In 2009 and 2010, I understood something that would take most people another decade to learn.
I had started on Facebook — drawn, like everyone else, by the access, the reach, the extraordinary ease of finding and building an audience in a place where the audience already was. And then fairly quickly, I recognised something that gave me pause. I did not own any of it. The content was mine. The relationships were mine. But the infrastructure — the platform, the data, the audience relationship itself — belonged entirely to Facebook. If they changed the algorithm, I lost my reach. If they suspended the account, I lost access. If they shut down, I would lose everything I had built there, overnight, with no recourse.
So in 2010 I built something I did own. A blog. An email database. A newsletter that went out through udookonjo.com – at a time when
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