When I started making content, I thought I knew exactly what I wanted. More followers, more reach, more eyes on what I was putting out. I was new to it and I did what most people do when they're new to something: I looked at what was working for everyone else and tried to replicate it. Trending sounds, quick cuts, posts designed to travel. The intern who wants to make partner by the end of the first year.
And it worked, for a while. I hit 10,000 followers faster than I expected. The algorithm liked what I was doing. Some posts took off in ways I hadn't anticipated.
The problem was the people they brought in.
They weren't there for me, or for the kind of travel and food stories I actually cared about. They were there for the information, the tip, the viral place they could add to their list. The moment a post stopped being useful to them in that specific way, they were gone. There was no community. There was just traffic.
I took a break. A long one, somewhere between one and two years. Not a dramatic announcement, just a quiet step back to figure out what I actually wanted from this and why I'd started in the first place.
What I kept coming back to was the reason I travel the way I do. I'm not interested in the obvious places or the validated spots or the lines that form because something went viral. I want the places with stories, with history, with regulars who've been coming for decades. I want to sit in a room where nobody speaks my language and feel completely at home because the food is that good. That's what I'm chasing, and that's what I wanted to share.
But here's the tension I had to sit with: I am also someone who shares places publicly. And at some point I had to reckon with the fact that I had been, in some small way, one of those people. The ones who expose a hidden gem to thousands of strangers who weren't looking for it and may not treat it with the same care. Would I appreciate it if my favorite neighborhood spot got blown up by someone who visited once and never came back? No. I wouldn't.
So I made a choice about how I post rather than what I post. No trending sounds. Lots of talking. Videos over a minute. No flashy cuts or tricks designed to game the feed. It's a deliberately anti-viral approach, and it filters the audience for me. The people who sit through a three minute video of me talking about a pozole shop in Colonia Guerrero are not the same people who came for a quick tip. They're the ones I was looking for all along.
I still share the places I love. I'm just more intentional about how far I want those posts to travel. There's a version of this where I could turn every hidden gem into a moment. I've chosen not to. Not because I'm precious about it, but because the goal was never the moment. It was the connection. And it turns out those two things require completely different approaches.
The 10,000 followers I built chasing virality weren't the community I wanted. The ones finding me now, through the long videos and the obscure rabbit holes and the posts that don't do numbers, those are my people. It took me a while to understand that losing the wrong audience is not a setback. It’s the entire point.
