Rosebay willowherb is a pioneer species. After a fire, after a bomb, after the earth has been scraped bare — willowherb is the first thing that grows. It doesn’t need perfect conditions. It colonises rubble, broken concrete, wasteland. And in doing so, it changes the soil. Fixes nitrogen. Builds organic matter. Creates the conditions for everything that follows — the grasses, the shrubs, the trees.
Your first customers are pioneers. They show up before the testimonials exist, before the website is polished, before anyone else has heard of you. They tolerate rough ground. And their willingness to trust you early is what makes the next wave possible. Their reviews, their word-of-mouth, their stories of transformation — that’s the soil.
Honour them. They’re building your ecosystem before you’ve earned it.
There’s one more thing the pioneers need, and the people who sell platforms won’t like it.
Email is SMTP protocol. Part of the internet’s plumbing. Not owned by a corporation. Not subject to an algorithm. The only true owned asset you have.
I tried Substack for seven months. Loved the writing. Then I saw the bars on the cage: ten percent of everything you earn, playing for their investors, locked inside a gilded platform. I quit and went back to owning my own infrastructure.
My field guide has sold 65,000 copies. Every live event since 2010 — fully booked. Online courses — thousands sold. Live webinars sell out in days. I used my email list.
The punk principle from the fanzine still holds: own your platform, own your audience, own your distribution. Build on your own soil and the plant is perennial. Build on someone else’s land and you’re Himalayan balsam — explosive, impressive, dead by winter.
But owning your infrastructure only works if you’ve done the foundation work first. A beautiful Shopify store with unclear messaging is a very expensive shop that nobody walks into. The infrastructure amplifies whatever’s underneath.
When I added Facebook ads and started selling direct through Shopify, my Amazon sales doubled. That makes no sense if you think in funnels. Marketing is an ecosystem, not a pipeline. Actions on one side create ripple effects somewhere you didn’t plan for. In a web. Like mycorrhiza.
The infrastructure doesn’t create the growth. The roots do. The infrastructure just gives them somewhere to grow.