Assume Bugs: A Smarter Social Media System for Solos

Most solopreneurs quit a social media strategy right before it starts working—because they expected it to work cleanly the first time.

Social media marketing for small business owners is basically one long experiment: your hook lands one week and flops the next, an algorithm update changes distribution overnight, or a “simple” content idea turns into a mess of unclear positioning and low engagement. If your mental model is “post the right thing and get rewarded,” you’ll feel like you’re failing.

There’s a better mental model: assume bugs. Not “assume you’re bad at marketing.” Assume the system—your offer, your content, your tracking, your audience assumptions—will have issues you can only see once it’s in motion. This mindset shift makes you faster, calmer, and a lot more consistent.

“I’m done,” is not nearly as useful as, “this milestone has been reached, let’s go find some bugs.”

This post is part of the Small Business Social Media USA series, and it’s about building a social media engine you can run without a team—by treating your marketing like iterative product development.

“Assume bugs” is the only sane way to market solo

Answer first: If you assume bugs, you stop treating every underperforming post as a verdict on your ability—and start treating it as diagnostic data.

Seth Godin’s point (from the original “Assume bugs” essay) is simple: if you start with a “get a good grade” mindset, you’ll avoid mistakes, avoid uncertainty, and avoid projects that aren’t guaranteed to look perfect. For a solopreneur, that perfectionism isn’t a personality trait—it’s a growth cap.

Social platforms reward volume and learning. You don’t get learning without shipping. And you don’t get shipping if your goal is to avoid the red pen.

A practical reframe I’ve found useful:

• Marketing milestones aren’t finish lines. They’re checkpoints.
• “It didn’t work” is rarely true. More often, it worked enough to show you what’s broken.

The three kinds of “bugs” that hit solopreneurs

Answer first: Most social media problems fall into three buckets: message bugs, measurement bugs, and system bugs.

1. Message bugs (what you say): unclear niche, weak hook, wrong pain point, too many offers at once.
2. Measurement bugs (what you track): optimizing for likes instead of leads, no attribution, inconsistent baselines.
3. System bugs (how you operate): inconsistent posting, no content pipeline, no follow-up process, no way to turn attention into email subscribers.

When you assume bugs, you stop asking “Why am I bad at Instagram/LinkedIn/TikTok?” and start asking “Which bug is most expensive right now?”

The “high school mindset” is why your content feels so exhausting

Answer first: Perfectionism makes social media feel emotionally risky, which increases procrastination and decreases useful experimentation.

A lot of solopreneurs approach content like homework: get it right, don’t look foolish, hope the teacher (the algorithm) approves. That mindset leads to:

• Over-editing captions for an hour that no one reads
• Avoiding video because you might stumble
• Posting only when you have something “big” to announce
• Starting and stopping platforms every few months

The irony is that social media marketing for small business owners is built on iteration. Your early posts are supposed to be a little off. They’re supposed to show you where the friction is.

A January reality check (and why it matters)

Answer first: January is when consistency breaks—so make your system resilient to “bugs” like low motivation and shifting schedules.

It’s January 2026. A lot of small businesses start the year with a posting plan that collapses by week three, usually because it depended on motivation instead of process. Assuming bugs means you plan for:

• weeks when client work spikes
• weeks when your content ideas dry up
• weeks when your reach drops for no obvious reason

If your plan can’t survive a bad week, it wasn’t a plan. It was a hope.

Build a “bug-hunting” workflow for small business social media

Answer first: The best solopreneur workflow is a loop: publish → review → fix one thing → publish again.

Here’s a simple system you can run in under 60 minutes per week, even if you’re doing everything yourself.

Step 1: Choose one platform metric that actually maps to leads

Answer first: Track a metric that predicts business outcomes, not dopamine.

Pick one primary metric per platform for a 30-day cycle:

• Instagram: profile visits → link clicks
• LinkedIn: profile views → connection requests → DMs
• TikTok: average watch time (not views) → profile taps
• YouTube Shorts: retention → subscribers

Then pick one lead metric:

• email signups
• consult calls booked
• product trial starts

If you don’t have a clear lead action, your measurement is bugged by default.

Step 2: Run weekly “bug reports” (15 minutes)

Answer first: A weekly bug report turns messy performance into clear decisions.

Every Friday (or whatever day you can stick to), answer these:

1. What posted this week got above-average reach? (List 1–2 posts)
2. What got above-average saves/shares/comments? (List 1–2 posts)
3. What drove profile visits or clicks? (Often different from #1)
4. What felt easy to produce? (Sustainability matters)
5. What’s one hypothesis to test next week?

That’s it. No dramatic pivots. Just one hypothesis.

Example hypotheses that are actually testable:

• “If I open with the outcome (‘How I got 12 leads in 10 days’) instead of the topic (‘Lead gen tips’), retention will improve.”
• “If I add a clearer CTA to comment ‘CHECKLIST,’ I’ll increase DM conversations.”
• “If I post three times a week instead of five, quality will improve and saves will stay flat.”

Step 3: Fix the biggest bug, not every bug

Answer first: Focus wins because marketing bugs interact—fixing the wrong one wastes weeks.

Solopreneurs don’t lose because they’re not working hard. They lose because they spread effort across too many micro-fixes.

Use this quick ranking:

• Impact: If fixed, will this materially increase leads or sales?
• Confidence: Do you have enough evidence to believe it’s real?
• Effort: Can you test it in 7 days?

Pick the highest-impact, highest-confidence, lowest-effort fix.

One-liner to remember: A bug you can fix this week beats a bug you can debate for a month.

Three “Assume Bugs” plays that speed up growth

Answer first: These three practices create fast feedback without burning you out.

1) Treat content like versioning: v1, v2, v3

Answer first: Reposting improved ideas beats constantly inventing new ones.

Most small business owners pressure themselves to create a brand-new concept every post. That’s not how audiences learn, and it’s not how you learn either.

Try this:

• Take your best-performing post from the last 60 days.
• Rework it into three versions:
  • a tighter hook
  • a different format (carousel → short video, or thread → graphic)
  • a different angle (mistake → checklist → case story)

If versioning feels “lazy,” that’s the high school mindset talking.

2) Assume your CTA is bugged until proven otherwise

Answer first: Most content fails at the last inch: it doesn’t tell the right people what to do next.

A solopreneur social media strategy should always answer: What’s the next step for someone who agrees with me?

Strong CTAs don’t have to be pushy. They have to be specific:

• “Comment ‘TEMPLATE’ and I’ll DM it.”
• “Grab the checklist—link in bio.”
• “If you’re in the U.S. and selling services, DM me ‘AUDIT’ and I’ll send 3 fixes.”

If you post helpful content with no next step, you’re building attention you can’t capture.

3) Build one “debug” ritual for comments and DMs

Answer first: Engagement is customer research in disguise—if you document it.

When someone comments “This is me” or DMs “How do I do this?”, that’s not just engagement. It’s a signal about:

• what they really want
• what they’re confused about
• what words they use to describe the problem

Keep a running note called Audience Bugs and paste:

• exact phrases people use
• objections (“I don’t have time to post”)
• recurring questions

Those phrases become your future hooks and offers. That’s how you tighten your message without guessing.

Common solopreneur questions (and straight answers)

“How long should I test a social media strategy before changing it?”

Answer first: Test one variable for 2–4 weeks, unless something is clearly broken (like the wrong audience or no CTA).

If you change everything every week, you’ll never know what worked. Keep your platform, cadence, and content pillars stable for a month, then iterate.

“What if my content is good but reach is down?”

Answer first: Assume a distribution bug, not a value bug—and double down on retention and shares.

Platforms fluctuate. When reach dips, focus on:

• stronger first lines (hook)
• tighter edits (cut 20% of words)
• more shareable structures (checklists, scripts, before/after)

“How do I do this without posting every day?”

Answer first: Consistency beats frequency. Two strong posts a week plus one engagement block can outperform daily posting.

For most service-based solopreneurs, a sustainable baseline is:

• 2 posts/week
• 15 minutes, 3x/week replying to comments/DMs
• 1 weekly bug report

If your system is reliable, you can scale output later.

The point isn’t to avoid bugs—it’s to hunt the right ones

Social media marketing for small business owners gets dramatically easier when you stop expecting “flawless” and start expecting “informative.” The work isn’t pretending your strategy has no bugs. The work is eagerly seeking out the most important ones—the ones blocking clarity, trust, and leads.

Try this for the next 14 days: ship content with the explicit goal of finding one bug. Not going viral. Not impressing peers. Finding the bottleneck.

What’s the most likely bug in your current social media system—message, measurement, or operations—and what would you test next week to prove it?