kind of thinking, which is a lot of what I'm hearing you talking about, right? I want to hear just so much more about all of that, but before we do, I think to help people understand where you're at now, I want to figure out how we got there. Everything seems like it's sort of around this idea of your attention being sacred, the listening, the being present, all of that. And you mentioned that, you know, you used Instagram to get word out about the book you had and all of that. I just want to know how you even found your way into like podcast production out of a philosophy and feminism kind of degree.
Amelia Hruby: So there are quite a few bridges between the two things. I would say that when I went into graduate school, I was very on the fence about going into academia and then pretty quickly realized it was not going to be the path for me. So throughout my dissertation work, I was cultivating other interests. I was just doing things I thought were cool. And I had moved to Chicago for this degree, you know, being in grad school is a full-time thing, but also isn't. It's not like I had a nine to five. I had a lot of time to devote to things I was interested in. So I started doing two things that eventually got me to where I am now. The first is that I started volunteering with a community radio station called Chirp. I eventually had an on-air radio show, and then I was asked to lead their local music podcast. So I was interviewing local bands and creating podcast episodes from that. I did not know how to make a podcast episode. I did not know how to do any of that, but they kind of gave me this like basic training and it went from there. That is what eventually led me to start my freelance audio career and then eventually led me to start Softer Sounds. I think the other important thing I was doing during that time is I started working with this small organization in Chicago that was called Fourth Chicago and it gathered creative women entrepreneurs for these quarterly salons and like an annual sort of event for the full community. And I was helping them run the events. I was helping them send this like weekly newsletter with all sorts of cool things happening around the city. And then eventually we launched a podcast interviewing members of the community. And that really started my love of small business. And it gave me this network of all of these amazing women who were self employed in Chicago. And so alongside my dissertation and graduate school classes, I was pursuing both of those interests. didn't have a path. I didn't think they were going to lead to a career. I didn't have a clear reason for doing this other than I was interested in it and I wanted to spend my time on it. And so I was doing that. And then in my second to last year of grad school, I had the opportunity to work with a company called Sister, just based in California. And they run this program called Feminist Business School. And I had the exactly right mix of academic feminist study and experience working with small business owners. And so I was hired to be their program coordinator and I was running the courses and sending marketing emails and really got a very generative crash course and running a small business by kind of being the one employee inside of that business with the founder, Jennifer Armbrust. And that really became the bridge from school into my own business. So as I finished my dissertation, defended it during the pandemic from my kitchen table, very unique dissertation defense experience and challenging one that I had. And then I had that part-time job that I was working. And eventually after doing that for a few years, I was like, I want to have my own business, not just support other business owners in their business. And I kind of looked around and realized I had been doing this freelance work for years and I thought it could become a full business and I thought I could really bring all of my values and things I cared about to it and Softer Sounds was born.
Becky Mollenkamp: And Softer Sounds is the podcast production part of your business. And if I'm not mistaken, they're sort of two arms maybe, or maybe it's more than two, but arms of your business. Softer Sounds, which exists as sort of as its own ecosystem of podcast production in kind of that traditional sense, but as you said, a feminist studio, which we'll talk a little more about. And then there's the sort of Amelia side of your business that I think is more of sort of I don't know if you would call coaching or not, but some courses and community and that sort of thing that we see a lot on the online space from a lot of people. And there's these two separate businesses. Is that right?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. I would say that Softer Sounds is my primary work and 70 % of the money I make in the world comes through the podcast studio. And then I guess it is my Amelia stuff. I think of it almost as my just Off the Grid as its own business. So like the podcast and everything that comes from that, but that's shifting a bit in the year to come, but there are these two different models. One is high-touch services that I provide with myself and a small team and the other is more like writing and teaching and podcasting and like bringing all of that together sort of through my original ideas and things I'm creating.
Becky Mollenkamp: And community building through memberships.
Amelia Hruby: Yes.
Becky Mollenkamp: So Softer Sounds started first though, and I'm guessing the Amelia stuff kind of came along a little bit more after that as you had a little more experience of running the business?
Amelia Hruby: Yes and no. So before I did anything you would now know me for online, when I was on Instagram, you know, I had mentioned like I self published a book, I sold that book to a publisher. So I had a little fledgling business that I was running in, gosh, like 2017 2018 2019 2020, where I sold my book, I sold little courses, I used to teach a Selfies for Radical Self Love course slash practice group that I would sell. And I had different types of workshops and offerings that I taught and did with collaborators in Chicago and elsewhere. So I had this sort fledgling, almost influencer business, like influencer content creator teacher business. And when I decided to leave social media, I realized I couldn't keep that going. I wasn't going to make any substantial amount of money. I made maybe a few thousand dollars a year doing that before. And I was like, well, I need to make more than that to survive. And so I launched Softer Sounds because I needed a full-time income. And I was like, what can I do that's going to be a full-time business? And that's what led me there.
Becky Mollenkamp: But you were still, when you launched Softer Sounds, if I'm not wrong, and I could be, you were still using social media. Like your approach to marketing was probably more of a traditional thought around marketing or did that, did those happen concurrently? You left social media.
Amelia Hruby: So I left social media six months before I launched Softer Sounds.
Becky Mollenkamp: Okay, so most people who are starting a business, even a service-based, high-touch service-based business, I think they would be terrified of launching a business without social media, right? Because we think of it as such a big marketing tool. We're gonna talk about all the reasons why it doesn't need to be. But I think for many people, they'd be like, and I had assumed it was right after, and that maybe you decided it was too much. So before you launched the business, just what was the reason for leaving social media? I'm assuming the noise?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, so the decisions were not concurrent. I will say like when I decided to leave social media, I didn't know I was going to be launching this podcast production studio. I decided to leave social media in January of 2021. And that was really after I mean, everything that happened in 2020, which was a lot. Obviously, the pandemic happened, we had a racial uprising in the US. That you know, perhaps was like most localized in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities, but being in Chicago, which is very close, felt very present there. I was on Instagram through all of that running my account, and honestly really trying to grow my account because my book came out in October 2020. So I was putting all of this energy and effort into growing my platform, which is what I had been told to do. I had spent all this money hiring a social media strategist and doing book photos and all these things. And my book came out in October 2020 and then by January 2021, I was like, this is not working for me. And another thing that happened that year was I read most of “Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff and I was like, so these apps are tracking everything we do. They are impacting my decision making on a much deeper level than I realized. And even when I tried my hardest, it didn't work anyway. Like I didn't get thousands of followers. I mean, I left Instagram with about 3,000 followers, but like I wanted over 10. You know, I wanted like the little K in my profile. I thought like I worked really hard for that and it didn't work. And then I realized how much this was impacting otherwise. And I was like, I have to get out of here. So in January, 2021, I decided to leave. I shared that I was leaving and I kind of spent the next three months building my newsletter list, creating content around why I was leaving social media, telling people over and over and over again that I was leaving. And then I left on April 9th, 2021. And then Softer Sounds was, I think, like, I filed the trade name application, the DBA in Nebraska on like July 1st of that year, and I opened the business in September of that year. So it happened kind of just after, but I had definitely left social media before.
Becky Mollenkamp: And when you say left social media, Instagram, Facebook, like all of the traditional? YouTube? What falls under your umbrella for you? Because I know it can be different for different people. Some people would say YouTube's a search engine and not social. And so I'm just curious what you call social media.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, it's a great question. So in that period of time, I had already left Facebook, what I was leaving was Instagram, I think I had a Twitter account I never used, I don't sure when that got deleted. And I kept my LinkedIn account through that time, but I didn't use it. I actually just quit using LinkedIn entirely this year, because I realized it had just become social media. So when I think about what social media is, I think of it as a site or app where we are creating profiles on which we are encouraged to produce content and share content and be active. And then we engage with other people's work primarily through a feed. So anything that is feed-driven, I think is leading towards social media. But you're right, we have so many nuances there, right?
Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, substack, which we'll talk about.
Amelia Hruby: Substack is social media, the app is social media, I would say. I think there are clear cases like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, but then there are less clear cases. I mean, it's interesting on TikTok that a lot of people are on it all the time, but will never create a video for it, which I find fascinating. I feel like on Instagram or even Twitter/X, people are more encouraged to become creators faster, perhaps. But we have fringe cases like LinkedIn. Is YouTube social media, I think is a very complicated question in certain ways and not in others so it is challenging, but at this point in time, the only apps that are even the fringe cases that we could say I use would be YouTube that I have a user account on and I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I have a account for the studio that reposts static videos of all of our podcast episodes. And then I am on Substack and I do have the app on my phone and I will sometimes scroll notes and be reminded that it is definitely a social media platform.
Becky Mollenkamp: And trying to become more and more of one, which is interesting. And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Because the other thing I want to ask before I forget and lose it is that I think, as far as I remember, unless it's changed recently, your old Instagram page is still there, right?
Amelia Hruby: Correct.
Becky Mollenkamp: So what's the decision to not leave, delete, goodbye?
Amelia Hruby: I would say that I have left in the sense that I never log in and I don't use it. I decided to leave my profile up as an archive of the work that I had done. So if you go to that page, what exists there is all of the posts of 50 feminist mantras, like the original ones that I made and sharing the self-published journey of the book, sharing the publication journey of the book, and sharing the content I created about leaving social media. So what you'll find there is like a very specific digital archive of my work from roughly 2016 to 2021. And to me, the reason I left it up is because it's actually very hard to archive your content off of Instagram anywhere else. You can technically export your account, but it doesn't export like neat little posts for you. It doesn't attach the images and the captions in any conceivably easy to figure out way. And so I wanted that to still exist, honestly, as a resource, there's a ton of, there's a lot of stuff there around like Selfies for Radical Self-Love and the course I had built and taught, free curriculums that I had created and posted on Instagram. And I was like, well, this can stay here, but I will never be present on it. And I don't, like I don't log in, I don't go to it. I don't use it. I think that I have considered more recently going back and deleting it as it feels farther away from where my work is, but I kind of, it's a time capsule and I think it can be a nice resource. And also now that I've become someone who left social media, I think it can be nice to have this sort of thing. That's like, well, this is who I was on social media. It's not just totally gone and you have to just believe me that I did these things, you can go look at it. If you do, I will never know, but it is still there. So it kind of has different practical reasons and a little bit of an emotional archive one.
Becky Mollenkamp: There's no judgment in that question because I always tell people I have left Facebook and I still have my account. I just went through and deleted almost all of my friends. I think I left like 10 family members; it just felt easier to leave them than have to explain why I was deleting the friendship. And I don't really look at it other than occasionally I go on and sell some things on Marketplace. And that was one of the reasons I kept it was like there's still sometimes practical uses for me around some of these things. There’s this part of me that's like, want to say I'm out of here and I'm leaving. But then sometimes there's reasons why you don't leave because sometimes you need to stick around. Now, Twitter/X, on the other hand, I said goodbye. There was no reason for me to even keep that account open. I'm so vehemently disgusted with Elon Musk. I was just like, I don't even want to be associated with this anymore. So like, I truly want it to be gone. So yeah, I guess it's not always clear cut as with anything.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, absolutely. There are annoying things in my everyday life that I don't have these accounts. My partner and I are trying to sell our bicycles and I'm like, well, I can't do it on Facebook. You're gonna have to do it because I don't have a Facebook account. Or I mean, in the first year of my business, I joined a sort of business community that had this big course functionality and then they had a Facebook group and I created a Facebook account exclusively to join that group and within a few days I was like absolutely not, I’m out of here. I just didn't do it and there are things that I can't participate in because I don't have these types of accounts as you would know now being off X you can't even look at people's tweets without having an account and being logged in or you can only see their most popular tweets, you can't see what they've recently posted. And so when I want to read my partner's funny tweets, I have to ask for their phone. Like, hand me your Twitter and I'll go read all your tweets from the past two weeks. There are these friction points that I encounter regularly in my life because I choose not to have these apps, but it just feels more true to who I am and more in alignment with myself that I don't use them and don't have them. But I do think about the nuance of like, what does it mean to even have an account somewhere or not? Because similarly, like with my LinkedIn account, I didn't delete it. I just logged out and never logged back in. But like you, there are other spaces where I deleted whatever Twitter I had, I deleted the Facebook account that I had. And there is like a nuance there that's just interesting and I think very individual and unique to each of us.
Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, especially when we're like, it's one thing if you're doing it for noise reasons. But when you try if it's an ethical thing, those ethical lines can be murky. And I just think it's important for us to acknowledge that. I think when we start to get really finite about what is and isn't ethical, then that's where we come into some problems. You, I'm sure, maybe I'm not sure, I think I'm sure, probably had some fears about leaving social media and then probably even more so when you decided to launch your business and didn't have social media. I wonder if you even sort of thought about maybe I need to start these back up in order to do this business. I hear from so many people and I know you must too, I want to get off social media, I can't stay on social media, but I have this business and I feel like I have to be there. I'm terrified. No one's going to buy my stuff. Did you have all of those fears and how do you navigate those with starting a business without social media even from the start?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, absolutely. I had all of these fears. I always like to emphasize that I was never a Luddite. I am not someone who's like, I was never on social media. And so I have some sort of moral superiority. Not at all. I was so in, I spent thousands of dollars on social media strategy and photos and all of this. I was in financially, emotionally with time investment, I was so in on Instagram and I had a ton of fear extracting myself from that space because I had built this small following. And I really believed that the success of my work was based on that. I had all hinged on my Instagram and I had to do this whole process of emotionally divesting from that belief, starting to believe that I could cultivate community in other spaces on the internet. And it took a lot. But the fears that came up, there were so many. I teach a workshop on this sometimes. And when I go back through naming all of them, I'm like, it's a lot. I was afraid everybody would forget who I was if I left social media. I was afraid I would never have anyone to talk to about the things I care about again. I was afraid that nobody would ever invite me to anything. I was afraid that I would never be able to make money again. All of these fears came up just being a person on the on who wanted to get off of this app and it was really scary. I mean, I think there were fears that I would be invisible to everyone, that I would be illegible to everyone. I would be forgotten. A lot of abandonment fears that came up. and then a lot of money stuff around, well, if I am I ever going to share my work and how's anybody ever going to buy it if I'm not on social media? But I think that also part of why I spent three months leaving. It was one to communicate with everybody and try to get them to follow me onto my newsletter, but also because I just needed the time to feel okay, for my nervous system to regulate to leaving and for my window of tolerance to be okay with that decision. And through that process, I wrote this list that has become probably the most popular thing I've ever made, which was a list of 100 ways to share your work off social media. And actually, I think the original version was 100 ways to share your work and life off social media. And there's so much stuff on that list. It's everything from buy a spot on a billboard to start a newsletter, to call your best friend and tell her what you've been doing this week, to write down three things you want to happen for you in the next year and say them out loud three times. Everything on every level of emotional, practical, spiritual, material, business strategy, whatever, is on that list. And creating that list helped me believe that there were just so many more options for me and I could be so much more expansive than my thinking. And that I think is really what made me finally feel safe, even amidst all the fears.
Becky Mollenkamp: It's funny that you mentioned abandonment. It makes me think of trauma. And it's so funny how, I mean, business is so good—just like having children is so good—at helping you uncover or reveal traumas and new ways they're showing up and working through them. That really speaks to me as somebody who has abandonment issues, because for me, that fear of being forgotten thing is almost like, will I exist? It's like if a tree falls in the woods and, you know, does it make a sound? Do I exist if I'm not on social media? And that's scary for people. What happened? Has your idea of, I mean, I know the answer you would be back on social media probably is that it's worked for you, but has it gone how you thought it would? Has it been better than you thought it would be? Worse than you thought it'd be? More challenging than you thought it would be? What's that experience been like? Because now you're a few years off of what was once your primary social media site.
Amelia Hruby: I think there are definitely different phases of the experience. For myself and most of the people I talk to on the podcast, right after you leave, there's this sort of high—I left and now I have all this energy and attention and I feel so motivated. That's a period of time, especially for folks who have a sharing practice online, where you will often write a ton of blog posts or write a whole bunch of newsletters. I sent more newsletters in the six months after I left social media that I did the following three years. I had trained myself to create so much content for Instagram that I got to funnel that elsewhere. And I think there's this big period of elation and that feeling. And then I think slowly, we return to human pace. I realized I could just like actually make less. Like I was really burning myself out trying to constantly be in creating mode. And so things kind of like slowed back down and I found a pace of sharing that felt more natural to me and my personal rhythms. And then at a certain point, like there's definitely some loneliness that's set in. I'm not here to say it's just easy and fun. When I left social media, I had recently moved states. So I didn't have much of a community where I lived. There's also still the pandemic. I think that would have been right around when people started getting vaccinated. So there wasn't a lot of like in-person community more generally. And there have definitely been periods of time where FOMO is real. It's not just FOMO. I miss out on things, actively. It happens. It's not a fear of missing out. It is the actual missing out that will happen because I'm not there. And I've had to deal with those feelings as they come up. But I think amidst all of that, I have continued to exist. People have continued to remember me. I have cultivated sharing practices off of social media and my work has traveled farther than it ever did on social media in the process through my podcast and my newsletter now. And I feel just so much more centered in who I am and what I have to share because I am not inundated by hundreds or thousands of other voices every day. That's where ‘the your attention is sacred’ piece comes in. That's what it all comes back to for me is like my attention returned to the things I actually care about, not the things that everybody else is trying to get me to care about in this space. And I no longer look to the app to tell me what to care about. I look to my own life and to the people I love and respect and actually talk to, to figure out what I want to care about, what I do care about. And that has just been, leaving social media was a little bit no big deal and also a huge radical shift in my attention and my life. But on the other side, for anyone who's like, will I exist off of social media? You absolutely will. You may have to cultivate some different skills. You may have to flex some different muscles. But you can have a life, a career, a business, all of that without being on any of these apps. It is totally possible if you can open your mind to it.
Becky Mollenkamp: Are you saying that to everyone? Or are you saying that to service-based businesses? I'm just curious, as you've done more of this and have talked to more businesses that are going Off the Grid, as you call your podcast, are there particular kinds of businesses that are better suited to not using social media for marketing?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's both/and. I think that any business can be off of social media, truly any business, but I think you have to adjust your expectations and the pace of growth you expect accordingly. I totally understand that if you are trying to grow a business that sells millions of products a month, it might be way easier to do that on social media where you're buying the attention of tens of millions of people a month. I understand the quote unquote attention economics of that. But do I know people running product-based businesses that have left social media and are still successful and profitable? I absolutely do. And I've talked to them on my podcast. Worthwhile Paper would be the one that comes to mind. And you adjust expectations. You shift your pace. You have to be open to different things. So I think there are trade offs of literally any decision we make in our business. If you choose to be on social media, you're probably making a lot of trade-offs around your general happiness, anxiety, and a lot of other things. But you might grow your business faster or better or whatever, not better, faster than other ways. But in choosing to be off, you may have a lot of peace, you may have a lot of stillness and centeredness in your life and your business, and it may grow slower. And that's not to say that will happen, but I just like to insist it is possible for any business. if you set your expectations accordingly and you don't just take on the desires of VC-funded business that we're all told we should have for some reason. And then I will say something even stronger, which is that if you are a service provider in business, you absolutely do not have to be on social media. Could you connect with ideal clients on social media? Totally. It may be working for you, that's great. But do you need it to grow at a sustainable pace for somebody doing one-on-one services? No, you can do that in so many other ways. And so I think it may be easier for service providers to be off social media than for product-based businesses, but I think it's possible in both cases. And I think it has to do with what you want, what you sell, who it's for, etc.
Becky Mollenkamp: Well, what's so funny to me, and I am speaking about myself here as well, is that so many people I talk to who are service-based business owners who want to leave social media, can't stay on social media, but are so afraid because of what it might mean for their business. So, so many of them, when you really talk to them about it, do you get clients from social media? And they are like, no. And yet we have all this fear about leaving. I mean, I'm the same way. My client work is referral. And so what is it? What is it that keeps me on there? And I think the answer is it's designed to do that. And so I'm assuming that's probably the answer. But is there another answer on why we can't seem to leave even when we say we want to? And it's really not benefiting us or our business.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, I think there are a few. Like how evocative do I want to be today? Or provocative?
Becky Mollenkamp: Very provocative.
Amelia Hruby: Okay, so I absolutely think these apps are designed to capture our attention and addict us to them. That is so true. And now we've even started seeing the reporting and evidence that the apps themselves are creating…so I'm thinking here that we just saw NPR released a number of documents from a TikTok lawsuit that's showing that TikTok knows exactly the number of videos it takes to get you hooked. They know exactly how long you have to be on the app for their algorithm to curate the right mix of things that your brain is just gonna want more and more more and more of. They have this information.
Becky Mollenkamp: And to get me to shop because I'm horrible with TikTok Shop because they know me. They get me.
Amelia Hruby: Exactly. And get you to spend money. We know the apps are doing this. And I think that it's so important to recognize. Many of us who try to pull ourselves off of a social media app and feel like we can't do it. I never want to be like, well, that's just your fault. You're just not strong enough. That's not what I'm saying. These apps are designed to be addictive. And I understand how it feels to be caught in that trap. And I've been there, I absolutely was there with Instagram for years. That said, I think that a lot of small business owners, service providers particularly, I think there are a couple of things that I see when I get down to the one-on-one conversations, what's really coming up. I think a lot of it is that people equate visibility with social media entirely, and they have this fear that if I leave, I will be invisible. No one will know me, remember me at all. And for some people, no matter how many times we talk through the fact that that isn't true, they can't unhook that learned belief and so they don't leave. I think also another one for people, this is the harder one. This is the one where I feel like I'm kind of picking on people, but I think it's true. It feels way easier to broadcast something on social media, like put up a post and say, well, I tried to sell my thing, but the algorithm didn't show it to anybody. That feels way easier…
Becky Mollenkamp: Amelia, you're calling me out. This seems mean.
Amelia Hruby: I know, I'm sorry. I did it in the past. I would have my little selfies course and I'd put up my post and I'd be like, only 10 people liked it. The algorithm didn't show it to anyone. How am I going to sell this? But did I reach out one-on-one and actually try to sell it to 10 people? No, I did not. It was easier to just be like, I broadcast this out there. And people do this with their newsletters too, I want to be honest. Sometimes it feels easier to be like, I just broadcast this and then it didn't work. And now I'm going to attribute that to an external circumstance. And then I'm going to quit on it or do something else. What do you do with that information? And again, I want to affirm those external circumstances are real. The algorithm does not show your post to people. These are all true things. But I think a lot of us stay on social media to avoid doing what feels like the more vulnerable work of actually selling directly to people. And that's so scary. And we can't get around it.
Becky Mollenkamp: So I take it you're selling directly to people?
Amelia Hruby: I do, yes. I am very happy to do that and I have in the past. will pitch myself for things. I do a lot of sales calls. Definitely, especially in the realm of Softer Sounds, that is the type of business I run.
Becky Mollenkamp: How scary was that at the beginning? Does it get easier?
Amelia Hruby: So I think I have a constitution where I am more okay with doing this than most people are. I'm Aries Sun, Gemini Moon. Let me shine and let me talk about it. That's what I like to do. So I do like to own that and recognize that because I think for me, it feels scary, but not, you know, life ending to do that and get a no. I think for some people, it is so hard and painful that it really feels like the end of the world. And I want to acknowledge that. That's why so many of us have to do so much healing work before we get into business. And for some people, it's just easier than it is for other people. I'm such an extrovert and I love to sell myself and I love to be shiny out there. And that's something I'm comfortable with and a lot of people aren't. So I just want to say that. I started from maybe not the same place other people do. The other thing, though, is it didn't feel that hard because I started by selling myself to people I already knew. I wasn't doing cold emails. Softer Sounds started with me sending 60-ish emails to people I had already met and knew multiple times. I had met them a couple times, we had talked, they knew who I was, and I emailed all of them and said, I just started a podcast studio. It's called Softer Sounds, I’m really excited about it. Here's the type of things we do. Do you want to work together? Do you know someone you might be able to refer me to? And that's how I did my first six months of business, from those emails. And so that I think is just a testament to if you are building community and relationships over time, it's just less scary to sell yourself to ask for help. And then eventually, it kind of snowballs and you have a business where you just get referrals without you having to do as much direct sales or as much pitching, or even cold pitching. And I have not done a lot of cold pitching. I've done some not super successfully in my business. But there are also people who will teach you how to do that out there. And you can learn that skill and get business that way. And that's very vulnerable, but also well for some people, feels more vulnerable. For others, it's like, great, they don't know me. I can send them whatever I want, as evidenced by my LinkedIn DMs before I left. But I think that it does get easier to answer your question. And it doesn't have to be as scary as we might make it up to be to sell our work directly to others.
Becky Mollenkamp: I want to talk a little bit about aesthetics in the way I was thinking of them and maybe the same way you are, but visuals and the way things just sort of appear and make you feel. I was looking at your website, the Amelia website. It's a one -pager. It's real simple. It's bare bones and it's got everything you could need on it. And yet I think most of us are terrified in the same way we're afraid of leaving social media, terrified of a website that's that sort of basic and simple of here's my one page website. Here's all the stuff you're going to need. Softer Sounds has more than that. It's more of a traditional site, but even still, it still feels very aesthetically minimal, like there's just, here's the stuff you need to make an informed decision or to learn more about what I do, are you interested? Then I also noticed your podcast cadence doesn't seem always, I think maybe with Off the Grid, you're a little more rigid about being consistent, some of you, because you have several podcasts and have had some that kind of come and go. But even with that, they, you know, it seems like you're allowing yourself to have things work for you when they work for you, when you feel inspired, you share when you don't, you don't. With the website and the podcast and not being on social, it all feels very emotionally centered or it focuses on what do I need and what and how do I get rid of all the other stuff. So how does everything about that and the way you're showing up in your business feel feminist to you?
Amelia Hruby: There's so many layers to this question. first I want to share a little bit about maybe how I conceive of those different things, and then I'll weave together how they feel feminist. So I would say my personal website has just been a work in progress for a long time. I had a personal brand designed by my dear friend, Kenning Zoo. And she put a website together for me when I was launching the book, and it was beautiful and wonderful. And it was much more involved and had many more pages and more things than the website I currently have. Because I hit about three years out from the book being published. So it came out in October 2020, and then by fall 2023, I was like, this doesn't suit me anymore. I'm not talking about my book ever. It's just not where I'm at at this stage. And I didn't know what to do. I was like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing right now. I do a lot of things and I don't know how to integrate that into one clear personal brand or personal site that makes sense. So what I did that you're picking up on is I made my about page my homepage, and I pulled the brand back to just white page, black text and I kept the beautiful word mark she had made me in the fonts that we had picked out together and that was it. So the website really has shifted just to be sort of the essentials because I don't quite know what the next iteration of Amelia is. I think that right now I'm pouring all of myself into these different projects, particularly my businesses, and eventually I think there might be something more self-centered, centered in myself in the future. And then Softer Sounds has a website that was built to be a business website. It's very brochuresque and it has sales pages that explain things to you and try to kind of help you feel the feeling and want the things we sell. And then Off the Grid has a website that's very functional—here's the podcast, here's the toolkit, here's the thing, the membership I want you to join. So I have these different online spaces and I think they're all very functional and very straightforward. I think one of the ways that's feminist to me is I have just a deep commitment to transparency. I really want to be clear about the things I do, the things I don't do, the things I sell, the things I don't sell, how much they cost. All of that feels, to me, like a way of being a feminist in business is to offer that transparency. And I do work with clients on what does that mean for you? Because I don't think it has to mean we all have packages that everybody buys at the same price. But I think it's helpful to have starting prices for custom work or different cues to help people understand where we're at with both our values and our pricing. And I try to live that out on my websites. I also think that for my personal site, there's a way where I'm just trying to be all the things that I am and trying to let all of that show up at once as opposed to being such a personal brand as a human and just totally niche down and locked in on one thing. I like to show up in my multiplicity. And I think that that is feminist in many ways. And I would agree that there are different types of projects for me in terms of podcasts and the frequency of sharing that you mentioned. So Off the Grid is a weekly show when we're in season. I typically do two seasons a year that range from like 10 to 20 episodes. So that I feel is very consistent and reliable. If people know they can listen on Wednesday mornings, then that's always going to show up on Wednesday mornings. And I run that show pretty strategically and like a business because it makes money. I sell stuff through it. And I think this year it's going to make like 25 grand, not insubstantial money. And so I try to show up in that way. I'm going to work. This is work. But I have little personal projects that I just let be what they are. So I have a tarot podcast that I love and is, I guess, complete now. I published that, I did seasons when I had the energy to. I would do one suit of Tarot per season. I would try to publish two episodes a week, but it didn't always happen. Things were pretty fluid and flexible. And I let that serve me. Similarly with my newsletters, the Off the Grid one comes out every Wednesday, but my personal newsletter, cadence? Rhythm? That comes out literally whenever I feel like writing it, which is typically six to 12 times a year, but like there's no plan. So there's this combination of things being very, every project has its own sort of specific vibe and relationship to it. But I do have a content calendar in Notion that everything is on. So I have both that really intimate, local view of everything I'm doing and a really high-level, big=-picture view. And I think that's also super important in our feminism. I think we have to be really attentive to the material circumstances of our lives where we live and how can we impact and shift those, and also how can we have both a structural systemic view of feminism, but also a global one. I've been trying to get more honest with myself about how US-centric my feminism is and how limited that is. And I haven't gotten much farther than being like, wow, it's really limited, but I'm working on it.
Becky Mollenkamp: I feel that one big time. I recognize it a lot. And there is also, I guess, a part of me that's like, and at some point, I don't know, maybe this is an excuse. I love, think my whiteness shows up, my white supremacy, that, you know, rooted white supremacy shows up sometimes in allowing myself some excuses for things, too. So I always have to evaluate, is this that or truth? But there is also a part of me that's like, and the reality is I cannot, I don't think, understand the nuances of every culture, every religion, every country, every ethnicity, and how my feminism could be different, how feminism looks different in all these parts of the world and all of that. That doesn't excuse me though from having at least a higher-level understanding and perhaps I think the piece you're talking about, which is just at least the acknowledgement. I think that's the first place. On the feminism front, I wanted to say, I think what I noticed, when I think about your business in the way I've seen it, I'm in your membership. I've seen like that also feels very like everything just feels very simple. I don't mean simple in a gross way to be clear, but when you compare it to so many other things that I see that feel very, they feel like a lot of flash, a lot of we're going to throw everything at you or giving so much and there's all of this communication and this pressure and bells and whistles and it leads to it feels like social media. It feels like this comparison. You can feel the comparison monster coming up. You feel like my business doesn't measure up to this and they're doing all of these things. And the overwhelm that you can get with social media and all of that. And I feel like your business models kind of what you're doing with saying, I just need less noise. And we all need less noise because that attention is so sacred. And I feel like the way you even are running your business, modeling your business, showing up in your business feels like it's honoring that. And that to me feels pretty feminist because it's honoring it for yourself first, which is super important, but it's modeling it for the folks in your community too. It's independent and interdependence. It's the individual and the collective. And to me, that is what I think when I see you can allow yourself to say I'm going to release an episode when I feel like it, or I'm going to send an email when it feels right to me or I'm not going to worry about do I have this perfect membership portal that you come into that's bells and whistles and all the things. It can just be really simple. We can show up on a Zoom call that doesn't have to be, you know, in some fancy community place and all of that. So that's what I think of. With Softer Sounds, you specifically call it a feminist podcast community or a feminist podcast studio. You mentioned earlier, but I want to hear more about specifically, what do you mean by that? What makes it feminist?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah. So I think that in the realm of Softer Sounds, I am explicit about gender and the language we use. I talk about supporting women and non-binary creators and business owners. And that feels important to me in the realm of podcasting because podcasting, both in who is behind the scenes and on the mic, has been such a white, cis male medium. And that is something that I want to shift. And so it felt important in the realm of Softer Sounds to really lead with feminism and lead with gender to some degree. That felt like it mattered to me. And so that's definitely one way it shows up. And it's important to me as well that all of the languaging talks about women and non-binary creators. So I'm trying to be specific, and sometimes I will even say in certain places, typically ‘not cis white men.’ I'm trying to talk to anybody outside of that dynamic or that identity combination of identities, because they're just so well supported in podcasting.
Becky Mollenkamp: And so well supported everywhere.
Amelia Hruby: In the world. And so it felt important to me to be specific about gender in that context and also to be really clear that I don't just mean women, for many reasons. And when I say women, don't specifically always say cis and trans women. I just say ‘women’ and it's intended to be trans inclusive. And so that is definitely a way that feminism shows up in Softer Sounds that I think is a little more foregrounded than perhaps in the Off the Grid world. I don't use the languaging around gender there so much, but it's still pretty present in who shows up in the community. I think my whole vibe just attracts folks who live on the margins of many experiences or many privileged identities in our society. But then there are so many other ways that feminism shows up in Softer Sounds. I really have crafted the studio to be a soft place to land for podcasters who have rarely ever felt supported. You know, most of the shows that I work with are shows where people are figuring it out on their own. Maybe they've had one other editor who just didn't get it, and they can come to me and they can come to our team and they can feel like, okay, cool. They get what I'm trying to talk about. They support the message that I'm trying to share, and they can hear it and help me make it sound even better in my episodes. So one layer is the content safety and support. But the other layer is I am so consistent and our processes are so clear and everything is built in so that you can trust us to do the work we're going to say we're going to do, on the timeline we're going to do it, actually run your show. We have a well-oiled process running a weekly podcast so that you're not stressed out about urgency, so that you're not panicked about if anybody's going to get to it. I'm trying to remove all of that from the process of podcasting. And that also means that we're not for everybody. There is definitely a status quo in the audio world that editors should be turning stuff around in a day. People want it back fast. They want it to move quickly. They want it on their timeline. Most editors I know are constantly jumping to meet the demands of their clients. And at Softer Sounds, we do not do that. We do not rush. We do not work in urgency. And that doesn't mean we're not swift. I ask clients for audio two weeks before they want it to go live. And for some people that is astonishingly slow. And to me that gives us a week to work on it, gives you a couple days to listen to it, and gives it a couple days to be published and like scheduled in advance. This is very timely and it's very thought through, but I think that's another way I'm trying to interrupt. I think slowing things down and being intentional is another way that the studio is feminist. And even more than like the gendered language I use, that is where I really see who is for us or not for us. I'm like, okay, cool. Lots of people think of service providers as just they should be on call and on deck and willing to change in a moment and like I'm just not willing to do that. And that also frees up my clients to slow down and it lets them actually feel that nervous system regulation in their work because so many people quit podcasting because it's too stressful and they're so dysregulated. But I'm really trying to help everybody regulate around the process. And I think that is definitely feminist in my mind at least.
Becky Mollenkamp: I think the word you said in there about intentional, maybe that's the word I'm thinking of that sort of feels like your aesthetic of your business is this intentionality that ultimately I think intentionality feels incredibly feminist in a world that makes us feel like we're not allowed to stop and think about anything because, you know, when we stop and think about anything, we start to recognize how fucked up everything is and actually start to want change. So as long as we're caught up in the hustle culture and the, you know, urgency and all of that, then we're not stopping to think and demand change. And I think intentionality is a really important way of trying to disrupt. I'm thinking for our bonus conversation, if you're okay with it, maybe we can talk about passion projects. It's maybe not the right word for it. I don't know, but because you've done so many other podcasts and you allow yourself to take on these other things when you want to. And I'd love to learn a little bit more about how you balance all of that. So I think for people who are multi-passionate, multi-creative, whatever word you use, that might be a great thing to tune into on the newsletter so you can listen to that. The last thing I just want to know, and I think you touched on this a little bit earlier, but how do you evaluate now whether you're going to join something or not, whether you're going to be a part of something or not when it comes to those murky because, and I think right now, I think the example that I'd love for you to just maybe walk us through as an example of how you make those decisions is Substack. You are using Substack. I think you're maybe still feeling like you're kind of in the experimental phase. Maybe you feel like you've decided to stay. They're obviously doing a lot of things that are making it more and more social media like, and it has a lot of value in other ways for newsletters, podcasts, a lot of things. I'm there too. I think a lot of folks who listen to this are either using it or interested in it. So how did you evaluate that and come to the decision to use it even though it does have kind of that social media feel?
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, this is a great question. Thinking about Substack specifically, I think there's an episode of my podcast where I talk about this a little bit. So I'll link, I'll send you a link to it so folks can tune in if they want more. But basically, I went to Substack because there was very specific functionality that I wanted that I couldn't really find much anywhere else. So I had a very specific use case. And that's why I decided to go to Substack. I knew in the spring, I was getting ready to wrap up the third season of Off the Grid and I wanted to launch a private podcast. So I wanted there to be... When we weren't publishing free episodes on the public feed, I wanted to keep going with my weekly cadence, but for paid subscribers because there were just a lot of people listening and I was feeling under-resourced. I felt like I was not getting back the...it's not all about money, but just like the energy and time I was spending into it felt like it was starting to drain me. I would actually like to make even more stuff, but I just want to get some financial resource back for making the show at all. And so I decided I wanted to launch a paid podcast feed. And I also really wanted to start sending these link roundup emails, because I was just bookmarking like dozens and dozens and dozens of things a month that were about social media, about online business, but just didn't make sense to talk about anywhere in my regular episodes. And so I had these two desires. I want a paid podcast and I want to send emails to these paid folks. And so I started looking around and basically what I discovered is I could launch a paid podcast through Hello Audio and use zaps to have emails go to people. But I've had a lot of complicated issues with Zapier in the past and wasn't thrilled with that solution. And I could set up a private podcast with Transistor, but then I didn't have the email integration that I wanted similarly, more zap issues. And then I looked into Ghost, but I couldn't figure out a clear monetization way to do this. And so I was like, if I want all of this with comments, Substack seems to be the place that's offering this. It's very easy. And what is in fact free to start on. They take a cut of your payments, as you know. So I went to Substack for that reason. I was totally aware that there also like all this stuff happening on Substack and people want to be on Substack, and it made sense from the perspective of a podcast producer. A lot of my clients were on Substack now so having more skill on the platform to understand how to do things for them also was a reason where I was, it would be good for me if I had a reason to be here to be here so that was how I decided to join Substack. I felt very aware of both the fact that they were building out more social media features. So I did an episode on Substack in the summer of 2023, I think. Where I was very clear that y'all, this is becoming social media. They're building in followers. Way back then, I was very clear on this. So that felt very clear to me, but I still think that the core functionality has been built around email. And you can opt out of using the app or notes and then you basically are not getting much of the social media functionality. You're doing something much more like blogging with comments and tags. And so I'm here to say it is social media in its own ways, but I think that I had a use case that made it make sense for me. And another core factor there is that you can take your audience and leave. So I could transfer my audience, including transferring all their paid subscriptions elsewhere. And that's something where when I look at building on another platform, I wouldn't do if I couldn't do that. It's a reason I wouldn't build on LinkedIn. You can't export your audience from LinkedIn either. So I think it's important to have that be a part of it. And that's part of how I decide. I also just think that I don't rely on Substack for any discovery. I have a paid newsletter. I never send out free newsletters. That's actually about to change. There's gonna be one free one, but like it's only for paid people. I have over 500 free subscribers I think now, but I give them nothing. I can see that Substack is trying to send people to me, but I'm not there to build an audience. I build audiences on platforms that I can have more ownership of or take where I want them to go. I don't build audiences and spaces that are so platform mediated. And I would say Substack is that. So I'm not there to build an audience. I'm there to send this paid newsletter with this functionality. And maybe that will change. I could imagine that changing, but that's a lot of thoughts on my current decision to be there.
Becky Mollenkamp: Yeah, it sounds like ultimately, here we go again. Intentionality. Your decision process, it sounds like, it's about intentionality and if you think it through and it meets your intentions, your needs, then then that's fine. And I think the big thing is probably watching for when it may, if it ever does shift to that place where it's no longer doing that. Or the bad is now outweighing that. Because as we know, like those things they start. like the frog in the water. They're boiling you. They just do it nice and slow. They're cranking up that heat where suddenly you wake up one day and you're like, my gosh, now I'm as addicted to Substack as I was to whatever. And we have to watch for those things then. So that makes a lot of sense.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, absolutely. And I will just end by saying, I still get hooked. Like, do I think about starting a personal newsletter on Substack? I don't know, once a day? Yes. Every single day, I'm like, I should try to build a following. I think at the core of so much of that is I just want to get paid to be me and share my thoughts online. And Substack promises us that. And it's just not real for most of us, or not feasible for most of us. And I just always have to pull myself back from it. I appreciate your emphasis on my intentionality and it's very true. And I try to only act with intention, but do I have the same feeling so many other people do? Do I have that desire to just launch a Substack and have it suddenly have tens of thousands of followers and paid subscribers? Yeah, I want that. I've just learned over and over and over again that following that hooked feeling takes me nowhere I want to go. And so I try to pull myself back and recenter and what do I actually want? What are the things I'm willing to do to get there? And how can I act in alignment in those ways, over and over and over again.
Becky Mollenkamp: Well, thank you for that. My feeling as I'm exiting this conversation is I have for about three months been saying and real soon, any minute now, I'm going to switch my Instagram to a nine grid. I just want to put something up that is static, that still serves me by pointing people to places, but I don't want to be engaged there anymore. So I'm going to make a commitment to myself that by the time this runs, that nine grid will be there. So if you're listening, Hold me accountable. Go see if I've done it. Because if I haven't, tell me I need to because I or I'll never release it.
Amelia Hruby: Or this episode comes out in 18 months. It's okay.
Becky Mollenkamp: Amelia, sorry. I hope you never want anyone to hear this because I will never. No, I really want to get it done. I have it designed, I just need to do it. So anyway, that's my commitment because I'm not ready to say I'm going to leave it all. And I don't think you're telling people they have to leave it all. I know that's not at all what it is. It's about that intention and understanding for yourself. And I definitely know I am at that place with Instagram where I feel like this is not serving me in any way. And in fact, I find it a bit detracting from my life. So it's time to say goodbye in the way that makes sense, too, because, like you said, it doesn't have to look a certain way to exit. So thank you for this. We're going to have a bonus conversation about passion projects. We're going to end really quickly by having you share a resource, a book or something that's been helpful, maybe on this journey, maybe not.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, so I think just what I've been reading recently has been adrienne maree brown's new book, “Loving Corrections.” And there is an essay in there about social media that I thought was really interesting. So that's the resource that I want to offer in this moment.
Becky Mollenkamp: I haven't read her new one yet. I haven't even ordered it yet and I need to do that because I love adrienne maree brown. So thank you for that. And then an organization that's doing good work in the world that you'd like to highlight.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, so I am always trying to talk more about Black and Pink, which is an organization that coordinates pen pal exchanges for BIPOC folks who are incarcerated, particularly from LGBTQIA plus communities. They actually are headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, which is near where I live, but their chapters are all over the United States. And I have a pen pal who I've been corresponding with for I think about five years now and it's just sort of an organization that's really important to me and does a lot of good work around abolition and around sentencing and prison abolition and just so much more.
Becky Mollenkamp: I will link to that in the show notes. So thank you so much for being here, Amelia. I really appreciate it. This is awesome.
Amelia Hruby: Thanks, Becky. So grateful for you and everything you do in the world.