I had my most viral Threads post yesterday, currently sitting at

30.1K likes, 489k views and 2.3K comments

At the time of writing this, the below was posted 23h ago:

I’m from Australia where tipping culture is not a thing.

I’ve heard Americans say “don’t go out if you can’t afford to tip staff”.

Here it’s “don’t start a business if you can’t afford to pay your workers”.

Where do you stand?

The idea came when my wife and I were waiting for our Indonesian food this last Friday night.

She asks me about tipping culture in Australia (she’s not from here originally), and mentioned how she once heard an American say “don’t go out if you can’t afford to tip staff”.

This got me worked up (as you can read in the post, lol).

So, I was quickly inspired to fire that one out before going back to impatiently waiting for my Salted Egg Indomie.

Now yes, the post barely relates to my business (which is a valuable aside lesson in and of itself—that not everything you post online has to be on-topic).

So, it didn’t get me many followers or leads, if any.

But I learned a valuable nugget.

At the time of posting, I believed my account was being shadow-banned because my posts were getting 10-40 likes per post compared to the usual 100+.

I thought this was the result of having two posts removed for spam (they weren’t spam—another aside lesson that you should always be growing your email list, because the social media algorithms can and do destroy businesses with their whimsical reviews)—I still don’t know whether this was true.

But because of that, when I shot this post off, I didn’t expect much to happen.

But then I woke up this morning to 5k likes and a bunch of replies. A couple hours later it doubled, then tripled, and now it’s officially my most viral post.

My wife says she’s the mastermind behind my most viral post, and she’s right.

When she first tried to take credit, my instinct was “but I wrote it in a way that made it engagement friendly!”—which is also true.

But therein lies the nugget, my halal creator friend 🐔

Good writing is only so valuable.

Good writing is about how you say what you have to say.

But great writing is about what you say.

Because if you have nothing worthwhile to share, it doesn’t matter how eloquently you can put it.

Nobody cares.

Allah says in the Qu’ran in Surah Al-‘Alaq [96:1-5]:

“Recite in the name of your Lord who created… Who taught by the pen—Taught man that which he knew not.”

Writing is how we preserve and spread ideas—which is the goal of being an Intentional Creator.

So yes, while my writing chops impacted the virality of this post, I have to agree with my wife—I wouldn’t have had the idea without her.

Now that's not to say my recent posts had nothing valuable—there's many factors at play including the potential shadowban—but that's not what this is about.

It's a reminder that as creators, we should always ponder this "clarifying question" (which works to get clarity in any part of your creator business):

When people see your content, what do you want them to do next?

If your answer to that question doesn’t—or, can’t—lead to revenue, then I’m sorry but you’re relying on hopes and dreams to get paid.

And from the customer’s perspective, if you don’t help them solve a problem, why should they care?

I’ll be going deeper on this question in Intentional Creator Blueprint, including examples and how you can use it to structure your offer and align your content to it.

Make sure to join the community if you want access when it’s out.

Free access is limited only to the first 100 active users (I will be removing inactive accounts soon):

​https://www.skool.com/muslimcreators/about​

As-salamu aleiykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh,

—Redim