Net Influencer – one of the most-read publications in the creator economy space – published a full piece on Clue Labs at the end of 2025.
Written by Cecilia Carloni, it digs into the platform, the thinking behind it, and the broader shift I’ve been talking about for years. You can read the original piece here.
I’m proud of the coverage.
But what I actually want to use this moment for is bigger than a PR mention. Because the reason a publication like Net Influencer found the story worth telling isn’t really about Clue Labs.
It’s about the fact that the conversation around Social Discovery Optimisation is starting to happen at scale; and the industry is finally catching up to the problem we’ve been building to solve.
What the Piece Covered
Cecilia framed the piece around a question I’ve been asking for years: what if social media growth no longer depended on guesswork?
The article covers how Clue Labs works – the platform analyses long-term performance patterns across an account’s history to generate prescriptive recommendations tied to specific growth goals.
Not what’s trending. Not generic best practices.
What your account, based on your historical data, is likely to get amplified on.
It covers the origin story — starting my first business at 17 in a homeless hostel, building through events and social management, selling two properties worth £2M through Instagram DMs alone, and eventually arriving at the question that became Clue Labs: how is my whole livelihood based on my guess?
And it covers the central thesis that most of the social media tool landscape is built on broken incentives.
If platforms and schedulers profit from confusion and volume, they have no reason to help you post less and perform more.
That misalignment is structural, and it’s why most of the advice in this space still doesn’t fix the actual problem.
What the Piece Didn’t Have Space to Say
The article captures the ‘what’ well. What I want to add is the ‘why now.’
The reason this story is landing in publications like Net Influencer in 2026 is that the pain has become undeniable.
Brands that have followed conventional social media wisdom – post consistently, post often, test everything, stay on trends – are reporting declining reach, rising burnout, and an increasingly opaque relationship between effort and result.
That’s not a strategy failure. It’s a structural one.
Platforms have completed a shift from social graph distribution; where your followers saw your content to AI-driven discovery distribution, where an algorithm decides which strangers are likely to engage with your post before it goes anywhere near your audience.
That changes everything about what good strategy looks like.
But nobody in the tool space has built for the new model.
They’re still selling you dashboards designed for the old one.
SDO — Social Discovery Optimisation — is the framework for operating in the new model.
It’s the discipline of understanding how discovery algorithms work at a structural level, and building your content strategy around those mechanics rather than against them.
I coined the term because there wasn’t one. There needed to be.
The Net Influencer piece is evidence that the problem is visible enough now that serious media is paying attention.
That’s a category signal, not just a company one.
Why This Matters Beyond Clue Labs
When a new category forms, there’s usually a moment where the problem gets named publicly for the first time.
Before that moment, everyone is quietly experiencing the same frustration and assuming it’s their own fault.
That’s where we’ve been with organic social for the past two years.
Reach is down.
Content is harder.
The tools aren’t helping.
And the dominant response in the industry has been to post more, test more, spend more on ads.
All of which benefits the platforms and none of which addresses the root cause.
Naming the category is how the conversation shifts. Once there’s a word for the problem, people can start comparing notes on it, building for it, and demanding solutions that actually address it.
SDO is that word.
And coverage like this is how it moves from a framework I use with Clue Labs customers into an industry-wide lens for thinking about social performance.
On the Incentives Argument
One part of the Net Influencer piece I want to expand on is the incentives piece, because it’s probably the most uncomfortable thing in the article and also the most important.
The creator economy’s advice infrastructure is almost entirely funded by companies whose revenue grows when you remain confused.
Schedulers need you to keep scheduling.
Ad platforms need you to keep spending.
Analytics tools need you to keep monitoring daily metrics as if that’s where the insight lives.
None of those business models are rewarded by telling you to post three times a week with precision and watch your numbers climb.
Clue Labs is. That’s not a values statement — it’s a commercial reality. The better we get at making your strategy efficient, the more people recommend us and the more customers we retain.
Our incentive is literally to make you need less, not more.
I’m not saying everyone in the social media tool space is deliberately misleading you.
I am saying: before you take strategic advice, look at whether the company giving it profits from you following it.
That filter alone will save you a lot of wasted effort.
What’s Coming Next
The Net Influencer piece was published in December 2025. Since then, a lot has moved. Clue Labs v3 is launching in May 2026, and it’s a significant step forward – more platform coverage, a more refined AI recommendation engine, and a freemium model that means more people can access the platform without a commitment upfront.
The SDO Academy is also expanding: structured education around the discovery framework, designed for social media managers and brand marketers who want to understand the mechanics, not just follow a checklist.
If you’re in the industry and this conversation resonates; whether you’re a brand, a creator, or a marketer who’s been watching reach decline and wondering what’s actually going on.
This is the moment to pay attention to the category forming around you.
The guesswork era of social media is ending.
Not because platforms are getting more transparent — they’re not — but because the people building tools for this space are finally starting to model the system as it actually exists.
That’s what we’re doing at Clue Labs. That’s what SDO is.
