📘 It took me 3 years to get 10k followers

The Dad Story part 5

UPDATE: There was a blatant typo in the original headline of this post. This was on purpose to underscore my messages of being bad when you start and iterating and improving over time. Just kidding it’s because I’m STILL bad at all of this.

Want to work full time in social media? The best training is to start your own brand and build it to 10k followers.

If you’ve done this, you know… IT AIN’T EASY. (Also if you’ve done this, drop your links in the comments! You deserve another follow.)

That first 10k is brutal. You learn so much during that grind. You learn what content works and you also learn to not be too precious about your content. You could spend hours on a piece of content only to find that it bombs. Alternatively, the throwaway content you decide to post on a whim might go viral. You learn to experiment. You learn to have an abundance mentality with creative ideas. There are plenty more where that came from.

You’ll start by blaming the algorithm for your poor reach/engagement/whatever. But if you give this grind the respect it deserves, in the end you’ll realize it’s really just all about quality content.

Still though, there are growth hacks. Stay tuned.

Previously on “The Dad Story”:

1. I am a validation-starved nerd who loves comedy and those things tend to be helpful for social media content creation.

2. In 2013 I started a secret Twitter account called The Glad Stork so I could post my embarrassingly bad jokes.

3. The Dad’s goals were entertainment and community. We created The Dad Gaming for community.

4. An existential crisis is the mother of a dramatic career change. The Dad wouldn’t exist without General Electric.

I am still telling The Dad Story on this substack!

It’s just progressing slowly. I recently wrote about how when I was at GE, I created a corporate escape plan. That plan was essentially:

1. Learn to create content by building my own social brand. (The Glad Stork)

2. Pitch content to be published on sites/brands to build a portfolio.

3. Get a freelance job being paid to make ad hoc content by piece.

4. Get a regular weekly job being paid to make content.

5. Get a full time salaried job in content creation.

Want to be Editor in Chief of a dad brand? Follow those 5 easy steps!

(Just kidding. I got incredibly lucky and was in the right place at the right time.)

Learn to create internet content by building my own social brand. (The Glad Stork)

If you followed The Glad Stork in the early days, you are my favorite and I’ll love you forever.

Cuz man, the content was rough. I was quite bad. Still am most days, but consistently bad back then.

I was learning. And starting from zero followers you have to learn fast. And learn to be patient too.

At first it was just dumb tweets. Eventually I’d find one that hit. Usually with the help of comedy twitter writer friends.

This was 2014/2015ish. Instagram was just getting started, in terms of memes/jokes. I decided I may like Instagram better, so I started trying to make my dumb tweets more visual. I decided it would be a good idea to put the text over a blurred background image (usually original photography). For example, that tweet would become:

At this time, I was very wary of using images from movies/tv shows. The Office memes were not so prevalent at this time. So I eventually started drawing web comic versions of my dumb tweets:

At this point, I had spent a couple YEARS on The Glad Stork. And I still had less than 10k followers across platforms, and now I’m spending several hours drawing a single piece of content? (“Sorry family, I need to go draw a comic of a tweet for 12 people.”)

Talk about a grind!

But I really loved it. And I think you have to love it in order to put in the work it takes to build a following.

Despite my emphasis on “content,” hacks can be found

Okay so I’m going to admit something. I used one of the scammiest hacks out there in order to grow my Instagram in the early days.

At this point I’m really focused on original comedy content. But I can NOT seem to grow my Instagram. Meanwhile accounts like @fuckjerry and @thefatjewish are blowing up. A lot of accounts were not just curating shares of others’ content; they were actually reworking the content and photoshopping out watermarks to steal it as their own.

I was annoyed by all of it and I was nearly ready to throw in the towel on the whole thing. Building a following seemed impossible.

I still remember the day. I was at my daughter’s soccer practice and I thought, you know what, I’ll just do this scammy thing, see if it works, as a hail mary.

I opened Instagram, I found some original accounts that I really loved (such as @trevso_electric), I pulled up my fav posts of theirs, and I clicked on the likes to pull up all accounts who liked that post. I went through and followed EVERYONE who was not private.

You can follow up to 7,500 accounts on IG. I followed 7,500 accounts.

When you follow someone, they will often check your account to see what’s up. Usually they ignore you. But sometimes… SOMETIMES… they follow back.

It started working. I got follows from like-minded people who liked similar content. I was creating original content all the while, so they’d see that and engage.

Or sometimes I’d get messages like “WHY DID YOU FOLLOW ME? WHO ARE YOU?” and I’d feel bad.

So there you have it, that’s one way to build an initial following. I don’t know if it would even work in 2022. It’s spammy as hell, obnoxious, and actually takes a ton of tedious work. I do not recommend it. (Also you need to be creating actual original content too.) I bet there are a lot of people who follow my personal account to this day that discovered thegladstork through this way.

At best, it’s the digital equivalent of handing out flyers for your band’s show. At worst, it’s creepy and stupid.

I had a lot of success on Instagram after the initial boost. It’s still my favorite platform.

There is a certain “barrier to entry” on IG because you needed to be able to create an image, rather than just a simple plain text post like Facebook or Twitter.

And eventually, meme culture evolved and so did I. Instead of poorly drawn web comics and tweets on top of blurry images, I started doing proper memes. I was hooked. I loved it.

I hit 10k followers in early 2016, 3 years after starting The Glad Stork.

“VEMES”: The final meme frontier

It was around this time that gif reaction memes became more popular. Ya know, like “That feeling when blah blah blah….” and then a gif of a house burning down. (I dunno, it’s been a while.)

When I saw one of these I was like OOOooooOOOHHHhh, I want to do parenting gif reaction memes.

I still remember the first one I did. It said “When you’re about to lose your shit and your kid asks if they can watch tv” and a gif of Drake nodding, kinda like this:

Pretty dumb. But my second one was one of my favs.

Not long after I posted this, I got a Twitter DM that would DRAMATICALLY accelerate my corporate escape plan.

It was from Jill Smokler, founder of Scary Mommy.

“Hey there, would you be interested in creating content for Scary Mommy?”

That feeling when Jill Smokler asks you to create content for Scary Mommy