My Creator Journey: From "Beginner" (<1K) to "Growing" (100K+)
Observations and takeaways across the early creator lifecycle
What better way to learn than to do?
For the past ~18 months, I have been “dogfooding” the creator experience on Instagram. This post summarizes my journey and offers observations, learnings, and tips that I hope will benefit smaller creators and those who partner with them.
First, I provide some context on my recent growth. Then, I share my experience and learnings across multiple phases of growth. For ease of use, I have structured this post by major follower milestones, with each named for simplicity: Beginner (<1K followers), “Early” Learning (1K-5K), “Late” Learning (5K-10K), Exploring (10K-100K), and Growing (100K-1M).
Background
During the last ~9 months, I have seen significant growth as a fitness creator on Instagram. My account has grown from <5K followers to almost 125K followers—with over half that growth arriving in just the last couple months. My reach and follower growth for the last twelve months ending May 31, 2023 can be found in the two graphs below.
Account Overview
Before we dive in, some quick background on my account (@carmona):
Handle: Not a net-new account. My account started as a personal account that I pivoted to fitness. Most of my followers were family and friends—probably similar to most people’s follower graphs! This approach created its own challenges, which we’ll get into later.
Account Type: Creator. When I committed to the creator journey in late 2021, I switched from a regular account to a Creator account so that I could access more in-depth performance insights and benefit from any incremental distribution that favored this account type.
Content Vertical: Fitness. I post photos (of me) and Reels that explain how to perform certain exercises. I also do Story-based Q&As from time to time.
With that, let’s dive into the content!
The Creator Journey: Deep Dive
This section breaks down as follows:
Beginner (<1K followers)
"Early" Learning (1K-5K followers)
"Late" Learning (5K-10K followers)
Exploring (10K-100K followers)
Growing (100K-1M followers)
1. Beginner (<1K)
Key question: What content format should I prioritize?
During my Beginner phase (2021), I knew that I wanted to create fitness content on Instagram. The question that I struggled with was one of format: should I prioritize photos or videos?
Platform ROI
While considering that question, I spent a lot of time creating content on TikTok. After just a few months on the platform, I had amassed over 30K followers and multiple videos with hundreds of thousands of views. This early—and easy—growth had a big impact on my early thinking as an Instagram creator. I quickly concluded that TikTok and Instagram were best suited for different, albeit complementary, commercial objectives.
Put simply, TikTok was better-suited for driving upper-funnel objectives such as creator discovery and total reach. At the time, TikTok offered unparalleled organic reach and follower growth, even for new creators with only a limited following. More interestingly, viral videos could also drive follower growth on third-party platforms (e.g., YouTube, Instagram) for creators who linked to other social accounts in their TikTok profiles. In contrast, Instagram was much better at driving mid- and lower-funnel outcomes. Because Instagram prioritized connected distribution in Feed and Stories, Instagram creators had a much easier time reaching—and converting via organic CTAs—a higher share of their followers relative to creators on TikTok.
By simply leveraging each platform's relative strength, savvy creators could create a cross-platform conversion funnel that could drive downstream creator ROI (e.g., monetization, etc.) via Instagram.
Format Proof Points
As part of my experimentation, I also tried cross-posting the same video assets across both TikTok and Instagram. Oftentimes, the same video would get tens of thousands of views on TikTok—and would drive new follower growth across both TikTok and Instagram—but would barely earn a few hundred views on Instagram. Moreover, the Instagram Reel never seemed to deliver much (if any) follower growth.
Based on these early experiences, I concluded the following:
Format ROI: My video content was not a good fit for Reels. Cross-posting video assets was not worth the effort on Instagram because Reels rarely drove incremental engagement and follower growth. (As a reminder, Reels ranking and distribution fell short of TikTok’s in 2021.)
Audience ROI: Because my Instagram following was small, I assumed that most incremental, organic audience growth was going to come from TikTok, not Instagram. To successfully convert this audience into Instagram followers, I needed to give them a reason to follow; I needed to deliver incremental value when they saw my content on Instagram. The same, cross-posted video would not be enough to follow me on both platforms.
Collectively, these conclusions led me to prioritize photos on Instagram. On the margin, a photo-first Instagram strategy addressed two specific audience problems: 1) the need to give my TikTok-sourced audience a reason to follow my (then) small Instagram account and 2) the need to reduce churn among this same TikTok-sourced audience on Instagram, particularly those most sensitive to seeing duplicate content across platforms.
Beginner Takeaways
Platform ROI: If audiences follow creators across multiple social platforms, then a platform’s relative value proposition matters more than its absolute value proposition.
Audience ROI: If audiences follow creators across multiple social platforms, then creators should take a cross-platform approach to their overall content strategy; they should not necessarily upload the same content to multiple platforms.
2. “Early” Learning (1K-5K)
Key question: What content themes drive the most growth?
In the “Early” Learning phase, my goal was to identify which content themes would drive the most incremental reach and follower growth for my account. To make progress against these goals, I needed sufficient content (i.e., supply) and feedback (i.e., demand) so that I could understand relative performance.
Supply: Content Creation
After deciding on a photo-first strategy, I hired a photographer to follow me around the gym while I worked out. I took this approach for a few reasons:
Content Quality: I wanted high-resolution, highly-staged photos that would stand out in a sea of poorly-lit gym selfies. That meant working with someone who had access to a high-quality camera, could edit raw images, and had experience staging content.
Production Efficiency: I did not want to spend an inordinate amount of time planning, staging, and shooting content. A photographer expedited this process. After two hours, I had 50-60 high-quality photos across multiple “looks”—weightlifting, resting, pacing, setting up equipment, and more.
Once I had my first batch of high-quality photos, I officially started my creator journey. I literally announced the change in the caption of my first photo from that shoot:
Ayyyy 💪🏽 Fitness content moving from Stories to Feed. Thanks @urbanshots_ for the photos and @deanofthegame for letting us use your amazing space. If you’re in NYC, check out @deanofthegame.fitness!
#nycfitness #nycfit #nycfitfam #fitnessnyc #fitnyc #battleropes #hiitworkout #hiit #hiitcardio #cardiodone#cardioworkout #personaltrainer #fitness
As you can see, I was not delivering that much value to my audience beyond just the image. My caption focused on myself, not my audience. In fact, I probably spent more time selecting hashtags, which—at the time—I assumed were the most important part of the caption! (If you don’t read any further, they’re not!)
Demand: Content Distribution
To get my content in front of people, I relied on both organic and paid distribution strategies.
Organic Distribution
On the organic side, my distribution strategy was informed by two considerations: posting frequency and post-level discovery mechanisms.
Posting Frequency: During the first year of my creator journey, I posted 1-2 photos per week. This frequency was informed by economic—not strategic—considerations. Hiring a photographer meant paying a non-trivial sum for my first batch of fitness content. By posting only 1-2x per week, I could stretch my content—and amortize my costs—over a longer period of time. This approach felt appropriate at the time given that 1) I had little signal about how my content would perform and 2) I expected that my learning curve would accelerate over time.
Discovery Mechanisms: To drive incremental distribution, I also made use of the discovery mechanisms that Instagram makes available on each post: hashtags, location tagging, and account tagging. For example, as shown in the caption above, I used hashtags popular with New York’s fitness community. My assumption was that diehard community members would either follow these specific hashtags or use them in their own content. Either scenario—if it led to someone stumbling upon my content—could drive incremental reach and discovery for my account
Paid Distribution
My paid strategy had two objectives: 1) create the conditions necessary for me to get higher-quality feedback about the relative quality of my content and 2) position my account for future organic growth.
When I pivoted to fitness content, I struggled to get the feedback that I needed to properly calibrate my quality assessments of different photos/looks. At the time, virtually all of my followers were family and friends. This group followed me to see personal photos, not photos of my person. I quickly realized this distinction when I started posting fitness content. This content received significantly less engagement than my non-fitness content. With limited engagement, I struggled to differentiate between which content themes I should prioritize and which I should retire. What is more, I suspected that these lower engagement rates—a proxy for low-quality content—reduced the likelihood that my content would be recommended in others' Feeds.
How did I solve this feedback issue? Ads!
Ads were an efficient way for me to reach an audience whose interests better aligned with my new content strategy. Given my fitness focus, I targeted ads on two criteria: 1) English-speaking metros where one could easily find brand-name fitness boutiques (e.g., New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Sydney, Cape Town, and Dubai) and 2) a demonstrated interest in one of many fitness topics. Upon seeing these ads, a small fraction of this audience converted into new followers.
These new followers were particularly valuable for two reasons:
Reach Extension: These new followers effectively acted as new, high-potential nodes in my follower graph. Because they typically lacked any connections with my legacy followers, these new followers helped introduce my content—via shares and other engagement signals—to a completely new, like-minded audience
Engagement: Because these people followed me specifically for my fitness content, they typically engaged at relatively higher rates than my friends and family. That relatively higher engagement meant better quality signals for me and for “the algorithm” on every future post.
During subsequent months, my engagement rate went up and I began to earn more organic reach. Relatedly, I also began to see incremental, organic follower growth from Instagram—not just TikTok. And by the time that I hit a few thousand followers, I had a good sense of which content themes tended to outperform and which drove negligible growth.
“Early” Learning Takeaways
Production ROI: For a more sustainable content creation process, consider batching creation at discrete points in time. Also try to get multiple "looks" so that you have more ideas to test with your audience.
Network-driven Discovery: Consider using ads to more quickly identify who is most receptive to your content. This audience, if converted into followers, can help drive incremental organic reach if they engage with or share your content with others.
3. “Late” Learning (5K-10K)
Key question: How do I identify and incorporate best practices?
In the “Late” Learning phase, I began to operationalize best practices—the content themes, captions, photo edits—that seemed to drive the most incremental follower growth.
These best practices emerge from a single post. After Thanksgiving 2022, I posted a photo with a brief caption about how well-fed people could up the intensity of their workouts. Nothing about this specific post seemed that extraordinary; the visual and the caption were relatively straightforward. But the post took off. I remember watching it get reshared in people’s Stories and following the engagement across multiple Latin American countries. The post eventually reached over 90K people (~40X my follower count at the time) and netted me over 1K new followers.
After seeing this post go viral, I did what any rational creator would do: I doubled down on what seemed to work! I adopted the following best practices for future content uploads:
Post Frequency: While my Thanksgiving post was riding the algorithmic wave, I began to post every single day. Based on my own experience, I knew that my new followers would be more likely to see my posts in their Feeds—at least initially. By giving these new followers content to engage with, they could potentially drive outsized engagement and, ergo, incremental organic distribution.
Photo Edits: I began to apply more consistent edits (e.g., background hue, sharpening, shading) to all of my photos. I wanted all of my photos to have the same visual identity as viral Thanksgiving photo. For example, I began to apply a blue background hue to all of my indoor gym photos.
Hashtags: I used a subset of hashtags from my Thanksgiving post on every future photo. While we have repeatedly heard that hashtags do not drive much incremental reach, I assumed that any incremental reach would benefit my account.
After making these changes, I began to see material improvements to my organic reach and follower growth. The engine behind this growth—the same engine that helped my Thanksgiving post go viral—was the Explore tab. For reasons unbeknownst to me, my new content strategy was able to get more and more of my posts recommended on this surface. And to my surprise, posts that reached the Explore tab could sometimes earn more incremental reach than some of my earlier paid campaigns.
Just a few weeks after my viral Thanksgiving post, I hit 5k followers. Less than a month later, I exceeded 10k followers and became an “Exploring” creator.
“Late" Learning Takeaways
Captions: Captions offer another way for you to deliver value to your audience. Consider how you can use them to build community, signal expertise, or simply give the algorithm more meta data off which to work!
Post Frequency: Smaller accounts may capture outsized benefits from posting more frequently than larger, more established accounts. Small creators typically do not generate that much absolute engagement (i.e., likes, shares, etc.) That means that the platform has fewer signals about these creators’ appeal to certain audiences or interest cohorts. The primary way to generate more signal, then, is to post more content. Posting more frequently also helps to increase engagement relative to other accounts, all else equal.
Explore: Good content gets engagement. Great content gets distributed on the Explore tab. View the insights on every post and double down on the styles and approaches that get recommended on Explore. If you are not reaching the Explore tab, then you may need to either 1) invest in higher quality content creation, 2) deliver more value to your audience (e.g., imagery, captions, etc.), or 3) change your content theme(s).
4. Exploring (10K-100K)
Key question: What is the expected audience ROI on my content?
During the Exploring phase, my goal was to achieve a predictable “audience ROI” (i.e., follower growth) from my content. By applying my best practices to my high-quality content, I hoped to see steady follower growth over the next few months.
The wave of follower growth that started around Thanksgiving lasted until late March 2023. Around this time, my follower growth effectively plateaued (~40K) and—to creator Matt’s horror—even turned negative on some days. When my growth stalled, I began to second guess my content strategy.
While I had clear evidence that my content strategy had delivered meaningful growth, I began to worry that either 1) I had reached the natural limits of my audience given my current strategy or 2) that my content no longer seemed as attractive to the algorithm as it once did. In either case, the expected audience ROI for creating and posting more content seemed to be significantly lower than it had been only months prior. Lower audience ROI expectations raised a few questions:
If my organic posts were now driving incremental churn, then should I reduce my posting frequency?
If my posts were not driving meaningful audience growth, then did it make sense to invest in creating new content?
If I could no longer efficiently grow my audience, then should I explore ways to convert and monetize my existing audience with off-platform offerings?
Because I could not easily diagnose the issue by looking at post-level trends, I had to rely on the headline performance numbers in my Professional Dashboard. Based on those consolidated metrics, I decided to pull back on my uploads. Beginning in early March, I went from posting every single day to posting, on average, every few days.
Content Pivot
Shortly thereafter, I began to (repeatedly) see Reels that echoed new guidance for Instagram creators. This guidance, which can be traced back to creator Amy Marietta, recommended that Instagram creators 1) post to Feed every day, 2) use 3-5 hashtags max, and 3) prioritize vertical video, among other strategies. While no single recommendation felt truly revelatory, I found myself particularly receptive to a wholesale pivot in my content strategy. Not only had my follower growth stalled out, but I had also become much more receptive to producing Reels.
Two developments explain my newfound receptivity to Reels:
Absolute ROI: In late 2021, I deleted TikTok. After deleting TikTok, Instagram’s absolute platform ROI became much more important than its relative ROI vis-à-vis TikTok. With only one platform to invest in, I no longer had to optimize my content strategy across two platforms and one audience.
Reels Upside: In 2023, Reels seemed to offer significantly more upside than they had in late 2021. Anecdotally, I noticed that my late-2022 Reels seemed to perform significantly better than those uploaded in 2021. Not only did these Reels get decent distribution, they also contributed to follower growth. This upside seemed even more real when I saw my friends—and fellow fitness creators—earn millions of views on their Reels.
In mid-April, I applied Marietta’s playbook and pivoted my content strategy. I posted to Feed every day and placed a special emphasis on Reels content. When deciding what content to create for Reels, I followed the old Picasso mantra, “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.” I went to the profiles of the most popular fitness creators, clicked on the Reels tab, and watched their highest-performing videos. Those videos informed how I shot and edited my Reels. Before posting these Reels, I also 1) incorporated Marietta's guidance on hashtags, which seemed even less necessary now that Reels offered a self-serve content classification tool, Topics and 2) began to prioritize “Trending” audio over songs that I preferred.
After making these content changes, I saw follower growth return almost immediately. As you can see from the accompanying graphs, my follower growth began to increase exponentially during the month of May. I peaked at ~3.6K new followers on a single day in mid-May, only one month after I completely pivoted my content strategy. That outsized growth continued until I hit ~100K followers at the end of the month. Since then, I’ve seen my follower growth decelerate. That said, now I know that even my least-performant Reels are likely to hit ~25K views and contribute to a few new followers.
Audience Growth
Recently, I’ve seen my reach decline and my follower growth decelerate. At first, I assumed that I was hitting yet another plateau: either I tapped out my existing audience or my content was suddenly worse than before. But after spending time sifting through the data and writing this note, I realized that content follows a power-law distribution, with a small set of outliers driving most of the growth (and value) for any account.
While one might be tempted to explain my recent growth by pointing to the guidance outlined above—daily Feed posts, vertical video, and fewer hashtags—the data suggests that only a few pieces of content account for a disproportionate share of reach and follower growth. For example, this one Reel accounted for over 20K new followers and likely explains the exponential increase in follower growth during the month of May. The average Reel, however, only delivers a couple hundred new followers—max. And in hindsight, these same power-law dynamics also apply to photos. Some photos, such as my viral Thanksgiving photo, outperform across all metrics: reach, engagement, and new followers. Others barely make a ripple. While I can—and did—apply learnings from these outliers to future posts, by definition outliers should be relatively uncommon.
Given these power-law dynamics, most creators—including me—probably have an upward bias in our organic growth expectations. When a piece of content goes viral, it goes through periods of accelerating growth, plateau/stabilization, and then rapid decay. While most of us understand this pattern intuitively, we forget that this cycle plays out over an extended period of time. That means that when we see daily follower growth in the hundreds—or thousands—we often misattribute that growth to all the content uploaded during that period, not to a specific piece of content that may be an outlier. Looking back, this upward bias is also why I pulled back on my content uploads almost immediately after my follower growth slowed. I assumed that this decelerating growth was driven by my content strategy when, in fact, it was driven by the decay curve of 1-2 outlier posts.
When growth is disproportionately driven by outliers, you have to just keep posting; growth just becomes a numbers game. So at this point in my creator journey, my goal is to simply maintain my posting schedule—perhaps find some production efficiencies—and play the odds. If I can find opportunistic collaborations to quickly reach a new audience, I’ll explore them. But for my standalone content strategy, the goal is to post consistently!
Exploring Takeaways
Power-law Distributions: At this stage, power-law distributions will begin to drive growth. Consider how you can prioritize creating content on a sustainable basis so that you can play the odds.
Insights: Consider spending more time in Meta Business Suite, where you can see median performance data. At this stage, post-level data becomes much more valuable than aggregated insights because your best posts will have the most signal on what's working—theme, editing, caption—than top line numbers.
5. Growing (100K-1M)
Key question: How do I begin to monetize my audience?
Now that I’m in the Growing phase, I want to start monetizing my audience. I’m currently evaluating off-platform monetization opportunities such as monthly programs (PDFs), one-off training deep dives, or even a newsletter with sellable advertising units. These off-platform monetization strategies have delivered predictable revenue for countless fitness creators and seem to deliver the highest all-in ROI, inclusive of direct and indirect costs.
In contrast, on-platform monetization opportunities, such as branded content and subscriptions have proven less predictable and seem less attractive. A few thoughts on Instagram’s monetization channels, which will also act as my "Growing" takeaways:
Branded Content
Despite its volatility, branded content remains my preferred way to monetize on Instagram.
To date, I have completed a few deals for both money and in-kind offerings. My most notable partnership thus far has been with a New York-based fashion brand, which pinged me almost immediately after I hit 10K followers. The value exchange felt appropriate and the operational lift—simply tagging the brand in a Story—felt negligible. Since this partnership in January, I have not received meaningful inbound, either through the creator marketplace or DMs.
I assume that this slow start is due to a few of reason:
Awareness: Given the rapid growth of my account over the past few months, I assume that I’m still an “unknown” creator to most potential brand partners. As I continue to build my following and push content, I assume that I will gain more visibility—and will become more familiar—to more marketing decision-makers.
Vertical Pullback: Feedback from friends in the space suggest that many brands—especially in the fitness vertical—have pulled back significantly over the past year. Given the challenges confronting many DTC fitness and fitness tech companies, it's very likely that marketing budgets were the first to go and will be the last to recover.
Reactive Approach: I have taken a reactive approach to brand partnerships. I have not created pitch materials or proactively reached out to brands about partnerships. That said, I completed my profile on the creator marketplace after I hit 100K followers. I also added a few brands as preferred partners, though I do not expect my preferred brands to use Instagram to find their social talent!
Instagram Subscriptions
Even at >100K followers, I am still not convinced that Instagram Subscriptions are the way to go, especially for fitness creators.
The question that I grapple with is whether I should 1) keep my content free so that I can grow my audience and, ergo, the branded content opportunity or 2) put my content behind Instagram’s paywall and encourage people to pay. Given my recent growth trajectory, my assumption is that, on the margin, my content will earn a higher ROI from audience growth—and potential impression growth—than from its ability to convert and retain new Instagram subscribers.
I’m happy to go deeper on my rationale, but key considerations driving my decision re: Instagram Subscriptions are:
Content Commoditization: Fitness content is everywhere (and free!) on Instagram. There is no shortage of exercise how-tos, AMAs, training tips, or gym selfies. Given an effectively infinite supply of free fitness content, I assume that I have virtually zero pricing power. In economic terms, demand for Instagram fitness content is almost perfectly elastic. Any price increase, then, drives demand close to zero.
Opportunity Cost: Because fitness content is commoditized, I assume that I would convert a tiny fraction of my audience into paid subscribers. This audience would need its own content, which means that I would need to either 1) create incremental content to attract and retain this new audience or 2) repurpose existing content for this paying audience at the expense of my non-paying audience. In the former scenario, I would incur new hundreds of dollars in direct costs and indirect costs (e.g., time) that I probably could not recoup from monthly subscriptions alone. The latter scenario would save money initially, but would immediately end all audience development efforts and would probably jeopardize the health of my account.
Revenue Share: Even if I decided to move forward with subscriptions, why pay 30% in Apple/Google platform fees if I can convert people on my own website? These fees eats directly into my margin and—given the low likelihood of converting my audience—erodes the LTV:CAC ratio.
Wrap
As mentioned, this journey has been a wild ride! The saying is cliche, but “test and learn” really is the way to go. I hope that these observations and learnings help you or your creator partners. Feel free to comment below if you have questions!
Great perspective on how to build a real business leading with value and content.. I’m sure off digital deals will be much valuable to you in the long run .. more partnerships and more personalized experiences others can amplify for you
Awesome read!! Super insightful and informative. Thanks for sharing this piece!