we hit 100K on Instagram today :) here's everything we learned https://x.com/i/article/2114666839867338752
We went from 0 to 100K Instagram followers in 6 months, and here's how you can do it too
Friends we did it :) 0 to 100K Instagram followers in 6 months, here's the chart:
And the best thing about this growth: it was all organic. We spent $0 on ads. Zero!
Over the last 6 months, we've learned a lot about how to grow on social media and I don't wanna gatekeep, so in this article I'll be telling you exactly how we did it. And maybe more importantly: where most companies fail.
Why I believe social media matters more than anything
In a world of AI, building products has become easier. This means that you are competing with way more people than ever before. So how do you differentiate yourself? How do you make sure you "win" over others? You make sure your customers find you first and like you more.
That's why I think marketing is actually more important than ever. And I'm not alone: when I raised our pre-seed round ($4.6M with Lightspeed), I think one of the main reasons investors were excited about us was that we figured out distribution by going viral BEFORE even having a product. Here's the video that started it all:
The big lie
"Going viral is not a strategy" is something a social media manager once told me, and this is the BIGGEST lie.
I hate to break it to you: people only say this if they haven't figured out a way to go viral, and are trying to protect their turf. I believe 99% of social media marketing is BS and a waste of time, and the only REAL way to win on social media is to go viral and grow a lot. Nothing else matters.
A lot of the marketers that say this, unfortunately, suck at hitting it big on socials. It's a shame, but true. Many people I've met over my career are better at managing up than they are at making engaging content. My opinion is that if you run socials, should be judged on their numbers and nothing else... but hey, we don't even have marketers at Schematik, so what do I know?
So I think there's two options:
1. follow this framework
2. don't waste time on socials at all - this is fine too, it really depends on your business.
The framework: how to nail Instagram
The thing that most companies get wrong with socials is that they don't really care about their users. Yup, you read that right. Let me explain: they decide what message they want to send out, and just hope that their customers like it. Example: they launch a new feature, post about it, and hope it will go viral.
My friends, it will not. People don't go to Instagram to learn about features of products they have never heard of. They wanna watch something that distracts them from their daily lives.
Here's how you flip that around:
1. Figure out what your audience wants to watch
People are on Instagram to watch fun videos while they're on the toilet or bored. So you need to cater to that. And this is actually quite simple: figure out what the people you care about are already watching. In our case, I just looked at hardware tags and learned that people love a few formats of videos. I started watching them obsessively... noting down the different formats, and thinking about how I could make similar videos:
The thing we found: don't talk about your product or brand. Videos that talk about those types of things rarely work. You can mention or show it subtly where it makes sense. But we're making fun posts, right? We want people to watch them.
2. Make tons of videos like that
The next step is simple: make videos that your audience wants to watch. Inspired by what you see working in the feed, make videos of your own. You'll learn here that making good videos is actually really hard, and it will take a ton of iterations to get good at them. My friend Louise says it well:
3. Be consistent
Simple: post something every day, and multiple times a day if you can. This means you need to allocate serious time to this. In the early days of Schematik, I was spending at least 50% of my time on this.
In this phase I realized that it would be quite hard for me to do this consistently, but I didn't wanna back away. Instead of taking a step back, I found someone to help us.
Meet Flo, he's a genius. I've never seen somebody build as fast and make such great hardware videos. We found him because we were watching his content on IG (he has 250K+ followers), and we asked him to help us create videos. After a while he decided to join us full time as Founding Engineer (he's a great engineer as well!). Bringing him on was probably our best decision, since he already had so many learnings. And I learned a lot from him.
4. Obsess over numbers
Which leads me to point 4: this was definitely something Flo was much better at than me. We now obsess over our numbers together. For every video we look at the amount of views, likes, and most importantly watch time:
The higher your watch time is, the more "viral" your video will go. If something does well, we make many more of that format. If something doesn't do well, we try something else. A humbling insight here is that what I love is often not what works in the market. I found out I'm super bad at predicting.
BTW videos with my face in them do about 100 times LESS engagement than faceless ones. It hurt my ego, but the numbers don't lie:
5. Experiment
Alright, you've got your engine running, you're making tons of videos, and sticking to the ones that are working. This is great, until they stop working. And they will. So you constantly have to experiment with new formats, and here you can get super creative. You can come up with all sorts of stuff :) For example, we recently discovered that explainers work really well.
If you don't have an idea what t do, just look at what's working in the market, just like we did in step 1.
90% of your experiments will fail, if they don't they're not experiments. But the once that work can become part of the "rotation".
For example, we've recently started a new format (i have to gatekeep this one, sorry) that is doing really great numbers for us.
Moving beyond IG
When you have limited resources it's really key to focus them all on one platform. Doing a bit of X, a bit of LinkedIn and a bit of Instagram is probably the worst advice you can get when it comes to socials. It's much better to put all of that effort on one platform and completely dominate it.
That being said, you can probably repurpose your content from one platform to another. For example, our IG content does quite well on YouTube and TikTok as well. Here on X it does terrible by the way.
After a while, when your social engine is really working (I'd say when you hit more than 1M views per month consistently), you can explore new platforms. For me the rule is that we can only do that if IG keeps killing it. Right now we're exploring more long form on YouTube, so I hope to give you a nice post on how we reached 100K viewers there soon :)
When to turn on Paid?
Later than you think. I believe that you first need to get good at socials before turning on paid, because paid is like a drug: you pay your way out of the pain, and it gets addictive. If you have posts that do really well organically, you'll get a much better ROI if you run them as ads. For us paid hasn't made sense yet, because I still find soo much growth organically, but I do think at some point we'll explore this.
Okay, now it's your turn, go smash it at Instagram or tell me why I'm wrong?
Either way, follow me for more growth tips, and while you are at it follow Flo as well.