What took my friend's IG from zero to 20k followers in 5 months

Hey friends — Joe here.

The Income Stack runs three times a week — 📊 Trades on Saturday, 💡 One Idea on Tues, 🛠️ The Solopreneur Stack on Thurs.

As a Solopreneur, I certainly need to build a stronger content engine on social media.

Ten days ago, I got on a call with a friend whom started the journey slightly earlier than me but built an Instagram following of 20K in 5 months (quite a feat that he pulled off, in my opinion).

I went in wanting tactics, but the message from him is simple:

post a video every day, no shortcut.

His advice to me:

• Bullet-point the script, don't write it. Full scripts take an hour and can't be iterated. Bullets take ten minutes and survive being changed mid-take.
• Timebox the whole thing to an hour. Editing is the biggest sink; lighting and camera placement are second. The shooting itself is the fastest part once the setup stops moving.
• Don't batch yet. Batching optimises a process you haven't found. Get the reps first.
• Copy the formats. Find people making the thing you want to make, take their hooks and structures, add your own half on top. Everybody does this; almost nobody says so.
• Rework the winners, not the losers. When something hits, go back to that script and format and do it again better. The flops don't have much to teach.
• Write down who it's for. Not a follower count — one person. The version of me that needed this, at the stage I needed it.

The honest note

The reason I hadn't started wasn't time, and it wasn't equipment.

It was that I wanted the content to be "good". Which is an expensive way of saying I wanted to skip the part where I'm bad at something in public. (aka fear of failure).

The line that got through:

300,000 views isn't an accomplishment and 10,000 isn't a failure — the only thing that counts is whether it went out the door.

Set against that, "make it good first" isn't a standard.

It's just a nicer word for not doing it.

I don't know if I am ready to do daily video content (yet). But I am committing to making more contents on my primary platform and being comfortable with imperfections. I'll tell you in a few weeks how it goes!

Here's my question: what have you been polishing instead of publishing? If you have tips on how you overcome the fear of posting, I would love to learn more from you!

Keep growing!

Joe