GM Friends 👋

Today is a big day.

If you’ve ever wanted a behind the scenes look at what the full content creator journey looks like at each stage…

This is for you.

I also break down how you can steal my strategies to accelerate your growth.

Let’s jump into it 👇

If you’re looking for a job in Web3, click here 🔗

📈 Today I hit 40,000 followers, here’s how I did it.

To understand how I got here, you need to understand where it all started.

🌱 Phase 1 (2,000 - 10,000 followers):

At the beginning, I sucked…

As an NFT project founder, I wanted to grow on Twitter but I had no idea how.

Sh*tposting wasn’t my thing, and I didn’t want to lean into the engagement farming meta.

Then I saw NFT GOD.

For the first time it became clear that you could grow on Twitter by posting value driven threads in Web3.

And so I started writing.

When I began my content journey, I heard about this idea of the “Law of 100”

Which means that if you’re going to start anything, particularly with content,

You need to commit to creating 100 pieces before you can decide whether or not it’s working for you.

(Otherwise most people write 4x threads, they don’t perform well, and they quit.)

But 100 threads?? 🤯

If I do 2x a week that will take me 2 years! 💀

So I said f*ck it. I’m going to write 100 threads in 100 days.

And only at the 100th thread, that’s when I can decide if it’s worth it or not.

And that’s what I did:

Every thread I wrote on that journey is captured in the comments of the post above.

If we go back to the beginning, this was the first thread I wrote. And compared to how I write today, it was so bad:

What was wrong with it:

❌ It used hashtags
❌ Had a link in the opening tweet
❌ Was about a topic that very few people care about

But it didn’t matter that it wasn’t perfect.

Because it was the first rep in the content gym 🏋️

And then I kept going: 2… 10… 50… 100.

Each time improving one small thing.

This period got me all the way to 10,000 followers in 3 months.

But it wasn’t the writing alone that got me there.

Because I stacked another strategy on top of my frequent thread writing…

Twitter Spaces became the gasoline that I poured on top of this content fire 🔥⛽️

Every day I would do between 1-5 Twitter spaces, speaking as frequently as I could.

This was incredibly beneficial for 3 reasons:

1️⃣ I was always up to date on the latest news, which became an infinite content generator.

2️⃣ The people who follow you from Twitter spaces actually like what you have to say. Which means that they are much more likely to engage with your content than other followers.

3️⃣ It took the pressure off my threads having to perform well, because spaces gave me consistent growth of a few followers every day.

If you do frequent spaces whilst creating content,

You create a multiplier effect on everything that you post.

So if you're stuck in Phase 1, how should you use this strategy?

🫵 How you can grow through Phase 1:

✅ Focus on volume not perfection (you get better through volume)

✅ Speak on spaces. This will get you high quality followers and grow you faster at the beginning.

✅ Improve one small thing with each rep (each post, thread, etc).

🪴 Phase 2 (10,000 - 20,000 Followers):

This is when I found my voice.

Once you get out of the beginning Phase, that’s when you start to feel confident.

For some it comes later, for others it comes sooner.

But once you find your voice, that’s when content becomes really fun.

At this stage I didn’t have a niche, but I had developed a writing style and was learning a lot from fellow content creators that I reached out to.

📝 Wale taught me the importance of deep research & how to make threads more engaging with graphics.

📝 NFT GOD taught me to switch from quantity to quality. I stopped writing every day and started putting more time into each thread.

📝 Friends at a similar size taught me small hacks to make my content more engaging.

Out of all my time as a content creator, this was definitely the most fun.

When you struggle for your first 10,000 followers and begin to see consistent growth from 10,000 - 20,000,

It starts to feel like you’re finally in the game.

🫵 How you can grow through Phase 2:

✅ Make friends at a similar size to you and learn from each other

✅ Don’t feel a need to niche down, follow anything that excites you.

✅ Switch from quantity and high volume to quality and refining skills.

🌴 Phase 3 (20,000 - 30,000 Followers):

This is when I went viral.

It’s funny.

I remember vividly sitting at my desk earlier that week…

Feeling so frustrated 🤦‍♂️

I was putting 8 hours+ into every thread that I wrote…

But I was going through a period where nothing worked.

I had some of my first doubts as a content creator. The initial rewards had worn off, and now it just felt like a grind.

And that grind was feeling slower every day.

And then. It happened.

After writing 2x threads earlier in the week that had done okay.

I was in the office eating my lunch, and I saw that GPT-4 had just released.

As I held my sandwich in my hand, I said to myself:

💭 “Okay, I’m going to write a thread on this. The rules are: I have to finish it before the end of lunch. I’m not making a thumbnail. I’m not editing it separately, I’m just going to write it in Twitter and hit post.”

And that’s what I did.

The result: 2,000 Followers in less than 24 hours.

I couldn’t believe it. A thread that I wrote in 30 mins with a sandwich in my hand got me more growth than 10+ threads that had taken 8 hours each.

I showed a friend the next day over lunch. He gave me a high five, and then asked me:

“Okay so that’s what happened with ChatGPT yesterday, but I’ve seen all those usecases now, is there anything new?

🤔 Hmm… Great question I thought.

So I ran it back. I doubled down and wrote this post:

The Result: 4,000+ followers & over 3 million views.

Naturally, I ran it back one more time with another post that also got over 1 million views and even more followers.

This was my breakout moment.

🫵 How you can grow through Phase 3:

✅ You can’t manufacture virality (Even now, I can’t make lightning strike twice). But if you are consistent, and keep your eye out for massive waves, you will hit those magic moments.

✅ When you hit virality, double down on it and keep mining that moment until it no longer works.

✅ Understand that the world doesn’t know how hard you worked on a piece of content. 8 hours vs 30 mins, the reader doesn’t care. What they care about is content that is valuable, entertaining & timely. If you hit those 3, your chances to blow up increase dramatically.

🌳 Phase 4 (30,000 - 40,000 Followers):

This is when I niched down

Just after hitting 30,000 I was starting to see a lot of creators specialise in a niche.

Zaimiri was killing it in his growth niche.

And many other creators were starting to define their angle in Web3.

I felt like if I wanted to stand out in this next chapter, I needed to find my niche.

So I thought to myself:

💭 Hmm, what am I interested in that I’d enjoy writing about every week.

As you read this now,

You might think that the next step for me was to start writing about jobs to become the ‘jobs guy’

But it actually wasn’t. It started with me writing about AI.

I wanted to become the AI guy of Web3, so every week I was writing threads like this:

I continued down this path for over a month. But at every point I felt like I was forcing it.

I was caught between two personalities.

Writing about AI on Monday, and still writing more generally about Web3 throughout the rest of the week.

And then, I started to notice something.

As a founder, a lot of people had were asking me for a job.

And I didn’t have a job available for them, but I wanted to help.

I found that every day I kept giving 1-on-1 advice on the types of jobs that were available, how to get the jobs, etc.

As soon as I’d tell one person, another person would ask.

Generally when multiple people show an interest in something, that’s a sign to create content about that topic.

And so I did, starting with this:

After this post, I had heaps of DMs from people saying that it was super helpful.

So I doubled down. I’d shown people the types of jobs and how to get a job, but then I had people asking me “Where do I find a job?”

Naturally, my next post was sharing the jobs that were available:

The market kept showing that there was interest in this type of content, and I’ve been building on it ever since.

I look back on this and feel incredibly grateful for how lucky I was to stumble upon this niche.

But…

That’s not the end of the story.

When I went back through my old posts to do research for this article, I stumbled across a thread that I wrote almost a year ago today.

November, 2022…

I had already written about jobs a year ago. The market had already told me it was interested. But… I didn’t listen.

I wrote that one post and at the time thought “Oh awesome, that post did well… Anyway moving on.”

What I should have done was dug a little bit deeper and listened to the fact that there was clearly market demand for Web3 job content at this point in time.

🫵 So the lesson to take away from this story.

✅ Don’t force a niche. Write about everything that you’re interested in or skilled at, and your niche will find you.

✅ If you get a positive signal from the market about a piece of content. Don’t celebrate and move on. Take a moment to dive deeper and see if there’s a niche there for you.

✅ Once you write about a topic, if you get people in your DMs asking follow-up questions, that is a great place to start for building on your niche.

🚀 Phase 5 (Beyond):

So what’s my plan now? It’s incredibly simple:

Now that I’ve discovered what I enjoy writing about and what the audience wants, my goal is to become an expert by learning as much as I can about the niche.

Over the coming months I want to:

1️⃣ Increase the quality of my jobs content. I want to make my content more enjoyable to read and easier to take action on for anyone searching for a job.

2️⃣ Go deeper. I am speaking to hiring managers and leading Web3 companies so that I can uncover behind the scenes insights that no one else has in Web3.

3️⃣ Enjoy the process. The early days were a grind and unsustainable. I want to do this for years to come, so I’m now playing the long game. Finding ways to make the content feel easier and more fun to create each week. If you love what you do, you can do it forever.

If you made it to the end, you’re a legend 🏆

I wanted to do something a bit different in this post to show you what the journey is really like.

Most people watch a content creator’s path and looking back, it can seem like a perfectly straight line.

But it’s not like that at all. To this day, I’m constantly discovering new ways to improve and evolve the way that I create content.

Don’t feel pressure to find a niche, don’t feel pressure to hit 10k followers immediately.

All you need to focus on is learning how to be consistent (at whatever pace works for you) and get a little bit better with each post.

Most people quit before they make it.

But if you stick with it, you’ll become unstoppable.

Good luck friend 🍀

🧗 Started from the bottom now we’re here…

^{If you’re new here, one of the core principles of the content I share is that a newsletter is the most linear and simple business you can start in Web3. It has high sponsorship revenue and can go from being a side hustle to a full-time business in under a year. I am building this newsletter in public, to share the progress each week so that you can be a part of the journey. Now let’s get into it 👇}

This Week:
Subscribers: 3,520 (+25 Subscribers)
Open Rate: 42.2%

Tracking my goals:

🚂 Improve the graphic design of this newsletter: Paused until 4,000 subs.

🚂 3,520 / 4,000 Subscribers: A strong week of growth 💪

✅ Update the welcome email for new subscribers: (Complete)

Have a great weekend Legends 💯

— Alex

Thanks for reading this week’s episode of Grow Faster ❤️

I’ve been in Web3 for 8 years, ETH since $45 and am building on my NFT project Bricktopians every single day.

If you want to join my world, and be a part of a project that grows with me.

Grab a Bricktopian NFT and let me build for you 💯

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