The Marketing Underdog — I Am Documenting What Happens When You Build Without the Conventional Tools

May 31

I have been thinking about how to document this properly.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Kim Kardashian and her very reasonable opinion that if you are not using social media to build your business you are doing something wrong. I set a reminder on my phone. Six months. I want to know what happens when someone with a business degree and a marketing degree and a very strong preference for not performing online tries to build an author brand the honest way.

That experiment needed a name.

The Marketing Underdog.

Once a month I am going to report back. What I did, what worked, what did not, what the numbers actually are, and one thing I learned that I did not know when the month started.

Here is what the series is about and why I am doing it.

I write about change. I write about identity migration and what happens to people when their lives move faster than their sense of self can keep up with. I have three books out. I have a business degree and a marketing degree and I have read more research papers than any person voluntarily should. And I chose to demarket. One email a month, no sequences, no funnels, no urgency that is not actually urgent.

The conventional wisdom, the data, the industry, and Kim Kardashian all agree that I am doing this wrong.

I am about to find out.

Every month I will tell you exactly what actions I took to build the brand. What content went live, what professional outreach happened, what the Instagram follower count is, what the email list looks like, what the blog traffic is doing, what sold and what did not. The real numbers, not the ones that make me look good but the ones that are actually true.

And at the end of every post one learning. One sentence. The thing the month actually taught me about building something without the conventional tools.

I am not doing this to prove Kim Kardashian wrong. She is probably right. I am doing this because I genuinely want to know whether honest consistent specific writing in a defined territory can build an author brand without a social media machine behind it. And I want to know it publicly so that anyone else building something alone can see what it actually looks like from the inside.

In the next few days I am going to publish the first episode. More a starting line than a report. Where I am right now, the numbers as they actually stand today, and the specific things I am putting in place so that next month I have something real to measure.

Think of it as the before photo. Except instead of a photo it is a spreadsheet and instead of a gym it is the internet and instead of a personal trainer it is a business degree and a very stubborn personality.

Episode one coming in the next few days.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

The Marketing Underdog — I Am Documenting What Happens When You Build Without the Conventional Tools

The Marketing Underdog — Episode One: The Starting Line

I Submitted the Book for the Print Test. Then I Ate an Entire Bag of Chocolate Covered Pretzels.