Write This Down with Maddy Birdcage

How to stop thinking like a creator and start thinking like a founder

• Maddy Birdcage

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Tired of performing for platforms while your pipeline stays quiet?

In this episode, we press pause on the creator grind and rebuild your marketing from the ground up, using founder-first principles that actually compound. No trends. No theatrics. Just a return to what works:

Reputation over reach.
 Relationships over transactions.
 Patience over pace.
 Craft over content.
 Responsibility over forced relatability.

We share the turning point that came from real rooms. Quiet ones, where leaders move with intention, ship with pride, and protect their name with every decision. From that shift, we map out a practical path forward.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Build a message that earns trust and travels in rooms you’re not in
  • Structure your funnel with clarity; signal at the top, proof in the middle, conversions through conversation
  • Use stories, “case moments,” and crisp content to show, not just tell, your value
  • Replace the volume trap with a calm, repeatable publishing rhythm
  • Lead a personal brand like a founder, not a performer

We also unpack:

  • Why daily posting isn’t a religion
  • When to increase volume for learning
  • And when to slow down to raise the standard

Expect real examples from luxury and professional services. Plus, a weekly cadence you can implement without burning out.

If you’re ready to stop chasing spikes and start building something that lasts, this episode is your reset.

Subscribe, share with a founder who’s over the content treadmill, and leave a review with the one shift you’ll make this week.

To work with us, book your client assessment call at https://www.birdcageangeladvisors.com/hire-an-angel/

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Write This Down with Maddie Bird K. As a global marketing advisory founder, a business educator and psychology-informed strategist with a full family life and an addiction to luxury trouble, I'm here to let you into the inner working. My businesses, my family life, and my mind to show you how to live the good life. Each episode, I promise to give you practical takeaways you can take action on right away to get you closer to being that calm, growth-focused CEO in control of your business, your marketing, and your life. So make sure you write this down. Welcome back to another episode of Write This Down with Maddie Birdcage. And in today's episode, I'm gonna be going against what everyone else on the internet is saying. And I'm gonna tell you, you need to stop trying to grow your business like a creator and instead focus on being a founder, going back to some old world business values that we should be translating into online platforms. Because I don't know about you, but I have been feeling very burnt out from the constant content creation. And I've felt like my words have been maybe definitely feeling a bit empty lately. And my engagement on socials can certainly prove that. I have been a lot more inconsistent with how I show up on socials. And I feel like I've just been posting just to tick that box, just to get things out. That goes directly against everything that we teach and our framework and what we actually believe. But it's very hard when you are part of the social media game, whether you're actually creating online to promote a business or whether you are just consuming the content, it's very hard not to fall into the trap of chasing the vanity metrics, of feeling like you need to post three times a day, which is advice that we give. But I guess I kind of forgot that the reason why I encourage people to post three times a day to TikTok, especially in the beginning, is not to trick the algorithm. It's actually so you get better at your content creation. And I feel as though whether you are already posting or whether you're starting to post, I feel as though it's once you do hit that point where you understand how to make content that resonates, that lands, all you want to do is keep chasing those big numbers, those big views. And it's getting harder and harder to get those big numbers and big views. TikTok isn't rewarding creators as much as it once did. But as founders, we need to remember that we don't get paid the way that creators get paid. Creators get paid from views. They want to land brand deals, sponsorships. They monetize their content by showing ads through their organic content. And because of that, their business, the product that they're selling is literally their content. Now, as a brand, as a business, that's not how you get paid. You can't spend likes, you can't spend followers, you can't spend views. Yes, we need those things. We need exposure, and that's a normal part of marketing, visibility. But what we ultimately need, we don't care if we get seen by 200,000 people or 2,000 people. As long as we get a conversion at the end of it where 10 people feel compelled enough to go and buy from us. That is what counts. And it doesn't matter if you get 200,000 people looking at a post and 10 people convert, or 2,000 people on a post and 10 people convert. It doesn't matter. And yet these algorithms, these platforms, they have us trained to really care about those vanity metrics. But I want to reassure you, and I want to reassure myself, I guess this is a bit of an open letter to myself as well, to take a step back and to recalibrate and really to think about what we are actually doing with our social media when we are trying to use it to promote a business. I want you to think about it this way. When you're building a brand, you shouldn't be building for the weather, the weather that changes, whether it's rainy, it's sunny, it's cold, it's hot, it's windy. The weather always changes. And that's what social media platforms do. That's what digital marketing does. It always changes. That's actually why I love it. But as a business, we should be building for the climate. We should be understanding what our audiences want from us, the message that we need to be saying, regardless of what the platform is. We're not going to build a ski chalet in North Queensland just because it gets cold a few days of the year. That's building for the weather. If you're building a house in North Queensland, you're going to make sure it's protected from the rain, that it can be fully air conditioned, that it's maybe you don't have a black roof overhead, because that is the climate. It is a warm climate, even if it gets cold on those few days. So I want you to take that consideration that as a brand, you need to build for climate, not for weather. I know that we have been trained into becoming these content creation machines, and you've been sold on the importance of a personal brand. And don't get me wrong, I actually think personal brands are so, so valuable and important to founders, but there are actually two ways to build a personal brand. And people really only focus on the first. The first is the creator way, that is optimizing for reach, for volume, for entertainment, for sponsorships. But then there is the founder way, which is optimizing for reputation, for signaling, for proof, for sales. The second one is the lane that we are in. And the good news is that it's karma and it compounds. And it doesn't ask you to become an influencer, a performer, a comedian, a fashion stylist to be taken seriously. As I said, I stepped back from the social media feed for a little while because I guess a big thing for me, I didn't want to keep adding to a conversation that treats marketing like a game of stunts. I then got to spend time in rooms with people who are building things. They're actually building things that last. They were calm rooms, they were measured answers. There was no hacking the system. There were high standards that you could feel. And it really reminded me that we've let a lot slip in this rush to want to be social media creators as part of our business. We've ignored responsibility. We've ignored craft. We've ignored patience. We've ignored relationship building. And we've ignored focusing on our reputation. Now, they aren't just offline ideas. They actually very clearly translate online when you raise the bar with how you are approaching your digital marketing. And that is really what this episode is about. I'm going to name the problem very plainly how social turned marketers and brands into performers and content farms. And then we're actually going to look at what is happening online versus what we should really be doing online. I'm then going to walk you through the five values that still work in 2025 and will work to the rest of civilization with very clear examples that stand in direct contrast to all of the things that you've probably been sold online on your feed. I'm then going to show you how you can use those values and move them into your marketing strategy without feeling like you're losing your soul, without losing your backbone. Now, if you are feeling like me and a lot of people that commented on a few of my TikTok posts recently, that this actually, this mindset that I have actually feels like relief, that is good. Trust that. Because we're not here to be louder. We are actually just here to be truer, to take a breath, to step off the treadmill and imagine that you were building your business for the long term, not just for the short-term vanity metric. So that is where we're going to start. But before we do, I want to give a little bit more insight into how I've actually arrived here. I didn't have a dramatic breakdown or a big I'm leaving social media announcement. I just kind of went quiet. I was posting, I was replying to people, I was doing the rounds, and then one day I just looked at what I was publishing and thought this just doesn't sound like me. It sounded like someone who was trying to keep pace. Trying to keep pace with a conversation that I actually didn't respect anymore. The online script that I'm seeing repeated over and over again is become so predictable. Burnt out confessions and breakdowns as content, income screenshots to prove trust. This unrealistic expectation, post three times a day or you don't exist. And then the one that finally did my head in that I saw was when someone said, Stop thinking like a business and start thinking like a creator. I looked at our clients at the work that we actually do in the rooms that matter, and none of that actually matched what I had seen from this big creator. It actually felt very childish for this person to say that. And so what it really felt like for me, it felt like we'd all just quietly agreed to pretend that the platform is the whole point of everything, that social media is the whole point of business. And so that's when I stepped back. There wasn't a big speech. I just stopped feeding the machine and just got on with the work. Then Auckland happens. So to give you some context, we're invited to join a club called the Luxury Network in New Zealand. Now, they were for the longest time looking for a digital marketing partner to bring on board for their members. No one really felt right. And I can understand why, because especially luxury brands, but I want to say it's not just about luxury, it's about legacy. It's about people who really take what they do seriously and don't just want to get rich quick. They're actually trying to build for the future. These types of people, they don't want to hear a social media girly getting up in front of them and telling them all the hacks that they need to do. So instead, they found us, they resonated with what we were doing, and they invited us to educate and then to speak one-on-one with a number of their members. And so we went over to Auckland, Maria and I, and we presented, and none of what we presented actually had anything to do with social media tactics. And yet it was all about social media. So, what did we actually talk about? We spoke about strategy, about examples that we've used in the past in order to use social media, but amplifying it with paid ads and email and website. But mostly what we spoke about was the fact that social media really, the purpose of it is to amplify what you were doing offline with your brand. Now I want to share what it was like being in a room with, I guess, the 1%, with high and ultra-high net worth business owners. So the first thing was that people left space before they answered questions. So you would ask them something and they would really take time to consider. There was no rush to fill the silence. You could feel the standards in that room without anyone actually saying we value quality. One founder actually said to us in a one-on-one conversation we had: if I can't stand behind it in 10 years, I won't ship it in 10 days. Now that is big, that is huge. But it landed in that room like a rule that everyone already knew, that they already were living by. And those conversations made me realize that, okay, I wasn't actually over social media. I was over the performance of it. The people that we spoke to, these business owners, they didn't sound like the social media feed. They sounded like businesses. Calm, measured, accountable. And I realized that I just really miss that. I missed how it feels when your name actually means something. And you protect that meaning with how you operate. So on the flights and in the gaps in between meetings, I filled my notes app up, not with hacks, but with phrases that felt like anchors for me, with names, with small human moments that just really seemed to fill my soul and do more for a brand than any trend ever could. And it reminded me of why I started in the first place and why our kind of work makes sense to me, because it's the kind that outlasts whatever this week's algorithm decides. In those times of reflection, I also had to admit something to myself. The advice to think like a creator, it did get under my skin at times. It is seductive. It promises instant feedback, fast spikes, easy proof that you are showing up. And that's what people say, just show up. But I'm not a creator in an influencer sense. Our clients aren't either. And you probably aren't either. We don't get paid for reach. We get paid for our reputation, for how much people trust us. We don't sell entertainment, we sell trust. And that doesn't make sense. And just because that is you, it doesn't mean that you can't have a personal brand. It doesn't mean that you're irrelevant. It just means we need to run them very differently, very steadily, with clear standards and with proof and trust, and not just chase those big numbers. So here is where I landed. I want to keep everything I love about digital, the scale, the speed when it matters, the ability to teach properly and show how we think and share that message. But I want to bring back the discipline that we lost when we all started performing for the platforms. These ideas of responsibility, of craft, of patience, of relationships, these old world business values that we seem to have forgotten somewhere along the way. All of these can be done better through social media. And so that week in New Zealand, it didn't just hand me a new idea. It actually handed me back the permission to say what I guess it's just given me back the permission to live what I've always truly believed, which is that I don't need to make content for the algorithms. I need to make content for you guys. And so the path now has become very simple for me. It's literally about quality over quantity. And I'm going to show you how we can take these old-world business values, how we can put you back into your seat of being a founder, not just a creator. Now, something that I'd love for you to do, maybe write this down to do later, but open your feed and see for yourself it is the same loop on repeat. Hook harder, post daily, show more of your personality, be authentic. It's loud, it's performative, and it's permanently urgent. It's like everyone's trying to win like a talent quest, a talent show that just never ends. And that's why the burnout happens. Meanwhile, it's the people who sign contracts and are moving budgets and are spending money and investing are having very different conversations. So let's look at what these five old-world business values are and how how I believe they contrast to what we're told to prioritize online instead. Now, the first one is reputation. A founder thinks what will this look like if someone forwards it to their CFO to understand if they want to engage us? That is in direct contrast with this idea of reach, which is how do we get more people to see this before Friday? Do you see already this difference and shift reputation versus reach? Reputation, how is this going to look in front of the person that's going to make the decision versus how do we just get the most people possible to see this? The second value, relationships. As a founder, you should be focusing on building relationships offline, but this can also be translated to online. In those rooms in Auckland, I was seeing names remembered, the names of kids remembered, asking what their latest project is up to. It's about leaving those small notes, making a call, remembering the detail. And that is in direct contrast to what I'm feeling online, which is this idea of transactions, where people are almost performing this idea of relationships, where instead of actually remembering details and caring about the person on the other side of you who could potentially become your biggest client or know someone who's going to become your biggest client, instead of that, we think, oh, engagement is down. Let's tell a personal brand story and try and get some relationships happening. Telling a personal brand story is not how you build a relationship. It's how you start a conversation. So yes, it needs to happen, but it's what you do next that makes the biggest difference. And the way that I see relationships that could be built through social media, the way I see that happening is more about that's in the DMs. That's the one-on-one conversations. That's about actually asking people who they are, what they do, what they care about, and how you can help them. Instead of this transactional idea of, I'm going to share my mental breakdown, personal brand story about how hard it is and hope people feel connected to me. The third value is this idea of patience. It's this idea of, I don't care how long it takes, I just want it to be right because what I put out is a reflection of me, my values, my brand, and my legacy. That is how a founder thinks. That is in direct contrast to this idea of pace that I'm seeing online. You have to post today or the algorithm's gonna forget about you. That's the type of mentality that I think that we have been leaning into instead of this idea of if I just make a really great video that really resonates, that is gonna have 100 times more impact because of that first value, the reputation value. It is a fine line, though, between this quality over quantity messaging, because I do feel like you can't just post once a fortnight or once a week, especially in the early days. And I think maybe that's where the conversation is a little bit muddy. In the early days, I do recommend posting more. Number one, to get yourself into a rhythm. But number two, when you need to build something, you have to work harder. It's hard, you need more fuel in your car to go from stationary, from park into first gear. But once you're in third gear, it doesn't take a lot more to then transition up to fourth gear. And I think this is what I want to be really clear on. I'm going from fifth to sixth gear right now. I already have built quite a generous audience, one that I feel happy with, comfortable with. I've already built an audience. And so for me now, it's it's less about just posting three times a day, and it's more actually about sharing really quality content with the people that already know my name. If you are in that beginner period, you do need to do more testing. You do need to be posting more, but I don't want you to post out of this sense of, oh, if I don't do this, the algorithm will forget about me. I want you to post more frequently from the perspective of the more I post now, the more I'm gonna understand my audience, the better I'm gonna get at speaking to them. And therefore, that is why I need to post more frequently. And this leads into this idea of craft over just content. I want you to think of your content as your craft. It's an extension of your brand. It should reflect the same values, the same way that you do what you do inside your business. Don't just post content for content's sake. Don't just make a post because you saw some other creator do it. And I think people say, like, this is about authenticity, but it's not actually about authenticity. It is about craft versus just straight out content. And number five, this is a big one for me. It's responsibility. It's taking responsibility for you, for your customers, for what you do and for what you're saying on the internet. What I was seeing with all of these founders was they actually say less, but they mean more. And it's because they take responsibility for their words, for their actions, for the effect that they're having on their customers. They're owning their message, they're owning their products, they're owning the emotions that they're making their audience feel. And that is in direct contrast to this idea of just being relatable. People say you need to be relatable with your content. Well, not always. Sometimes your audiences don't want you to be relatable. They want you to be aspirational, they want you to be passionate, they want you to be five steps ahead of them. How can you possibly be relatable to them if you're trying to help them get to a new level, a new place? There are some audience schemas where relatability is the key to speaking to them. But for a lot of audience schemas, especially if you're a luxury prestige or boutique brand or a professional service, if you are that, you do need to show elements of humanness. Yes, you're not there to be a robot. You don't have to purely be professional. But the idea is not simply to be relatable for the sake of it. You need to be relatable if that is what your audience wants. Now I want to be very clear that I'm not anti-digital marketing. In fact, I love it more than ever. But I need you to stop treating your digital marketing like a megaphone. I want you to start thinking of it from the perspective of reputation first. Online, we've been taught that we need a new voice every week because the algorithm lacks variety or this is what's trending right now. But in the rooms that I was just in, it was the opposite. One jeweler said very simply, we make heirlooms. That's it. That was their message. That was what every piece of communication in their offline presence, where they're thriving, that is what their communication is backing up. Why this metal, how this join, how they'll service it in 15 years. That is all that message needs to be when it translates to online. They don't, that jeweler doesn't need a fancy hook when people already recognize the substance behind what they're doing. And relationships are similar. The feed says, do a personal story for engagement. But the kind of personal that I watched in those rooms, it wasn't confessional. It was attentive. There was a luxury florist who the husband always orders flowers for his wife for Valentine's Day. And she noticed he hadn't put an order through. And so she quickly picked up the phone and said, Hey, would you like me to send some flowers out to your wife? I noticed you haven't placed an order this year. Guess what? Could have saved the marriage. Who knows? She remembered him. She remembered him ordering previously. She remembered her and the receiving of the flowers. And because of that, she built a relationship. Now you best believe that that man will be using that florist for the rest of his life. There was a builder who only took on one project every two years because there were such luxury builds. And that was fine. He didn't need more. He wasn't looking for more. He wanted to stick with what he was doing. Because if he were to grow his team, there could be issues with quality. It wasn't him that was on the ground that knows how to deliver the way his clients really want it to be delivered. And that is what I want you to consider. And that's what I'm looking at in my own business. We've downsized our team yet again because for me, it's about doing less, but doing it better. And it's the same with your content. You can do less content if you do that content better. So, how do we break this down so that you can actually take action from this? What I want you to first of all think about is this idea of building for the climate, not for the weather. I want you to completely, and this is how all of our frameworks, and this is what we teach in the full library, we guide you step-by-step through this. This is what we do when we do your strategy for you. This is what we really help you remember when we're doing advisory. And of course, if we're doing your campaigns for you, for the very small amount of clients that we do to done for you, this is what is always happening. We are not building messaging, building strategy, building content for Instagram. We don't actually care what platform you're going to be posting on until it gets to the very end, until the actual post needs to be uploaded onto that platform and we need to write the caption in the way we know Instagram likes it or the way TikTok likes it. That's not what we care about. And that's not what you should be caring at at this point. What you should be caring about right now is your initial strategy. I mean, I say strategy and people think, oh, I have a marketing strategy. No, that's not what I mean. I should probably be more specific with this. I want you to think about your audiences, about your customers, about the person on the other end. What is it that they want from you? And what they want from you is for you not to just solve some problems. They actually want you to help them reach their potential, to help become their expanded self. That is what your audiences want from you. And I don't care if you're selling cars, if you're selling flowers, if you're selling jewelry, if you're selling business services, legal services, what it is, I don't care. The whole reason that people want to buy from you is because it helps them reach their potential. And so slow down. Take responsibility for what you're actually doing, what you're saying online. Don't be reactive. Don't buy into this idea that you need to have a, you need to have six posts going out every single week and who cares, just get it out, just tick a box. Don't worry about that. Maybe slow it down, focus on three posts for the week, three really quality posts that show your audiences how you can help them reach their potential. Then it's about building that trust. So you plant the idea in their head that they can reach their potential by potentially doing what you are offering for them. You're showing them that, you're giving them, you're lighting that spark. Now it's time to build the fire underneath that. It's time to stack some more logs on the fire. That is the trust piece. The first piece there is your topper funnel. That's about getting attention in the first place. And we're not just talking about attention for attention's sake here. We're talking about intentional attention. Then it's about the building of the trust. That's where you share your personal brand story. And I'm not saying share a personal brand story about you having mental breakdown on the internet. I mean, sure, maybe for some brands that really hits home, that really resonates. And if that's you, go for gold. But for most brands, especially if you're a prestige, luxury boutique or a professional brand, if that is you, if you want to be taken seriously, your brand story, it needs to follow the narrative arc. And in all of our full library trainings, and obviously when we work with our clients directly, we have our, we call it our grade five storytelling script. And it is a very simple way for you to map out your brand story where you don't have to burst into tears. You get to just tell that story in a way that actually hits home for people. And again, it is about showing them the potential that they can reach by showing them what you have done or how you've done it or what you've overcome in order to build the value that you now offer. It's also about sharing client testimonials and success and case studies. People ask, hey buddy, why don't you share more case studies? Well, because each case study is actually individual to the client, number one, and we share enough to be able to build that trust for people. That's not our strategy just to share testimonials and case studies. The strategy is actually to show you how you can reach your potential. And if you're interested in what the potential is that you want, I will tell you because I know you. You want to be take, you want to be seen as that calm, respected, in control entrepreneur or professional career person. That is what you want out of your life. I know that about you. If I've hit the nail on the head, make sure you send me a DM on Instagram. But that's what you want. And so my goal is to show you how you become that or how I have helped myself become that. That then becomes my brand story. And then finally, at that bottom of funnel level, what we need to do, we need to drive the conversion. And that doesn't need to be a huge part of your content. It should actually only be 20% of your content. And really, where I'm leaning towards with this conversion style content, it's more about being in the stories, being in the one-on-one DMs, the one-on-one selling. The social media gurus online that like to promote, I get paid$100 million a week and I don't even have to do any sales calls. Question, how do you know that, like that feels so transactional for me? I want to have a conversation. I actually won't take on work from someone, and that's been a rule since forever in my business. We won't take on work from you unless we have a conversation with you. Even with our self-paced programs, you are invited to book a call and speak to us about whether it is right for you. And I will tell you honestly, because for me, it is my reputation on the line. Again, I'm using that word, reputation. It is my reputation on the line. If the wrong fit buys one of my programs and doesn't get the results and goes on to tell all their friends that they didn't get the results, it's not my program. I know it's not because I know the program works. It's probably that they weren't right for the program. And that's why I'll always be so super honest whether or not people are right for the program, whether they need more hand holding through the advisory, whether they need to outsource their work to us because they just don't have the time or the skills, or whether they should be going to someone else. And I'll refer them to our network of marketing people that we have that have gone through Birdcage Certified. If this episode has resonated with you, good, first of all, good. I'm glad I'm not the only one feeling like this. But if it has, make sure you message me and tell me that it has. Because I really want to continue this conversation. And I mean, this isn't just a tactic for me to get you into my DMs. No, not at all. I legitimately want to know what is going on in your life, what are the challenges that you're facing, how are you feeling about things currently? And is there a way that I can help you, regardless or not of if we get a sale or not? That's not what this is about. If it leads to a sale inevitably, because we can help you, everybody wins. But if it's if it's just about you feeling like you're heard and maybe me pushing you in a particular direction that I can see that you can't, that's the conversation I want to have. Because I can't tell you how many people I've had sales calls with or conversations with that I've said, hey, I actually don't think we are the right people for you, but try this person over here, who have then gone on to refer people to us because of that honesty. And those people they've referred to have ended up being some of our best clients. That is an old-world business value. And that is how you can be using it. That is how you should be using it in your business. So stop thinking like a creator, stop buying into the hook tactics, all of that stuff. Start focusing on being a founder. Start focusing on being a professional business person who stands by what they say, stands by what they do, and is really a master of their craft and has the patience to build something that's going to last.