I open their account and usually know within 4 seconds.

It is not the hashtags. They did not destroy their account by posting at 9 a.m. instead of 7 p.m. Instagram is not punishing them because they ignored a trending audio featuring a sped-up Sabrina Carpenter song.

Their growth problem started long before they pressed record.

They never decided exactly who the content was for. Their ideas give strangers no reason to care. Every Reel looks as though it came from a different creator, and they are still waiting for the algorithm to reward them for being consistent.

Consistent at what, exactly?

I did not know any of this when we started Englishman Mike. We learnt it through trial, error and a truly unreasonable number of failed Reels. Eventually, that account grew from 0 to 700K followers in 10 months.

Here is the roadmap I wish somebody had handed me at the start.

Subscribe now

1. Choose a clear niche, then make yourself impossible to replace

Anyone can make fitness videos, teach marketing or review restaurants. If the only distinctive thing about your account is the topic, you are competing with thousands of people who can make almost exactly the same content.

Your niche tells people what you talk about. Your perspective gives them a reason to hear it from you.

Our goal was never to make Mike another British man talking about life abroad or purely teaching idioms. The internet already has plenty of those.

We needed viewers to recognise his particular perspective immediately. His age, Britishness, delivery, opinions and life had to create a version of the subject that nobody else could convincingly reproduce.

That is the position you want. You do not merely want to participate in a niche. You want people to see a subject and think of you.

Finish these 2 sentences:

I make content about __________.

People watch me instead of somebody else because __________.

“Because I’m authentic” is not an answer. Everybody claims to be authentic, including people whose entire face changes when the camera turns on.

Your answer needs to contain something another creator cannot simply copy.

2. Give every Reel a reason to exist

Before you film anything, answer one question: Why should a stranger care enough to stop scrolling?

The audience does not care that filming took all afternoon. They do not know that the light kept changing, the dog barked through 11 takes and CapCut crashed just as you finished adding captions.

They only know what appeared on their screen.

Complete this sentence:

Someone will watch this because it helps them __________.

Maybe it helps them understand something, solve something, feel understood, discover something surprising or laugh at something painfully familiar.

The 1st 2 decisions explain why most accounts never get traction. The next 7 show you how to build an account that people recognise, sharae and follow.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• The 3-part test I use to separate a strong hook from clickbait

• The question that tells me whether a Reel is genuinely shareable

• My system for turning 3 to 5 content pillars into at least 45 ideas

• The recognizability test most creator accounts fail

• How to use posting volume to improve instead of repeating the same mistakes

• The exact questions I ask when analysing a winning Reel

• Why trying to appeal to everyone is making your content forgettable

• A 9-point audit you can use on your last 10 Reels today

If your account has stalled, this is the part that will show you what to change.

Read more

What’s the best time to post? Which hashtags should I use? Is a 7-second Reel better than an 11-second one? Should the caption be a question? People will happily spend 3 hours researching the “optimal” posting window for an idea that took them 4 minutes to think of.

Almost nobody spends serious time on the first 90%.

The result is a generation of creators optimising mediocre content instead of making content worth optimising. Polishing, scheduling and hashtag-stacking Reels that were never going to grow, because the thinking underneath them was never strong enough to begin with.

This is the article I wish someone had handed me before I ever opened Instagram. It contains no posting times, no editing apps and no hashtag strategies. It covers the principles that decide whether an account grows at all, and every one of them matters before you press record.

1. Know exactly who you’re talking to and why they should care.

If you cannot describe your audience in one sentence, you are not ready to post. Harsh, but true.

People don’t follow “content.” They follow creators who reliably solve a specific problem or deliver a specific feeling. The fitness coach who makes gym anxiety disappear. The account that makes you feel smarter about money in 30 seconds. The person whose videos you send to your best friend because it’s basically your entire friendship in Reel form.

Every big account can be reduced to a sentence like that. If yours can’t, the audience has nothing to attach to, and no amount of posting fixes that. You’re not being ignored because you haven’t found the right trending audio. You’re being ignored because nobody can work out what following you actually gets them.

By the end of this article, you’ll know:

• Why better editing isn’t the answer.

• The single job every successful Reel has.

• How to think about virality instead of chasing it.

• Why psychology beats copying other creators.

• The questions that separate average content from content that spreads.

  If you want your next Reel to perform better than your last, the rest of this article is for you…

Read more

When the account started blowing up, I figured it’d be a run of clean wins. Find the formula, repeat it, done. Yeah, no. What actually hap…

Read more

And you can see why. The platform excuses are easy. If the algorithm’s the problem then there’s nothing to fix about you, you just have to wait for it to swing back around. If the niche is saturated then you were unlucky, not wrong. Every one of those stories lets you keep doing the exact thing that isn’t working, which is exactly why people reach for them. Nobody opens the app hoping to find out their whole approach has been off for 8 months.

They go after content because content’s the part you can actually touch. You can re-edit it, change the thumbnail, rewrite the hook and feel like you did something. Positioning, association, the psychology of the people watching — none of that turns up on a screen, so nobody bothers. It’s invisible work, and it doesn’t give you the little hit that reposting a tweaked version of yesterday’s video does. Let’s use business creators as the example, for the sake of todays post.

1. Your positioning is weak, and weak positioning makes everything harder.

30 seconds on your page and I already know you’re a founder, an entrepreneur, a marketer, a productivity guy, an AI guy, an investor, an operator and a thought leader. Then I scroll and it’s podcast clips and revenue screenshots and a personal story and a startup meme and a post about discipline, and none of it’s bad on its own. That’s partly the problem, and it’s why you’ve got away with it this long. There’s nothing here you can point at and call a mistake. The mistake is the sum, not the parts.

Nobody’s working as hard to understand you as you think they are. They’re not studying your account. They give you a second, maybe two, decide what box you go in and move on, because that’s what everyone does with everything online. Who are you, what do you do, are you worth remembering, what do they get out of following. The second those answers get fuzzy, so does your account. You’re being forgotten, not rejected, which is worse, because rejection at least means you registered to them.

Here’s the part people get really wrong.

Positioning isn’t your niche, your bio, or your brand colors. It’s what people connect you with the moment you turn up. It’s the thought that fires in someone’s head before they’ve even read the caption. The strongest creators online have basically trained their audience to expect one specific thing, and they hit that thing again and again until the association is automatic. You see the face and you already know the flavor. That’s not luck and it’s not charisma, it’s repetition pointed in one direction for long enough to finally stick.

Most of the time that’s the difference between the account that compounds and the one that doesn’t, and it’s boring, and nobody wants to hear it. People want the answer to be a better hook or a posting schedule or some trick with the first 3 seconds (and don’t get me wrong, those are real), not “you’ve spent a year being 4 different people and now nobody can hold a single idea of you in their head.” But that’s usually what it is.

So stop guessing, and go ask 5 people what your account’s about, what they think you’d sell if you sold a product, what box they’d put you in, 3 words to describe your content, and what kind of person follows you. Line the answers up. If they’re all different, leave the hooks alone, because your hook was never the thing that was broken. And don’t ask your friends, who’ll be kind, ask people who barely know you, who’ll be accurate.

Then pull your last 30 posts and ask the same things about every one: what it’s really about, what it connects you with, who you’re talking to, and whether it backs up the story people are building about you or chips away at it. What you’ll find is founder advice next to a generic mindset post, then an AI tutorial, then a startup joke, with nothing leading into anything else. Each post is a fresh start instead of another brick in the same wall. Think about how you actually pass creators on to other people. You say “oh you have to follow her, she does the thing where” and then you describe the thing. If there’s no thing, you never get talked about, and if you never get talked about, you don’t grow, because other people sharing you is a big part of how this works.

2. Your content is valuable but forgettable.

Business creators are hooked on information because information feels like effort, and that feels like being a good person. But the audience couldn’t care less. There’s already too much of it and there always was, and nobody owes you their attention because you did your homework. Attention’s the valuable thing and information’s the cheap thing. Mixing those 2 up is a mistake.

The whole “provide value” thing has a lot to answer for here. People took it to mean stack as many tips as possible into every post. So you get these dense, text and info heavy posts that took an hour to write and get scrolled past in under a second, and the creator decides the problem was reach, or timing, or the thumbnail, when the problem was that the thing was boring. If you look a little deeper, I think you’ll find, that nobody actually wants to learn online. They want to be entertained, with just enough value on the side. This is key to keep in mind!

The only thing people remember is how something made them feel. Never the bullet points. That’s just how memory works and you’re not going to out-smart it. You remember the post that made you feel slightly attacked, or seen, or smarter than the people around you. You do not remember “tip number 3.”

Pull your last 20 posts and write down what each one actually makes someone feel — curiosity, status, relief, validation, whatever — then count them up. If nearly all of them say “helpful,” well, there it is. Helpful gets read and forgotten (and honestly 9/10 not even read…), but something that makes a person feel something gets screenshotted into a group chat. And that’s a real person spending their own reputation to put you in front of people who’ve never heard of you, which no amount of helpful tips will ever buy you.

“5 productivity tips for entrepreneurs” is up against everyone alive. “Productivity culture is keeping you BROKE - here’s how to escape the grind” is doing something completely different, because there’s tension in it, and that’s what stops the scroll and makes someone need to know where you’re going. Same underlying knowledge, completely different result, and the only thing that changed was that one of them had a point of view and the other had a list.

3. You change the experiment, then complain about the results.

Most creators change everything, all the time, and then act shocked when none of it adds up to anything. It takes a few flat posts for them to ditch the niche completely. Watch a competitor have one good month and they’ll tear up positioning they’d barely started building. And the minute some podcast about the power of storytelling lands in their feed, the whole plan gets rebuilt by Sunday night. Then they tell me growth feels random. Of course it does!

There’s a reason this happens, and it isn’t stupidity. Starting fresh feels amazing. A new niche, a new look, a new content plan — it’s got all the excitement of progress with none of the risk of finding out your current stuff just needs more time. Sticking with something boring and unproven for 3 more months feels painful, so people keep blowing it up and calling it a pivot, and every reset puts them back at the start while they congratulate themselves for being adaptable.

You’d never run a business like this. You’re not going to change your pricing and your customer and your message and your packaging and your whole sales process in one week and then try to work out what moved the numbers. You’d learn nothing, and you know you’d learn nothing. But that’s exactly what these people do to their content week after week, and they call it staying flexible. The honest word is impatient.

30 days of boring consistency will teach you more than a year of constantly starting over, and it’ll feel terrible the whole time, which is exactly why almost nobody does it.

4. Your sample size is far too small.

People make massive calls off basically nothing. 10 posts, 20 videos, one month — that tells you almost nothing worth using.

Grow a substantial audience, and you realize pretty quickly that individual posts matter far less than creators want them to. Only patterns matter: the comment that keeps appearing under completely different posts, the question people ask repeatedly, the reactions that show up again and again even when the topic changes. That is the useful information that you should make decisions from. But you can’t see those patterns 10 posts in, no matter how intensely you analyze them, because there simply is not enough data yet.

Post for 3 months consistently, and then you can start looking at the numbers and making any type of decision. Everything else is honestly premature.

K.

And honestly, that’s probably the healthiest mindset you can have if you want to build anything meaningful online, because one of the biggest reasons creators stay small is that they dramatically overestimate how much attention they deserve in the beginning. They think because they spent time on something, people should care about it. They edit a video for 6 hours, write this thoughtful caption, obsess over the lighting, choose trending audio, post it, then spiral when it gets 417 views and a comment from their cousin saying “so proud of you xx.”

Meanwhile, the internet has moved on in under two seconds.

Attention online is brutally competitive now. You are not competing against “other creators.” You are competing against people’s addictions. Their distractions. Their group chats. Their boredom at work. Their ex texting them at midnight. Their inability to focus for longer than eleven seconds without checking another app. So if your content does not create an immediate reaction, nobody is going to stick around and give you a chance because you seem nice and hardworking.

That is not how this works.

1. The algo rewards clarity.

Most creators are impossible to understand because they are trying to be too many things at once. They want to be aspirational but relatable. Luxurious but down to earth. Smart but accessible. Funny but professional. So their content becomes this completely muddled identity crisis where nothing actually sticks. One day they’re giving business advice, the next day they’re posting a blurry photo dump with a caption about healing, then suddenly they’re reviewing matcha and uploading podcast clips. Nobody knows what category to put them in.

And if people cannot understand you quickly, they leave.

The creators who grow the fastest are usually the easiest to categorize psychologically. You understand their tone immediately. Their worldview. Their taste level. Their energy. You understand the social role they play online and what following them says about you. That last part matters enormously, because people are not just following creators for information anymore. They follow creators because of identity. Because somebody makes them feel smarter, cooler, more ambitious, more informed, more emotionally understood, more culturally relevant.

The strongest creators online are not “content creators.” They are perception builders.

2. Most audience growth is emotional.

This is the part people who are obsessed with “providing value” never fully understand. Audiences are not rational. They are emotional first and logical second. Nobody is opening TikTok hoping to encounter an informative young entrepreneur with actionable insights and excellent lighting. People follow what creates reaction.

That’s why two people can say almost the exact same thing and one becomes magnetic while the other gets ignored. One person understands emotional packaging and the other… is boring.

And audiences are getting much harder to fool now. They can feel copied content instantly. They can feel when somebody is watering down every opinion to avoid judgment. They can feel when a creator has studied “personal branding” so aggressively that they’ve accidentally removed every interesting thing about themselves.

The safest creators are usually the easiest to forget.

3. Volume matters more than people want it to.

I know this annoys people because everyone wants there to be a cleaner, more elegant answer involving alignment and authenticity and posting with intention, but the reality is that most creators simply do not make enough content to become good.

They’re slow AF.

They overanalyse everything. They become devastated by low views. They disappear for a week every time a post flops. They treat every upload like a referendum on their intelligence, attractiveness, talent, and future success instead of what it actually is: data.

Meanwhile, the people building massive audiences are learning faster because they are producing faster. They are testing more hooks, more formats, more positioning angles. They are seeing patterns emerge in real time while everybody else is still journaling about whether they’re “aligned” enough to post consistently.

Eventually, if you stick with it long enough, growth stops feeling random. You start understanding what creates authority, what creates obsession, what creates sharing, what creates loyalty. You stop posting emotionally and start posting strategically.

And honestly, I think this is the part people struggle with most, because once you really understand how attention works online, you also realize something slightly uncomfortable:

Most creators are not being ignored because they’re underrated.

They’re being ignored because nothing about them feels important enough to remember.

There is a difference.

K.

Get real. Attention is engineered.

Every creator, founder, and personality brand that breaks through is communicating something very specific — whether they realize it or not. Identity. Taste. Status. Aspiration. Belonging. Tension. Curiosity.

The people who grow fastest online are rarely the loudest. They’re the clearest.

They understand exactly who they are, exactly how they want to be perceived, and exactly how to make people care.

That’s what this Substack is about.

Not generic “content tips.” And not recycled business advice from people whose only qualification is owning a ring light.

Real strategy — the kind that turns a person into a brand people talk about.

After helping grow Englishman Mike into a global audience of hundreds of thousands, I started realizing how many creators were approaching content completely backwards. They obsess over hacks, posting times, hashtags, and trends while ignoring the thing that actually drives growth:

Positioning.

Why do some people become instantly compelling while others feel forgettable even after 400 videos?

Why does one sentence stop people mid-scroll while another disappears into the void five seconds after it’s posted? Those are the questions I care about.

The internet is one giant game of perception, and the people winning it understand something most creators completely miss: audiences are not just consuming information. They’re consuming identity.

Every follow is a tiny psychological alignment.

Every successful creator represents something larger than their niche.

Status.
Taste.
Intelligence.
Ambition.
Humour.
A worldview.
A fantasy.
A type of person someone wants to become.

That’s why the strongest brands online feel bigger than their actual content.

And once you understand that, you stop making random posts and start building a world. Stop asking: “What should I post today?” And start asking: “What should people associate with me every single time I appear on their screen?”

That shift changes everything.

You realize the creators dominating online aren’t necessarily more talented than everyone else. They just understand branding at a much deeper level.

Here, you can expect essays, breakdowns, case studies, internet psychology, creator strategy, business observations, and honest conversations about what’s actually happening online right now — not what people wish was happening.

Some of it will be tactical, some observational, and a lot of it will probably annoy people who are very attached to the phrase “just be authentic.”

So if you’re serious about building real attention online, not just posting endlessly and hoping something magically happens — buckle up.

We have a lot to discuss.

K.