After 19 Years and 4,500 Free Registrations, I No Longer Know How to Reach Anyone

In 2013, we ran the first ever twenty-four-hour SharePoint conference. Four and a half thousand people registered for SP24, and we never spent a single penny on advertising.

Me and Helen were walking Hugo through Telford this morning, talking about how long we've been at this. Nineteen years since I started my first business in 2007, and at 52, the fights feel different from when I was watching Rocky films in my twenties. Back then, the ring was a room full of people who showed up because you built something worth showing up for. Today the fight isn't about building at all. It's about how you talk to anyone when every door keeps slamming shut.

Collab365 used to be a library of in-depth content for Microsoft 365 professionals. Then in November 2022, AI turned up and made our old model about as useful as the CD-ROMs I was building at university in the nineties. We rebuilt ourselves into an AI-native operation, automated everything we could, and convinced ourselves we'd stay ahead of it.

We were wrong.

The hard part isn't building anymore. We no longer know how to reach anyone.

Back in 2013, organic reach was real. We'd post about SP24 on LinkedIn and Facebook and people actually saw it, because the platforms wanted you to share links to keep the scrolling alive. For forty-eight hours, the sign-ups poured in faster than we could refresh the screen, and it genuinely felt like we'd cracked something fundamental about community.

Around 2015 and 2016, the algorithms turned, with Facebook organic reach for publishers plunging 52% that year. External links became the enemy and that free tap of attention got shut off overnight. We didn't clock it at the time, but that was the first gatekeeper moving into place. The community was still there. The walls just went up around it.

So we pivoted to search. For years we wrote genuine, human content, answered real questions, published honest guides, and for a while Google sent us real traffic. Now it's dropped off a cliff, with Google AI Overviews driving a 61% drop in organic CTR for affected queries. The majority of searches end without a single click, because ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini serve up the summary before anyone reaches your site. Google has gone AI-first, and source websites are becoming footnotes in a conversation they no longer own.

We turned to email.

Spent years building lists of people who actually wanted to hear from us, watched open rates slide after privacy changes killed tracking, and now AI inbox agents filter promotional messages before a human ever lays eyes on them. Your email isn't competing with other emails anymore. It's competing with a machine that already decided you weren't worth the trouble.

Cold calling is facing extinction too.

AI voice assistants are becoming the gatekeepers of the voice box. You don't get stalled by a tired receptionist now, you get stalled by a digital secretary that never sleeps, never takes a bribe, and never puts you through to the person who might actually care.

Paid advertising is spiralling toward impossibility.

Desperate small businesses are flooding the networks because they have nowhere else to go, and it's driving competition and costs sky high, with Google Ads search costs up 13% year-over-year. Meanwhile Google is risking its entire ad business by pushing subscription-based Gemini models that answer questions directly. If people start paying for answers instead of clicking links, the whole house of cards falls down, because the platforms don't need your ad spend if they can charge users directly for the conversation.

Influencer marketing is getting clamped down by platforms that want a cut.

Physical conferences demand a minimum ten-grand spend for a stand where you might convert one in a hundred conversations.

YouTube is still viable today, but how long before it dissolves into personalised AI-generated video channels that bypass human creators entirely? The pattern is always the same. Build an audience, pay to reach them, watch the platform replace you with its own content.

This morning on the walk, the words just fell out of me. "I can't think of a single way, Helen. Can you think of any other ways?" I just don't know what the future of this really is.

It's the vertigo of watching every playbook that built Collab365 evaporate at once. We keep thinking about all the new products launching today to no users, getting canned before they ever find a distribution channel, because the channels don't exist anymore. Distribution used to be an afterthought. Now it's the only thought, and the doors are locked from the inside.

AI and AI Algortihms are the new gatekeepers to marketing. It doesn't just control the flow. It is the flow.

And honestly? We don't have great answers. We're a small business in Telford, not some giant with a war chest and a team of lobbyists, and we can't outspend the gatekeepers or out-code them.

But we keep coming back to the same few things.

Hyper-local offline tactics. Roundabout banners, flyers, door-to-door visits to local business estates. It feels absurd for a company that runs on automated pipelines and edge computing, like we're regressing to the Stone Age on purpose.

Maybe that's the point. If every digital channel is rented land with an AI bouncer on the door, the only real estate you actually own is the pavement outside and the handshake you offer on it.

When was the last time a customer found you through a channel nobody else could switch off overnight?