How Dorie Clark gained 500K+ Instagram followers in 5 months

That's right. Hey, Jay, I'm so glad to be here.

So I spent a kind of disproportionate amount of my time and energy over the past decade on LinkedIn. And I think that was a good bet in a lot of ways. I mean, the work that I do is with business professionals. And so I think I wrongly dismissed Instagram as a place that certain industries it would be great for. You know, if you're something visual, if you're a wedding photographer, if you're a cake maker, if you're a florist, I thought, oh, okay, that's, that's the place for the pretty pictures. But I didn't really understand the ubiquity that it has in contemporary life. There are plenty of people who are getting business advice and guidance from it. And I, I hadn't really tapped into that, but what kicked it over for me was this past December, I signed a book deal, which is for my next book.

It's called The Definitive Guide to Becoming a Coach. I'm writing it with my colleagues, Marshall Goldsmith and Alyssa Cohn, and it's gonna come out in fall of 2027. And so I asked myself the question, what is one thing that I could start doing now that I would be, you know, grateful to my future self that I had done in the fall of 2027 around the book launch. And I thought, you know what, I'm pretty well connected, or I have ways of reaching people who are like executive coaches or leadership coaches because they're on LinkedIn. But there are so many different kinds of coaches and they're on Instagram. They may not actually be on LinkedIn. So the book was the forcing function. And I thought, all right, let's, let's see what I can do to learn how to expand there.

So that became my, my New Year's resolution for 2026 was to try to learn as much as I could and try to master the medium.

It's— that's how— that's how all the Creator Lab stories go, right?

it did not quite go that way. I started January of 2026 with about 22,000 Instagram followers, which—

It's, it's certainly not nothing, but I had had an account for 11 years. I had had it since, uh, 2015. So it, it had kind of grown through accretion, but I hadn't really ever put any effort or strategy into it. It was kind of a mishmash of like personal photos and like, oh, I was on a podcast and just kind of random things. And I think it was, you know, probably interesting for people to follow that, that knew me or had some connection to me, but I don't think there was a lot there for people who were strangers. And I think that's kind of the critical distinction was I needed to train myself to start thinking of it as I need to create value for people who don't know me or don't have any connection, don't really care about me as an individual, but care about the information, and how do I create something that would be relevant for them? So I started doing that, and for the first 5 months, basically until May of 2026, I was working, it felt like relentlessly. I was spending 10 or 20 hours a week doing this. It was like a part-time job learning it, and there were so many sub-skills that I didn't even realize that I'd have to learn in order to figure this out.

And I had literally almost nothing to show for it. I gained, you know, I don't know how many followers.

That's amazing. But then you lose some. So I think I netted it out so that I gained like 300 basically. But maybe you know better than I do.

There we go. It felt like a very depressing investment. But the cruel joke in all of this is that my most recent book, and something that I spend a lot of time talking about, is called The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. And so I knew from the outset that this was probably going to be, in many ways, an exercise in frustration, and kind of almost like a Zen discipline for me. I'm like, eat your own dog food, eat your own dog food. Keep doing relentlessly the thing that you love. the thing that shows no progress. Because I know intellectually that for a lot of things that we do, there's almost no growth for a very long time.

And then suddenly you get exponential growth and it kicks off. And it might seem like, oh, you know, you got hundreds of thousands of followers in this period of time. But the key thing is it's not up and to the right slowly over that period of time. It is absolutely nothing with nothing to show for it. And just, you know, an embarrassing kind of tally in terms of, you know, the ROI. And then all of a sudden there's a spike within a few weeks or a month. And I knew intellectually that was often how it was with social media growth, but you never know if it's going to work for you personally. So I had to just kind of keep putting in the reps and have the faith to do it.

But I'm curious, Jay, I mean, I know you have done some stuff with, with Instagram. I don't think it's been a kind of primary focus for you. And if I remember correctly from one of your shows, you had I'll put in air quotes, kind of like almost like a random thing, like go viral. Talk to me, how are you thinking about Instagram these days?

Come talk to me when, when, when you do. I have lots of thoughts. I will, I will help you out, man, however I can.

Yes.

Yes, it is really interesting, and I agree with you. I don't think it is either fair or justified. I mean, I've spent years, you know, having a very strong following on Twitter, LinkedIn. It's like, you know, right now it's like 450,000. And in the business world, that's a cool thing. But the apotheosis of this, I'm married now, thank goodness, to a really fantastic woman. We've been married for 2 years. But back when I was single, you know, you try everything, right? You try all these things.

And one of the things that I was thinking was like, oh, maybe this will work, is there's this website called Raya. I don't know if you've ever heard of it.

Yeah, it's like—

There we go. So it's for like ultra, ultra elite, like, you know, top, top singles, like meaning accomplished people who have done something in the world. And I thought, oh, well, that would be perfect. Like, I would, I would love somebody who's, you know, smart and accomplished and has, has really done something. Like, maybe this is the vehicle. And when I put in the application, literally all they like want, they're like, okay, do you have references from other people? And actually I did. So, okay, great. I put that in and they're like, and give us your Instagram account.

I'm like, I'm like, what? And they're, they're wanting to check your validity based on your following on Instagram. I'm like, I have a lot on LinkedIn, but they like 100% did not care. And similarly, I can't even tell you how many people comparatively have been like, oh, I saw you on Instagram as compared to I saw you on LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is a fantastic platform. I would like more people to be paying attention to that. But it is very interesting, to your point, the cultural cachet that somehow has become associated with Instagram.

I do cross-post. Not, not at the same time, literally, but I will subsequently cross-post them. Yes.

So in many ways it is. I, for a long time, was doing video on LinkedIn. I mean, for years, not exclusively, but I would frequently record batches of videos and do it. But I was doing it in what I now realize is not the kind of systematic way that I would want. I was not really aggressively checking the analytics to really drill into what was working versus what what isn't working, which I've started doing now. And also, I was not using scripted videos. I would have a premise and I would have a few bullet points laid out and I would, you know, basically just like hang them behind the camera. And so I would riff and, you know, I could do a decent job of that.

But what it meant was that the videos were a little bit longer. They were maybe 3 minutes or more even sometimes. And they were more— I mean, they were authentic, But they were kind of baggy, I now realize. That's a good word for it. Yeah. What I've started doing with these Instagram videos, you know, there's sort of a discipline of it, is using a teleprompter and writing scripts. And it is amazing now looking at the before and after and realizing, oh, you know, it was kind of boring. Like it would just drag because, you know, I was fumbling around for my point.

And so I definitely think that I've up-leveled it as a result of that. And so I think I'm making better videos now in general, and that is translating to LinkedIn audiences. What is fascinating, though, is that different topics will hit a video sometimes that will do kind of poorly on Instagram might be a surprise hit on LinkedIn. And so that actually heartens me because I'm like, oh, it wasn't necessarily that it was such a bad idea in general, but it was, it was maybe a bad idea for this audience, but not for these ones.

I think that sometimes there are topics that are maybe more LinkedIn appropriate. I've done a lot of things around like job hunting and like interviews and things like that, and some of them have done well on Instagram, but I would say percentage-wise more of them do well on LinkedIn because in a lot of ways that's the raison d'être of LinkedIn. So I think that that's part of it. Also, there's different— I'll do like celebrity reaction videos sometimes. There'll be a celebrity who does a thing and then I'll analyze it. And there are demographic differences in terms of what will pop well on LinkedIn versus Instagram versus Facebook. And so that's interesting to watch as well. As you can imagine, on Facebook, what crushes is female celebrities over 50.

They love that on Facebook, and sometimes there's a Venn diagram of overlap with Instagram. I mean, for instance, I did a video about Dolly Parton that did really well on both platforms, but other ones won't kind of necessarily connect in the same way.

It is unclear to me, and I think it is probably unclear To everybody, you know, maybe including Adam Mosseri, who's the, who's the head of Instagram, what some of the buried things are in the algorithm. Everybody knows that the more you post, the better. But the part that has not been really teased apart appropriately to me is, is it on a pure level that you have more at-bats, and so therefore you just have more chances that something will hit? Or is it possible that the algorithm is actually positively biased toward people who are posting more? And I don't know the answer to that, but regardless of what is behind it, it is true that when I was posting with more frequency, I was certainly both enhancing my skills, having more chances that something would connect, and perhaps tipping the algorithmic scales in my favor.

So right now, and I mean, this is an interesting thing to talk about as well because, you know, I know a lot of your audience is people who are, you know, like me, either doing this on their own in terms of running a solopreneur business, or maybe they have a small team, but it's not, you know, large-scale enterprise in terms of content creation. And so I have deliberately in the past, you know, 6 weeks, let's say, ratcheted back the production rate. And it's not because I think that that's a great idea. If I had unlimited time and resources, I would keep going full steam ahead. But the reality is that at the end of August, I had a book deadline. We had to submit the first draft of my book to the publisher. And immediately after that, I went for a week on a honeymoon, which you'll notice I got married 2 years ago. This is a very belated honeymoon that we finally scheduled.

followed by organizing a 100-person conference. And again, I want to thank you for the, the 2 episodes that you've done after each of your retreats that you've hosted. Oh, my pleasure. Because the breakdowns that you did, I thought were just so helpful, kind of your analysis of everything. I feel like I learned a lot from it, so I'm grateful. But we just finished this 100-person event called the Recognize Experts Summit. So having to do all of those things meant that I basically made a conscious choice to try to do as much content production as I could so that I would be able to release a video a day, but not more than that. I want to go back up to 2 or even 3 a day if I can.

Wow. That would be optimal from my perspective. But life has intervened. And so as a solopreneur, I've just been Focusing on, on those needful activities.

It was. I actually was doing, I think, more than that. Well, actually, no, let me think about this. It was— we can, we can even break this down. So I guess it probably was a little bit less. Because it was over a 5-month period, which would be about, let's call it 150 days. I did roughly 100 videos, so not quite one a day. I was doing batches of one a day, and then there would be like sort of waiting periods where I was like trying to film and edit and coordinate.

I think one of the biggest steps forward that I had actually that I think was really helpful to my development was initially because I felt very overwhelmed by all of the different skills that I would have to learn for this. I outsourced my video editing to my assistant, to my chief of staff, who, you know, has a background with AV and is comfortable doing it. And the sort of forcing function was that I didn't like some of the edits that he had, like in particular thumbnails. I know you just did an episode about the importance of thumbnails for YouTube, but it's also true for for Instagram, you need to have a decent thumbnail. And I was just like, oh, you know, I don't, I don't sort of love how that's done. And he's like, well, you know, like, that's how your face is basically. And I'm like, but you've got to be able to find a different thing. And so it sent me down the rabbit hole of basically trying to prove that I was right, where it's like, no, it doesn't have to look like that because I look like a maniac.

Sometimes I am. So the big problem was that if I was somehow starting it and I was like starting to form the sentence, like my mouth would be, ah, kind of off to the side, which is not a great look. So I actually went in and it's not that it's that hard to learn, but it felt overwhelming to me. I've learned Instagram edits, which is, you know, Instagram's app so that you can be editing things yourselves. And I learned about things like a freeze frame, where you can actually grab a still, pull it forward, and make the thumbnail. Mm-hmm. And just small things like that, I didn't understand in terms of an ask, like what was an easy thing or what was a hard thing, because I, I wasn't doing it myself. But once I learned, it also opened up a lot of creative possibilities for me because it was things like, you know, oh, I could, I could try this like split-screen thing, or I could try this cutout thing, or Oh, I could substitute some B-roll in here.

And I think that just building my facility with that and doing it myself, even if I don't always do it myself, has given me a lot of knowledge that, that I think made a difference for me in what I was able to produce.

So I started to actually get traction on my account in late May of this year, sort of early June. And, you know, then really just went on a growth spree. And all of a sudden, the first things that started to connect were, I mean, the very first one, which was kind of an early signal, I was mostly getting 2,000 or 3,000 views for a video, which was not that impressive. And there was one that I got that was 50,000. So, you know, you're sort of looking for like, what is the 10x outlier? And it was a little bit random, But it was an interesting proof of concept. I had read an article in The Atlantic that I thought was really interesting about, you know, sort of like why an Ivy League education is valuable. So this was kind of nerdy, right? It was like, you know, a study that was done. And so I was basically breaking that down and explaining it.

And that one, you know, got me like 250 followers, which was huge for me at the time. Mm-hmm. Because of course, for that 5 months, I had barely gotten that. So I thought, oh, okay, this is proof that if I have the right thing, you know, something will click. So that gave me a little bit of hope. And then I did a couple of celebrity reaction ones, which I think, you know, was a useful device. I mean, yeah, I certainly didn't want my account to turn into like, you know, whatever, eNude or something. 50 Cent.

Yeah. What I realized is that when you have a celebrity, it's an entry point because fundamentally, if you are trying to get new followers, they don't know who you are. They are new. And so it's very easy for people to just scroll by because, like, you know, who's this?

Exactly. But if you see somebody, you know, oh, it's Jennifer Lawrence, or, oh, it's Julia Roberts, or, oh, it's Ben Affleck, or whoever it is, They're at least interested enough to give it a few seconds. And if you have something valuable to say at the end of it, they might stick around, which is cool. So that was sort of the first breakthrough. And then the thing that I really started to feel good about was when my own video, or just me direct to camera, was getting a million views. And then I felt like, now I'm starting to really get this if I can capture them on my own.

I watched a lot of videos early on to try, because one of the pieces of the learning curve was I wanted to understand the platforms and I wanted to understand the algorithms because it just felt very mysterious. And so in particular, I didn't find content around this for Instagram, but I was simultaneously watching things about YouTube growth. And I did hear, you know, a number of sort of creator advisors do videos saying like, look, if you've got this account that has been posting all kinds of random things and it's stuck in the doldrums, you know, it's so much easier, just start clean, just start fresh. And that, I wondered if that was true for Instagram. And it felt very daunting to me because again, 22,000, you're almost in this like danger zone because if it was, you know, 500 people, I'd be like, okay, great, I'll just scrap it. You know, I'll start fresh. Yeah. But I had enough that I was like, oh, well, I don't wanna part with the asset that I already have.

Like, I feel like I need to make it work with the account that I presently have. But yeah, I was a little bit nervous that somehow the algorithm would be clouded or the message wouldn't get through properly. That definitely was a concern. I'll say that one of the pieces of information that was most useful to me and most hopeful to me There's a woman named Nausheen Chen. I don't know if you know her. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we had a conversation and she had, you know, had had and continues to have very strong Instagram growth. And I had heard from a third party that in 8 months she had gone from 3,000 followers to 300,000 followers.

And I thought, oh my God, that's wild. You know, how did she do that? And I wanted to understand. And one piece of our conversation was the one that really clicked for me, where she said from months 0 to 5, she grew from $3,000 to $10,000, you know, which, which is good. I mean, that's nice progress, right? It shows something. But then from months 5 to 8, she grew from $10,000 to $300,000. And that was when I realized, okay, exponential growth really can happen. And it had happened for her the year prior. You know, I think that sometimes we tell ourselves a narrative about anything, you know, whether it's about building an email list or building a YouTube channel or a LinkedIn or an Instagram.

And it's that, oh, I didn't get in soon enough. The people who were the first movers were able to take advantage of the exponential growth, but it's not available to me. And it showed me that that was possible, which gave me the desire to persevere to see it through. Because I thought, you know what, if it, if it's algorithmically possible now, then I'm a reasonably smart person, I should be able to figure this out. So Nooshin gave me a lot of hope.

There's early markers for sure. There have been interesting opportunities that have come from it. Just as, as one example about one thing that paid off in different ways, I mentioned earlier I had a video about Dolly Parton that was popular, and as a result of it, there's a woman who follows me on LinkedIn who is a CNBC editor. She saw the Dolly Parton video and said, will you write an article based on your Dolly Parton video? It's kind of interesting, right? It's like— Very interesting. Like, oh, okay. So the social content comes first and then you turn it into an article. Interesting. But so I did, and that article did really well.

She said it was, you know, for like a week or something, one of the most popular articles on the site. It ended up bringing me nearly 2,000 new email subscribers as a result of it. And the article on CNBC got seen by the producers at WGN-TV, which is one of the major TV stations in Chicago. And they invited me to do a TV appearance on WGN to talk about it. So, you know, just thinking about kind of the, the media ecosystem, that's one small example. But additionally, I have certainly gotten a lot of kind of remarkable amount of inbound inquiries for, for coaching, for speaking, things like that. So it definitely has had a positive impact on the business. In fact, I mean, you know, for creators, something that is worth calling out and mentioning is that it's a little bit of a problem sometimes because you're working so hard, right? Like for 5 months you're doing a thing and nobody's paying attention whatsoever.

So everything is optimized toward, okay, I've gotta just make the content, make the content. And then Because it comes very fast, there's often not time to put in place proper infrastructure to even respond.

I guess it's a good problem to have, but it is still a real problem because you've been optimizing for one thing and now it's like, oh my God, I have to figure out this, this completely other thing. And I did get pretty overwhelmed by it.

Yes. Yes. I've got a tail right here in my possession.

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I mean, I, you know, I'll also mention yet another possibility, uh, it opens up sponsorship possibilities that were not really there before. I mean, it is true, and people have lots of good things to say. Justin Moore, I think, is a friend of yours. I've read his book, and he and a number of other, you know, great folks that I know— a colleague of mine named Terry Rice talks about this as well— that you can absolutely land sponsor deals even if you have a smaller following or kind of a niche following. But, you know, it's true that more opportunities are available if you have a larger platform because Part of what they're looking for sometimes is reach. And so I've gotten more inquiries about that and have been able to land a couple of deals that have come in where they may have come in and said, like, for instance, oh, well, we want you to do a LinkedIn post.

And then I could say, oh, but, you know, wouldn't you also like it on this other platform? And then that becomes an additional income stream.

Yeah, you definitely, you definitely need to batch for it. So the kind of level of triage here, first thing that I would do, and when you're first starting, you might not have this, but pretty soon, you know, within, within your first 10 or 20 videos, you will have something as a basis. You can pull your data from Meta. and see which posts are performing best. And you can plug that into Claude or whatever your preferred AI system is and have it do an analysis so that you can look at it and say, all right, what topics are resonating? What themes? Like, you know, what, what are, what are we working with here? Basically, what should I definitely do more of? What should I definitely, you know, stop doing? And so you've got some material there. You also hopefully have been saving ideas from other things that you're watching on your own Instagram feed. So you might see somebody else doing a thing where you're like, oh, that's such a cool format. I like that.

You know, save, save, save. And so you bring it in. And

Yeah, so for me, I usually treat my email inbox as kind of a central repository because I know that I'm looking at it. So if I see something interesting, I will email it to myself, and then I'll grab it from email and I'll put it into a folder. I also have a great tool that I use called Sandcastles. And Sandcastles, it's run by Callaway, who I think you've interviewed too, is that right? Yeah,

Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I think that that's really useful because it'll analyze your channel, it can analyze other channels, and you can sort of see what's trending. So that gives you other ideas as well. And it connects through Claude with an MCP so that you can ask questions in Claude and have it run an analysis. So you can begin to surface some ideas about what you want to do. All right, so then I've got like raw ideas.

I have a page that I keep, which is like kind of the raw idea page. Oh, and there's also another source, Jay, which is that I will grab comments off of my posts because people will often say, okay, you know, this is great, but what do you do in a situation where blah, blah, blah? And so I'm like, oh, well, that's an interesting idea for a video. So I will paste that over there. So that document has gotten up to probably 30 or 35 pages, like just a Word document. Wow. So there's a lot of raw material there. And I will then go through and pick what I think are the most promising ones. And I have developed over time a skill in Claude that is basically a positioning.

Like, it's basically like helping me formulate a hook and like an angle for it. So I will feed in, you know, okay, here's some rough ideas. And then the Claude skill, I've trained it over time. So I have like a voice document basically, and it's guidelines for all of this that I keep refining and have been refining for all of these months. And so the skills themselves have to be relatively short, but they refer to a source document That is probably 30 pages of specs about, you know, voice and ideas and this kind of hook, not that kind of hook, et cetera. So it goes through that and comes back with me and is like, oh, well, here are some possible ways. Like it comes up with 10 hooks for each topic. And so I'll go through and I'm like, okay, you know, number 3 for A, number 4 for B, and we'll go for there.

Yeah. Or maybe not. It doesn't actually have example scripts, but it will have, like, it's got a banned phrase list, you know, like of like, you know, the AI words that are annoying to everybody. Yeah. So some of the information in this document is tonal because I wanna make sure that as I'm creating content, it's for the right people psychographically. I don't really want to attract an audience of people that, you know, feel like people are out to get you and you need to, you know, have your comeback or, you know, you need to be angry about that. I mean, that certainly is a sentiment that could mobilize people, but that's not what I'm doing. And so I want all of the frames to be about, okay, here is a way that you can have information that will be helpful to you, but it's not about a kind of victim mindset.

or whatever. So, I mean, those are some of the, the pieces. There will be guidance about particular things like here's how long the hook should be. Like the, you know, the hook shouldn't be more than 10 words because if it is, it gets long and it won't fit on the screen. It can be things about phrases that I want to specifically avoid, not because they sound like AI, but that they're off brand. Like, you know, if you're talking about winning or crushing, it's a little bit more bro energy than I want to be putting out. And so we have different phrasing that we would use.

I'm glad.

Love it.

It's so unwieldy. Yeah, in its raw form. My wife will send me things that she's seen. She's like, oh, you should talk about this. This would be a great idea. So I'll put that in the document.

Yeah, I have 3 sort of canonical documents, and one is like the raw ideas. The next is the scripted, you know, ready to film. And then the third is I've filmed this. And so I will move sequentially from one to the other.

Yeah, absolutely. Because filming is the constraint in some ways, because at least for me, I mean, you have a nice studio all set up, but, you know, right, right at the moment, I split my time between New York and Miami. And when you're in New York, space is at a premium. I don't have a kind of permanent studio setup where, you know, with lights and things like that. So you have to sample that, or you need to, to go outside and film it in the natural light and, you know, do that at an appropriate golden hour or whatever it is. So I want to have a batch of things that I can do all at once to capitalize on the efficiencies of, of being able to film a bunch of things rapidly. And I will literally go out into the streets of New York— it's kind of ridiculous— with a backpack in like 6 sweaters because you need to change your wardrobe. I

Yeah, absolutely. Because the problem then is that if you release those videos, people often might scroll by because they'll say, oh, well, I've seen this one before, even if it's a completely different topic. So it needs to have a different visual look so that they'll pause long enough to say, oh, I haven't seen this one yet. So yeah, I'll have, I'll have a bunch of different sweaters or jackets or shirts. And just go out and I'll, I'll be changing angles. Uh, you know, I might be in the same park, but I will take the tripod and just shift it around, you know, 45 degrees and 45 degrees so that they're seeing different backdrops.

I mean, I think there's probably a lot of, a lot of ways that it can work. For me, the balance that I've struck is that I have a better setup for this in Miami, but when I'm doing a celebrity reaction video, I will do it at the desk, sort of looking a little bit more formal because that's where it's like, oh, I need the authority of, you know, you know, here I am a pundit and I am, I am explaining this thing. Whereas if it's me talking direct to camera, I feel like that's a little bit meant to be more accessible. And so for that one, I'll be out in the wild, so to speak.

Yeah, I do, although it doesn't necessarily have to be batched in quite the same way, because if you are doing a video format that doesn't require heavy editing, you can kind of do that almost like when you're waiting in line for something. If I'm doing a direct-to-camera video shoot and I haven't messed up too badly, usually it'll take, you know, 5 or 10 minutes to just blitz through because really you're just cutting the beginning and the end. You're watching it through one time to make sure there weren't any kind of stops and starts or something like that. You might trim a little bit of the silences, you add the captions, you add the text hook at the beginning, and that's, that's really all you have to do. So That can be done very, very quickly. So sometimes if I, if I have filmed a batch of, you know, a dozen or something like that, I'll knock out the edits on a couple just to get them posted, but the rest I will leave for myself as little chores when I have a spare 5 minutes.

For posting, I am not the most scientific in the world, I'll cross-post to Facebook, and I will often like dump a bunch of them. I mean, I think it's probably better to, you know, to stagger them. You can schedule trial reels now, which is really nice. But honestly, when you schedule trial reels, they become like sort of hard to see based on the UX of Instagram. And it always worries me that they're not gonna do it properly. This is probably just my own paranoia. Yeah. but because it's not easily visible, I'm like, did that actually happen or did that like vanish into the ether? So because I'm skeptical, I don't necessarily use it.

I think what would be optimal is to post, you know, let's say if your goal is doing daily videos, probably every day you post a new trial reel and then every day you advance a new trial reel into your feed so that there's new content for, for the new folks and there's new content for your followers. But oftentimes I will pour a bunch into trial reels, which means that—

Yeah, exactly. And then I'll sort of ration them out to my followers during a busy period. That's really just a practical adaptation for things like last week was, as I mentioned, this 100-person recognized expert summit. And so I knew it was just gonna be wall-to-wall, so I wanted to have it all teed up so that all I had to do in the morning was just press, okay, share, share to your feed, so that that was the only thing I had to think about.

So I will spend a fairly disproportionate time thinking about that because not only is it the first thing that people see, It informs everything. Ideally, I like to have the text hook and the verbal hook aligned so that it's kind of unified. Occasionally, I will write a script and then later I will think of a better text hook, and if that's the case, I will just say, all right, well, they probably won't mind, and so I will update it to the better text hook and keep the verbal hook different, but it's usually not my intention to do so. But Yeah, I want to create something that strikes a balance. And this is part of my voice document as well. One mistake I will say that, that AI likes to do, at least initially, was that it would like give away the answer. And the whole goal of an Instagram video, if you're talking about retention, is you need to create curiosity. So they would come up with titles that would, that would just give away the answer.

It would be like, the reason you're not a good entrepreneur is you don't sleep enough or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, okay, why do you need to watch that video?

I've, you know, baked in language about art. It has to create curiosity as an element, for instance. So I mean, that's, that's one piece of it, but I, I definitely have been playing with that a lot.

The caption.

Um, relatively little. The caption is important for SEO. So you want to make sure that there's relevant keywords. I mean, all of these, like, AI is so smart now, right? Like, it, it's using all of these factors. So even if it was completely blank, it probably still wouldn't be that much of a problem. But you know that in terms of who it's being distributed to, they're drawing from your literal captions of what you've been saying. Mm-hmm. They're drawing from the text hook.

And so, you know, it understands who to feed it to. But Your written caption is just one more element that you can control to make sure that the appropriate keywords are in there. So I don't belabor it. Some people put their entire script in there, which I don't really bother to do, but largely because I am doing this on my telephone and I, you know, you could copy and paste it, but it's a little bit of a bear. So I will just make sure that I'm giving people enough information so that they understand what the video is about and why they should watch. And then, you know, a CTA, a call to action to encourage people to follow me. But yeah, I'm usually writing it on the spot and not, not thinking incredibly deeply about it.

Yes.

I am using the front-facing camera. This is definitely in the camp of like, done is better than perfect. I know that the back camera is like way nicer. And I'd love to film with a back camera, but I have tried different arrangements. I bought a separate external teleprompter and it was just too complicated to use. It was optimized for a DSLR camera. I thought, oh my God, that seems complicated to me. So I film all of this on my iPhone and it was hard to use and kind of janky with an iPhone.

So ultimately I was like, you know what, that's definitely just too hard. I wanna make it easy enough that I can actually keep doing this and that I have the ability to do it myself because I'm filming this without a team. Sometimes my wife is around to help me out, but sometimes she's not. So I, I needed it to be manageable for someone who is not a technical person like me to be able to get it done.

Just within the Instagram Edits app.

Yes, correct.

Do I think it's meaningfully important for people to have multiple buckets that they return to, or which is common?

Yeah, I think the key thing for me in kind of coming to that, and it probably won't be the case forever, right? Because different trends emerge on platforms about what people want or what they're looking for. That's why I always start with the data analysis first to understand what is it that people seem to be interested in now so that I'm not stuck in some past model. But that is definitely what seems to be working right now. It emerged ground up. When I started the Instagram journey, I really wasn't sure what the audience would be interested in. And the problem, you know, you could say it's a strength, but also a problem with me honestly is that I, in my work, don't have a very specific area of focus, right? It's not like I've only ever done one thing. My first book is about professional reinvention. It's called Reinventing You.

I have another one called Stand Out about how to become a thought leader in your industry. My third book is called Entrepreneurial You. My most recent one, The Long Game, is about strategic thinking. So any of those could have been potentially viable paths to explore, and I tried videos initially about all of those things. It's like, oh, okay, should it be more entrepreneurial content about like, here's how to make money as an entrepreneur, or should it be more about like, here's how to be strategic and develop long-term vision? I didn't know what would resonate. And so where I've landed is as the result of sort of seeing of the potential universe of my content. I'm clearly not doing like random things like, oh, I'll throw in cooking and fitness or whatever, but of the potential universe of topics that I could talk about, these are the veins that that seem to resonate most with people. So I've shaped it accordingly.

Aha. Well, thank you, Jay. I appreciate it. I think that what I have learned, and I hope can be helpful to other people, in terms of growing on Instagram is, number one, responding to the audience like we were talking about a moment ago is really crucial. I was never an analytics person before. I was a philosophy major as an undergrad. I have a graduate degree in theology. I'm not a data cruncher, but I've come to appreciate how important it is to actually look at the numbers, And when you see a meaningful spike in reaction, that should be noticed because that is the thing that you can double down on.

And you have to develop almost scientific hypotheses. I had a post that did very well for me called How to Stand Out in a Meeting Even If You're the Quiet One. And it was completely disproportionate. It got a million-plus views or whatever. And in no way was I expecting that to do so well. And so I decided, okay, I have to test this. Is it about standing out in a meeting that people are interested in? Is it about the identity of being a quiet one? And so I almost like an algorithmic thing, you know, like a decision tree, I started making other videos around that to see, all right, you know, what about if you do X? You know, if you, how to stand out in a job interview if you're a quiet one, how to, how to argue your point effectively, even if you're the quiet one. And all of these things were, were, experiments off of these things to try to get closer and closer to the idea of what is it that's working.

And it might not even be the premise. It could be the hook. It could be the visual of where you are or what you're doing. And so it becomes like a mystery that you can unfurl if you treat it the right way. And so that's been very empowering. The second piece of advice that I'd give is regardless of What people end up doing. I do think from my own experience that there has been real value in learning the process from the ground up myself so that I understand how it works. And I may outsource certain elements later, but I have so much more control about it and I can move so much faster being able to film and learning how to do that, being able to edit and doing that.

So I think it's a mistake to pay someone You could easily pay someone, you know, $3,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 a month. I mean, I have multiple author friends that pay a firm $7,000 a month, and they have beautiful looking content. Like, it's very beautiful. But my growth has been better than theirs on the platform. And I think it's empowering to realize that money is not the variable that is buying you success. Or

Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, I guess as a third piece, I would say, You bring this up frequently about your listeners and, you know, members of the lab, that it is education first. And I think that is a really important frame. We all know, especially with AI, I mean, God help us, there is so much slop that is being produced and it is noisier. So if we can make sure that whatever we are producing is something that genuinely feels like an insight, that, you know, really is something that you, if you received it, would say, oh, that's, that's cool, I want to pass that on. That is what is going to stand out. You know, it's just the threshold of not what would other people like, but would I like it? You know, does it meet your quality threshold? The other day, I did something that I had been wanting to do for a while and just had put off, honestly, because it felt very intimidating in terms of the time commitment and how to do it, which was I knew that it would be a good idea to have 500,000 followers in to create a carousel that was like an about me introductory carousel. Because presumably a lot of people who started following me, they might watch the videos, but they haven't necessarily taken the time.

I mean, why would they, to go to my website or learn any information about me? So they might literally just have no data, but this would be a way that I could introduce myself to them. So I knew it was useful, but I didn't even really know how to make carousels. And it was like, oh, you know, how do you tell your story that, you know, in a short, succinct way? So it took me probably 6 or 7 hours to work on, but it was like this very big project figuring out what are the exact right images to use and how do I tell the story? But I was really proud of it at the end because I felt like, okay, I feel like this captures my vibe in a nice way. And I put it up and it's actually been so lovely and so gratifying because an About Me carousel, you would think it's like maybe limited reach for something like that. It's not as immediately useful to other people because it fundamentally is about you. But right this minute, it is up at 132,000 views. which is so awesome for just something like that. And to me, that feels like evidence that I did it the way that I had hoped I could do it.

Oh my goodness. I think we've covered a lot of ground. This is really fun to talk about. I'm curious for you, how are you thinking about this? Like, do you wanna sort of, dive in and recommit? Or like, what's, what's your vision for yourself with this?

Right.

Totally. I

Yes.

Yeah.

And that's really interesting. Yeah, when consistency becomes a problem, it's like— Totally. Like the terrible downside of doing exactly what everyone tells you that you should be doing.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it, and I certainly support your Instagram journey, although as a podcast fan, don't cut it back too much because I keep learning a lot from your show. So I'm so happy To be able to come on and share some of what I've been learning because I really, I really find it genuinely beneficial. So thank you.