Working for the feed

A woman in Dubai makes granola in small batches: oats toasted slowly, nuts, a little cardamom, a recipe she spent a year getting right. She sells it to a few hundred people who buy a jar, then another, then ask for one to give away.

Everyone has advice for her. Post every day, whatever it is. Use the words people type into search boxes. Copy the formats that are doing well this month. Film the pour, the crunch, the slow-motion spoon, because that is what gets pushed. It does not matter whether it is good, as long as there is a lot of it.

Some of this works, for someone, for a while. It works when you are early, before everyone else has heard the same advice. It works when you are happy to sit in the middle of the road with everyone else. And it works when you can produce more than anyone else, for as long as the rules stay still, which is never long.

Somebody wins that game. The odds say it will not be her.

The other path is less comfortable. Make the granola so particular that the people who love it cannot stop talking about it. Write to her customers as people rather than as reach. Let others chase the numbers. Be the jar a guest brings to a friend's house and insists everyone try.

That path does not ask what the feed wants today. It asks who she is baking for, and where she hopes to take them.

When every seller is following the same instructions, the instructions are the crowd. The question worth sitting with is a plain one: is she working for the machine that ranks her, or for the people who open the jar at breakfast?