Operating Habits: Week 3 — The Platform Verdict
How to Use Your Own Data to Decide Which Platforms Deserve Your Time — And Which Ones Should Wait
We sold out 100 seats in the Operating Founder program in two weeks. The demand and excitement blew me away, and my learning so far showed me something important about what is most valuable to the community we’re building.
So I’m doing something I didn’t originally plan.
Every Friday, starting this week, I’m hosting a 60-minute live Zoom session solely for Operating Founders. Here’s what you get if you become a Founder:
→ Behind the scenes of everything I’m building. I’m documenting the construction of Operating by John Brewton in real time — the strategy, the mistakes, the pivots, all of it.
→ Live content creation tutorials. I’ll show you exactly how I create my content, all the tools, the process, the thinking behind every format and platform decision.
→ My actual content performance and growth data. I’ll walk through the same Google Sheets I use to track my own performance. No curated screenshots. The real numbers, live.
→ Blank templates of every asset I use — yours to download and use immediately.
→ 20 minutes of open Q&A every session. Anything related to building your creator business, growing your personal brand, or scaling your social following. No question is off-limits.
I’ll also be inviting special guest speakers and friends of mine, once a month, who have deep niches expertise in everything from specific platform growth strategies, content design, creator business building strategies and all the tools and operational components you need to get the job done.
For $99, you get a front row seat to how I do everything I do, while I’m doing it, for 52 consecutive weeks.
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[Become an Operating Founder →]
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You spent Week 1 getting your hands on the numbers. Week 2 taught you to interpret them every Friday with the Friday Forensic. This week, we zoom out one level.
The question is no longer “What happened this week?” or “What should I do differently next week?”
The question is: Which platforms actually earn their keep? Not which you enjoy most. Not which your favorite creator swears by. Not which you’ve been on since 2019 and feel weird about leaving.
Which ones, according to your data, produce the highest return on the most constrained resource you have, your time?
In This Week’s Issue
Previously in Operating Habits — Catch up on Weeks 1 & 2 and the assets you need before starting
Start Here — Why macro creator economy stats are useless to you
The Problem You Probably Don’t Realize You Have — Spreading thin, anchoring to memories, and the hidden context-switching tax
The Mindset Shift — You’re not a creator on platforms. You’re a company allocating resources across distribution channels.
What You’re Building — Two tools: the Platform Efficiency Scorecard (Excel) and the Platform Verdict Worksheet (Word)
Pass 1: The Time Audit — Where do your hours actually go?
Pass 2: The Growth Audit — Where is real growth coming from?
Pass 3: The Revenue Audit — Follow the money and calculate your RPM-F
Pass 4: The Platform Verdict — Stay, Sunset, or Experiment: three decisions that change your allocation
The Relationship Layer — Which platforms generate your highest-quality relationships?
The Weekly + Monthly Rhythm — How daily, weekly, and monthly habits stack together
This Week’s Assignment — Your seven deliverables by Friday
The creator economy is projected to reach somewhere between $200 billion and $480 billion by the end of 2027, depending on who’s counting. There are over 200 million content creators worldwide. Forty-five percent of full-time creators plan to expand to YouTube in 2026. Forty-one percent plan to expand to Instagram and TikTok equally.
I share those numbers for one reason,
To make a point about how useless they are to you.
The macro trends tell you where the industry is going. They tell you nothing about where your business should go. Every creator has a different audience, a different niche, a different skillset, and a wildly different relationship with their time. The person who built their newsletter on Substack and their network on LinkedIn is operating a fundamentally different company than the person who built their following on TikTok and monetizes through YouTube ad revenue.
And yet, when creators decide where to spend their hours, they almost never consult their own data. They consult vibes. They consult what worked for someone who has 500,000 more followers than they do. They consult the platform that gave them a dopamine hit last Tuesday.
Operators don’t do this. Operators treat platforms the way a CFO treats business units: every one needs to justify its existence with data, or it gets restructured.
That’s what we’re doing this week.
- j -
Most creators are on too many platforms. Not because the math supports it, but because they’re afraid of missing out.
Two predictable failure modes drive this.
The first is spreading thin. You maintain four or five platforms, posting on all of them, engaging on all of them, reformatting content for all of them. You’re technically “present” everywhere but dominant nowhere. Your content is a B-minus on every platform instead of an A on two.
The second is anchoring to a memory. You went semi-viral on Twitter eighteen months ago, so you keep investing three hours a day there even though your follower growth has flatlined and nobody clicks through to your newsletter. You’re not making a strategic decision. You’re honoring a sunk cost.
But the biggest problem — the one almost nobody talks about — is the context-switching tax.
Every platform has its own native language. LinkedIn rewards professional authority. TikTok rewards pattern interrupts and raw energy. Substack rewards depth and trust. Instagram rewards visual storytelling and aesthetic consistency. Twitter rewards speed, wit, and hot takes.
Each one you maintain is a cognitive overhead line item. You’re not just spending time creating and posting. You’re spending mental energy shifting between voices, formats, audience expectations, and platform norms. That switching cost is invisible in your analytics. It’s enormous in your output quality.
If you’re on four platforms and spending roughly equal time on each, you’re probably operating at about 60% of your potential on all of them. If you went all-in on two, you’d operate at 90% — and you’d have hours back every week to spend on the activities that actually compound: writing, thinking, building relationships, and creating products.
The goal this week isn’t to quit every platform. It’s to make the allocation decision consciously, with data, instead of drifting into it by default.
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Here’s the frame I want you to hold for this entire exercise:
You are not a “content creator on platforms.” You are a company allocating resources across distribution channels.
The question is not “Should I be on TikTok?” The question is: “Given my finite hours, which channels produce the highest return on time invested — measured in business outcomes, not vanity metrics?”
A Fortune 500 company doesn’t stay in a market because it “feels right.” It stays because the unit economics justify the allocation. If a product line consumes 25% of operating budget and delivers 8% of revenue, someone in the C-suite asks hard questions.
You should be asking the same questions about your platforms. This week gives you the tools to do it.
You’re building one system with two components. This mirrors the Week 2 structure — one data engine, one thinking surface.
Component 1: Platform Efficiency Scorecard
Download Excel / Google Sheet Here →
This is a dedicated analytical tool with five tabs:
Platform Summary Dashboard. This pulls and summarizes your data from the Daily Log you’ve been maintaining since Week 1. It auto-calculates totals and averages per platform: total posts, total impressions, total follower/subscriber growth, total engagement (likes, comments, shares, saves), and total time invested.
Time Investment Audit. For each platform, you’ll track three categories of time: Creation (writing, filming, designing, editing), Distribution (posting, scheduling, cross-posting, reformatting), and Engagement (responding to comments, DMs, community management). The tab calculates your Total Weekly Hours per platform and your percentage of total time allocated to each.
Growth Efficiency Matrix. This is the analytical core. For each platform, it calculates: follower/subscriber growth per hour invested, follower/subscriber growth per post, impressions per hour, and engagement rate per post. These are your efficiency ratios — the numbers that tell you whether a platform is earning its keep or coasting on habit.
Revenue Attribution Log. For each platform, you track: paid subscriber conversions sourced (or best estimate), client or customer inquiries originated, collaboration or partnership opportunities sourced, email list additions driven, and any direct revenue (affiliate, sponsorship, product sales) attributable to that channel.
Platform Decision Log. A running record of your Stay, Sunset, and Experiment decisions each month, with results tracked at the next review. This is your institutional memory — the record that prevents you from re-litigating the same platform debate every quarter.
🚗 Download: “Week 3 – Platform Efficiency Scorecard” (Excel) 🚗
Component 2: Platform Verdict Worksheet
Download Word / Google Doc here →
This is your thinking surface — a one-page worksheet you fill in alongside the Friday Forensic. Unlike the Friday Forensic (which is weekly), the Platform Verdict runs monthly, on the first Friday of each month.
It walks you through four passes:
Pass 1: The Time Audit — Where Do Your Hours Actually Go?
Pass 2: The Growth Audit — Where Is Real Growth Coming From?
Pass 3: The Revenue Audit — Follow the Money
Pass 4: The Platform Verdict — Stay, Sunset, or Experiment
Download: “Week 3 – Platform Verdict Worksheet” (Google Doc / Word)
Your goal this week isn’t to optimize every platform. It’s to make a resource allocation decision you can defend with data.
Pass 1: The Time Audit
Where Do Your Hours Actually Go?
Most creators dramatically underestimate how much time they spend on their “secondary” platforms. Scrolling disguised as research. Engagement loops that start as “I’ll just reply to a few comments” and end 45 minutes later. Reformatting a LinkedIn post for Twitter, then tweaking the hook for Instagram, then cropping the image for Threads.
It adds up. And because nobody tracks it, nobody sees it.
This pass forces visibility.
Open the Time Investment Audit tab. For each platform you’re active on, estimate your weekly hours in three categories:
Creation — the time you spend writing, filming, designing, and editing content specifically for this platform. Not repurposing. Original creation.
Distribution — the time you spend posting, scheduling, cross-posting, and reformatting content from other platforms to fit this one.
Engagement — the time you spend in the comments, in DMs, in community management, responding, initiating conversations, and maintaining relationships on this platform.
Add them up. Then calculate the percentage of your total weekly content hours that each platform consumes.
On your worksheet, fill in the summary: Platform, Weekly Hours, and Percentage of Total Time.
Here’s what you’ll almost certainly discover: one platform is consuming 30 to 40 percent of your time while delivering under 15 percent of your growth. That’s your resource leak. It might be the platform you enjoy most. It might be the one you’ve been on longest. It doesn’t matter. The numbers don’t care about your nostalgia.
Write it down. We’ll come back to it.
Pass 2: The Growth Audit
Where Is Real Growth Coming From?
Now open your Weekly Summary and Platform Comparison tabs from the Content Performance Tracker v2.0 you built in Week 2. You’ve got at least two weeks of data — more if you’ve been diligent.
For each platform, calculate three numbers:
Average weekly follower or subscriber growth. Sum total growth over the period, divide by number of weeks.
Growth per hour invested. Divide total follower/subscriber growth by total hours spent on that platform. This is your single most important efficiency metric.
Growth per post. Divide total follower/subscriber growth by number of posts. This tells you whether more posting actually delivers more growth — or whether you’ve hit diminishing returns.
Fill these into the Growth Efficiency Matrix tab.
Then make one crucial distinction. Separate your platforms into two categories:
Primary growth engines — platforms where new people discover you for the first time. These are the channels feeding your top of funnel. For most creators, this is one, maybe two platforms. It’s the place where strangers become followers.
Secondary platforms — places where existing followers also follow you, but rarely discover you for the first time. These are echo chambers, not growth engines. They might serve a retention or deepening function, but they’re not building your audience.
On your worksheet, label each platform as Primary or Secondary.
Then ask yourself one question and write down the answer: If I could only be on two platforms, which two would I choose based purely on growth-per-hour data?
Not based on which ones are trendy. Not based on where your friends are. Based on the math.
That answer is the starting point for your verdict.
Pass 3: The Revenue Audit — Follow the Money
Most creators skip this pass because the attribution is messy. A follower discovers you on LinkedIn, reads your newsletter for three months, then buys your course after you mention it in a Substack post. Which platform gets credit?
Do it anyway. Even imperfectly.
Perfect attribution is a fantasy that Fortune 500 companies with million-dollar analytics budgets still can’t achieve. You don’t need perfect. You need directionally correct. You need to know, roughly, where the money comes from.
For each platform, track five things in the Revenue Attribution Log:
Paid subscriber conversions. How many people converted to paid subscribers, and what was their entry point? Did they come from a LinkedIn post that linked to Substack? A TikTok that mentioned the newsletter? Track your best estimate.
Client or customer inquiries. If you offer services, consulting, coaching, or products — where do people first find you before reaching out? Ask them. Add a “How did you find me?” question to your intake. You’ll be surprised how often the answer isn’t the platform you assumed.
Collaboration and partnership opportunities. Which platforms generate inbound opportunities — podcast invitations, co-creation offers, guest posts, joint ventures?
Email list additions. Which platforms drive the most sign-ups to your owned list? This matters more than follower counts because email is the one channel you actually own.
Direct revenue. Any affiliate income, sponsorship deals, product sales, or other revenue you can trace (even loosely) to a specific platform.
Now calculate what I call Revenue per Thousand Followers — or RPM-F — for each platform. Take total estimated revenue sourced from that platform, divide by total followers on that platform, and multiply by 1,000.
This number will be humbling. And clarifying.
The platform with the most followers is almost never the platform generating the most revenue. You might have 25,000 followers on Instagram and 8,000 on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn drives 10x the business outcomes because the audience is there with professional intent. Instagram might look impressive in a media kit, and depending on your business, that could be what’s most important.
LinkedIn is what’s actually paying the bills.
On your worksheet, write down the RPM-F for each platform. Circle the highest one. That platform deserves more of your time than it’s currently getting.
Pass 4: The Platform Verdict
Stay, Sunset, or Experiment
You now have three data sets: where your time goes, where your growth comes from, and where your money comes from. Time to make decisions.
Three categories. This parallels the Kill / Keep / Double framework from Week 2, but applied at the platform level.
STAY — Your Primary Platforms
These are your one or two platforms where growth, revenue, and time investment all justify continued full effort. These get the majority of your creative energy. You create original content here. You engage deeply here. You think about this audience when you’re planning your editorial calendar.
For most solo creators, the answer is two platforms — rarely more. One for discovery (where new people find you) and one for depth (where you build trust, authority, and monetize). For many of you reading this, that’s LinkedIn plus Substack, or YouTube plus an email list, or TikTok plus a community platform.
On your worksheet, name your Stay platforms and write one sentence about why the data supports the decision.
SUNSET — Deprioritize, Don’t Delete
These are the platforms you’re going to deliberately move to maintenance mode. Not delete your account. Not announce a dramatic departure. Just quietly reduce your investment.
Maintenance mode means: repurpose content only, minimal engagement, no original creation. You’re keeping a presence but reclaiming the hours. If a platform was consuming eight hours a week and delivering marginal growth and near-zero revenue, you just freed up eight hours for your Stay platforms.
Name the platform. Write one sentence about why the data supports the decision. Then — and this is the hard part — actually stop spending time there. Block the app if you have to. Set a 10-minute daily timer. Whatever it takes.
EXPERIMENT — The 30-Day Test
One platform gets a structured, time-boxed experiment. Maybe it’s a platform you’ve been curious about but haven’t committed to. Maybe it’s one you’ve been on casually and want to test seriously.
Define the experiment in advance with three things:
The investment: How many hours per week will you spend? What content will you create?
The success criteria: What specific outcome would justify continuing? Be concrete. “If I gain 500 followers and drive 50 newsletter sign-ups in 30 days, I continue. If not, I sunset.”
The review date: Exactly 30 days from today. Put it in your calendar. No extensions. No “let me give it one more week.” Thirty days, then the verdict.
Record all three decisions in the Platform Decision Log with the date. Next month, when you run the Platform Verdict again, you’ll review the results.
The Relationship Layer
Before you close the worksheet, one more question.
Which platforms are generating your highest-quality relationship opportunities?
Go back to the Relationship Log you started in Week 2. Look at the Platform column for each new contact. Where are your best conversations happening? Where are the DMs that turn into Zoom coffees? Where are the comments that turn into collaborations?
Some platforms drive impressions. Some drive conversations. The ones driving conversations are almost always worth more than their raw numbers suggest — because relationships compound in ways that impressions never do.
If a platform ranks low on growth and revenue but high on relationship quality, that’s worth factoring into your verdict. Not as a veto — you still need to be disciplined about time — but as a data point. A platform that consistently introduces you to people who become collaborators, clients, or genuine friends has a value that doesn’t show up in a follower count.
Tag each contact in your Relationship Log with their platform of origin. Over time, this becomes your most valuable platform signal — the one nobody else is tracking.
Here’s the operating cadence you’re building, layered across Weeks 1 through 3:
Daily (5–10 minutes): Continue the Week 1 logging habit. Every morning, log yesterday’s posts into the Daily Log tab.
Weekly — Every Friday (15 minutes): Run the Friday Forensic from Week 2. Five passes. Kill, Keep, Double decisions. Update the Outlier Log and Relationship Log.
Monthly — First Friday of Each Month (30 minutes): Run the Platform Verdict on top of your regular Friday Forensic. Update the Time Investment Audit, Growth Efficiency Matrix, and Revenue Attribution Log. Make your Stay, Sunset, and Experiment decisions.
The monthly cadence matters. Platform data is noisy week-to-week. A single viral post can make a mediocre platform look brilliant. A bad week can make your best platform look broken. You need at least three or four weeks of data before making allocation decisions that involve shifting real hours from one channel to another.
Don’t rush this. The Friday Forensic handles your tactical week-to-week adjustments. The Platform Verdict handles your strategic resource allocation. They work together, but they operate on different time horizons — and respecting that difference is what separates operators from reactors.
By Friday, your job is to:
Set up the Platform Efficiency Scorecard with all five tabs
Download and save your Platform Verdict Worksheet template
Complete a full Time Audit for the past two to three weeks (best estimate is fine — precision improves over time)
Calculate Growth per Hour and Growth per Post for each platform
Estimate your Revenue per Thousand Followers (RPM-F) for each platform
Make one STAY, one SUNSET, and one EXPERIMENT decision
Update your Relationship Log with platform-of-origin tags for every contact
Then, if you want to commit, reply in the comments or just in your notebook:
“I’ve run my first Platform Verdict. I’m going all-in on ____, sunsetting ____, and testing ____ for 30 days.”
That sentence is worth more than a hundred hours of half-hearted multi-platform content. It’s the moment you stop spreading yourself thin and start concentrating your effort where the data says it matters.
Week 1 put your hands on the numbers.
Week 2 taught your brain to interpret them and act.
Week 3 forced a resource allocation decision across your platforms.
Next week, we build the content engine itself: content pillars and editorial planning — how to build a repeatable system so you stop waking up every morning asking “What should I post today?” and start executing against a plan that compounds.
- j -
If you found this useful, share it with a creator friend who’s still posting on five platforms and wondering why none of them are working. And if you’re a paid subscriber, your Week 3 templates are waiting in the archive.
Just finding this series? Start from the beginning — each week builds on the last: Week 1: The Daily Content Performance Tracker → Week 2: The Friday Forensic → Week 3 (this post).
All templates and assets are available to paid subscribers in the archive.
We sold out 100 seats in the Live 1:1 Operating Sessions, Operating Founder program in two weeks.
Now, every Friday, I’m hosting a 60-minute live Zoom session for all Operating Founders — behind the scenes of everything I’m building, live content creation tutorials, my real performance data walked through in real time, blank templates of every asset I use, and 20 minutes of open Q&A on anything related to building your creator business (that’s 52 live group sessions for $99).
That’s 52 live sessions with your Operating Founder cohort piers who you can build collaborative relationships with to leverage your collective brilliance and massive diversity of experiences to build even more amazing businesses in the time ahead.
I’m documenting the building of Operating by John Brewton in 2026 and want to help as many Substack creators and writers building their businesses as possible.
For $99, you get a front row seat.
[Become an Operating Founder →]
John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a PhD student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm, asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and every day, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.