Renting your storefront: what happens when the platform is the business
Putting your whole business on a social profile is not lazy — it is where the customers already are and the reach is free. But it is a rental with no tenancy rights and nobody to appeal to. What is safe to rent, what is not, and the dull checklist that keeps the irreplaceable parts in your own name.
It is 6:04 on a Wednesday morning and her Instagram will not let her in. The password she has typed a thousand times comes back wrong. Then the screen changes and says the account has been disabled. No reason given. There is a button to appeal and a box to type into, and nobody on the other side of it she can find.
Behind that login is a decade of portfolio — a photograph of every job she has finished. Behind it is every inquiry she has ever received, every thread with every customer, including the bride whose wedding is in nine days and who is currently wondering why nobody is answering. She cannot reach any of them. She never needed another way to. They were all right there.
Why the profile was the right call
The easy response is that she should have known better. Worth getting that out of the way early: it is both unkind and wrong.
Putting the whole business on a social profile is not laziness. For a photographer, a barber, a baker, a mobile detailer, it is the most rational use of the scarcest thing she has, which is her attention. The customers were already there. The tool was already on her phone. Posting a photograph took a minute between jobs, and the platform handed her an audience she did not have to buy — a feed that occasionally carried her work to strangers, and an inbox where those strangers could ask whether she was free in October. A website, by comparison, is a thing you have to make, then keep, then somehow convince people to visit.
The profile wins on every axis an owner can see from where she stands. So the argument is not that she made a mistake. It is that she made a sensible trade without ever being shown the terms.
The terms of the rental
The writer Nicholas Carr gave this arrangement a name a long time ago: digital sharecropping. The many do the work of making things; the few who own the land collect most of what the work produces. The metaphor has aged well, and it is worth being precise about which part of it actually stings.
It is not that renting is bad. Most of us rent something. A lease is an honest instrument: you hand over money, you get the space, and both sides know in advance what happens next and how much notice anyone gets. The platform version has the shape of a tenancy and none of the protections.
Your landlord can change the rent — meaning the reach you get back for the same work — without notice or explanation. Feed rules have been rewritten before in ways that quietly cut how many of a page's own followers ever saw a post, and pages found out by watching their numbers sag, not by being told. Your landlord can change the rules about what is allowed on the premises, and apply them backwards. And your landlord can change the locks at dawn, with software doing the deciding.
The appeal is the part that surprises people. Meta's own Oversight Board — the body the company created to review its enforcement calls — has publicly raised due-process concerns about how accounts get disabled, after hearing from a great many people who could not learn which rule they had broken, could not tell whether a machine or a human had made the call, and could not get a straight answer on appeal. Among the board's recommendations: say which rule was broken, disclose whether software was involved, and let people track their appeal. That those are recommendations rather than descriptions tells you where the bar sits.
None of this is unique to one company. A business whose phone rings because of Google can have its Business Profile suspended too, and the road back is an online form, some documents, and a review that takes as long as it takes. What you are missing when you go looking for a person to talk to is not customer service. It is the entire concept of tenancy.
What is safe to rent, and what is not
The useful move is not to storm off the platform. It is to sort what you keep there into two piles.
Attention is safe to rent. So is discovery, and reach, and the whole business of a stranger seeing your work and thinking about you for the first time. Platforms are genuinely good at that, better than you will ever be alone, and paying for it in rent is a fair deal. If a platform vanished tomorrow you would lose the flow of new strangers, which is painful and survivable.
The other pile does not survive.
Your customer list is not safe to rent. Neither is your booking history, your portfolio, or the only route a person has to reach you. Each of those is something you built and then stored in a locker whose key belongs to someone else. Losing new customers costs you work you have not won yet. Losing the list costs you everything you have already done.
There is a detail here that catches people flat. You can ask Instagram for your data, and a file does arrive: your posts, your messages, a list of your followers by username. What does not arrive is a way to contact any of them. The platform will not hand out email addresses or phone numbers — not even the ones a customer typed into their own profile for exactly this purpose. So the followers list is a room full of names you no longer have a key to. A record of a relationship, not a means of continuing one.
The boring checklist
None of what follows needs a project or a website. It is an afternoon of dull admin that quietly changes what a lockout means.
Own the domain, in your own name. A domain is the one piece of internet real estate you can actually hold. Register it yourself, with your own email address, on an account whose password you have written down somewhere. Not your nephew's account. Not the account of the web guy who set things up for you, however much you like him. That is the most common way an owner discovers, far too late, that the address customers have been typing was never hers.
Own an email address at that domain. An address at a domain you control is portable in a way a free one never is: you can move it between providers and nobody outside notices. If your business mail arrives at an address ending in somebody else's brand, the one route customers use to reach you is also rented, and the notice period is zero.
Keep an exported copy of the list. Whatever holds your customers — a booking app, a spreadsheet, a phone — get the names and numbers out on a rhythm you will actually keep, and put the file somewhere you control. Not because you plan to leave. Because that copy is the only version whose existence never depends on a company staying in business, staying honest, or continuing to recognise your password.
Have one route to you that survives a lockout. A number and an address, published somewhere you own, that keep working on the morning the login stops. A single page with your name, your trade, your town, and how to reach you is enough. The point is not the page. The point is that it is reachable when the other thing is not.
Then treat the profile as what it actually is: a channel. It is very good at pointing strangers somewhere. Point it at something that belongs to you.
What this does not fix
Less than it sounds like, and it is worth saying so plainly. A domain in your name gets you no customers. A page nobody visits is no substitute for a feed that carries your work to strangers while you sleep. Exports go stale the day after you take them, numbers change, and an old list is not a live audience. And there is no version of this advice where a small business ignores where the customers actually are, because they are, in fact, on the platform, and that will not change because you disapprove of the terms.
The recommendation is not independence. Independence is not on the menu. It is narrower: do not keep the irreplaceable things somewhere you can be shut out of without a conversation. Rent the reach. Keep the record.
I should say where I am standing. Catalyst Market is one place to look if you have nothing to point at yet: a gallery of trade-specific templates anyone can preview in the browser, no sign-up wall in front of the browsing, and a real person on our side who turns the brief into the finished thing. That is one option among many, and the argument above never depended on it. Wix, Squarespace, a friend with WordPress, one hand-typed page — any of them satisfies the checklist. The domain in your name is worth more than whatever sits on it.
The point
Nobody can tell the photographer how her appeal goes. Some accounts come back quickly, some take an unreasonable stretch of persistence and someone who knows someone on the inside, and some never come back. That uncertainty is what she has been quietly paying for with a decade of work, and the bill arrived at dawn on a Wednesday, with no warning and no way to argue.
A platform is a wonderful place to be seen and a poor place to be stored. So rent the attention, and own the address, the inbox, and the list. Then let the profile do the thing it is genuinely good at, which is pointing strangers at a door that belongs to you.