If marketing feels draining, you’re not broken.

Most creative business owners don’t struggle because they dislike sharing their work — they struggle because the advice they’re following doesn’t match how they think or work.

Not all small businesses are trying to become big businesses.

And a lot of frustration comes from advice that assumes they should.

This work is for a specific kind of business — not better nor necessarily worse than others, just different in what it values and how it measures success.

The first year of a creative business is noisy.

There’s advice everywhere — what to post, what to sell, what to optimize, what to grow. Most of it assumes you should be moving fast and measuring everything.

But for small, creative businesses, the first year isn’t about acceleration.
It’s about orientation.

When people say “you need to market your business,” they usually mean well.

But for new creative businesses, that advice often leads to doing a lot of things very quickly — posting daily, trying multiple platforms, tweaking messaging constantly — without ever feeling grounded in what’s actually working.

This article walks through a calmer way to think about marketing in the early days, so your efforts build on each other instead of burning you out.

There’s no shortage of advice — but most of it assumes you already know what you’re selling, who it’s for, and what makes it different. If you don’t yet, step-by-step guides can either help tremendously… or make things more confusing.

This article is meant to help you understand what kind of guides are actually useful at the beginning, where to find them, and how to use them without losing your sense of direction.