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How I grew an Instagram account from 4000 followers to 190k in a year
I started “@theminimalistwardrobe” in 2017 for two reasons. I wanted to create an audience for a business I was planning, while at the same time wanting to learn the game of Instagram.
At the time I had an existing business with its own Instagram account, but I was too afraid to try things out. I was stuck in my safe routine. What would my customers think if I suddenly posted 8 posts one day? Would they be annoyed? Is it weird if I post something else than my products?
These were the insecurities I had, and a fresh account with no responsibilities was the perfect solution to test everything.
The new business I was planning to launch was a clothing brand, with high-quality essentials and minimal branding. After some tinkering with names on Instagram, I settled on *‘The Minimalist Wardrobe’*. That wasn’t meant to be the name of the clothing brand, I simply wanted to create a like-minded audience, so I didn’t have to launch to crickets.
My first post was a low-resolution photo of clothes rack with some shirts and a few pairs of shoes underneath. There was no real strategy here. I just enjoyed the freedom of posting whatever and analyzing the results. Little did I know what it would lead up to.
# From 0 to 4000
The first followers are always the hardest to get, everyone knows that. I got my first few followers by posting a few posts and engaging with some similar accounts.
That’s a method that still works, but it’s not scalable. Engaging with other accounts is time-consuming, and even if you’d automate it, Instagram is cracking down hard on all software that is against their terms of service.
I grew the account to a little over 4000 followers in 8 months. Nothing to write home about, but during this time, I didn’t really use any strategy. I just learned a little from every post I posted and leaned into what worked.
I didn’t make any groundbreaking discoveries but learned how to use hashtags, what kind of photos and captions my audience seemed to like, and the best times to post. I started scheduling posts with a scheduling app so that I could create a bunch beforehand, and not be on my phone the whole day.
The followers came from my engagement, and from the posts that reached new people through hashtags.
After 8 months I just stopped posting. I had scrapped the clothing brand idea a long time ago, as soon as I realized how much work it would require. I also happened to find some brands that had executed my idea better than I ever could.
As for the learning part, well, I felt like I had learned some useful things, and honestly just lacked the motivation to continue playing around with a useless account.
I logged off the account for half a year.
# When it Finally Clicked For Me
I can’t remember why I logged back into the account after 6 months. Maybe I had a boring day. In any case, that was one the most significant days for The Minimalist Wardrobe, because that was the day when I understood that I’m on to something.
To be a little more specific, I understood it the next morning. I had published a post in the evening and woke up to over 300 likes. The caption said “Long time no see! Did ya miss us?”
Now, 300 likes with 4000 followers is nothing to brag about, but it was still enough for me to understand that there’s an actual audience that really enjoyed what I was posting.
I realized that the account is promoting something that people wanted. Beautiful photos of clothes racks and basic garments painted a picture of simplifying your wardrobe. I had somewhat unintentionally conveyed my own philosophy for clothing.
This is the moment I decided to apply a real strategy to grow the account, and treat it as its own project. Now things got interesting.
# Sliding Into DMs All Day Long
The first thing I started doing was contacting accounts of the same size (or smaller), asking them to do a shoutout exchange with The Minimalist Wardrobe. They’d simply post about me on their feed, and I’d post about them.
I spent hours and hours finding suitable accounts to cross-promote with, and I must’ve sent over a hundred DMs — daily — to people. I didn’t mind if the accounts were smaller. Anything over 1000 was worth it for me, as posting was easy, and my audience seemed to enjoy the posts.
Once I grew, I could get bigger accounts on board, which is why the growth was exponential. I had also perfected my strategy by only contacting accounts with good engagement, and instructing them on how to promote The Minimalist Wardrobe when agreeing on the shoutouts. A clear call-to-action to follow made a huge difference.
# From Shoutouts to Deeper Collaborations
Sending DMs for hours every day wasn’t sustainable, but the results were undeniable. I needed a better solution. Essentially I wanted collaborations that would give me constant exposure, but only needed to be set up once.
I decided to build a simple website and set up a blog. Then I reached out to sustainable and slow fashion bloggers and asked if they’d like to write for my new blog.
I’ve always believed in fair relationships, not just because I’ll sleep better, but because at some point the one who’s getting the worse end of the deal will call it quits — it’s just a matter of time. Fortunately, The Minimalist Wardrobe’s following was somewhere around 15k at this time, so it was a great opportunity for the bloggers to get in front of a new audience and gain new followers too.
Every time someone wrote a post for my blog, we’d both promote it on Instagram. That way both reached a new audience. Eventually, I had over 20 guest bloggers, with a new blog post 5 days a week — each of them promoted by the blogger.
The account kept growing fast, by over 2000 daily followers at best. 30k, 40k, and 50k were just simple milestones which I celebrated with a smile and started counting when the next one would come. I hit 100k 6 months after taking this seriously.
# My Experience With the Infamous Follow/Unfollow
The account’s growth kept accelerating, and I didn’t stop exploring different ways to grow. I decided to try the most despised way of growing an Instagram account: Follow/Unfollow.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, the idea is to follow accounts so that they get a notification, and a percentage of them follow you back. Then at some point, you unfollow them.
I did it for a while but stopped doing it for a couple reasons. Firstly, I hated the idea of it the whole time I was doing it. It was a cheap tactic, and honestly, I didn’t need it. My curiosity simply won and I couldn’t help myself. Secondly, it wasn’t sustainable either. I was back to tapping for hours on my phone.
Truth to be told though, it did work. My growth rate increased. It’s hard to say how much this influenced it, but it definitely helped. (Un)fortunately, Instagram has cracked down on action limits recently, so this shouldn’t be as viable anymore.
# The Real Reason For the Growth
The collaborations with bloggers were great, as were the earlier shoutout exchanges. I got a boost from following a lot of people. My analytical approach to using hashtags and putting effort into each caption paid off — many posts reached thousands of new people, turning a good amount of them into new followers.
All these strategies accelerated the growth of the account, but the real reason why so many wanted to follow The Minimalist Wardrobe was simple: The core idea was something that people were interested in. I was posting content that people wanted to see.
None of these “growth hacks” would’ve worked if the foundation of the account wouldn’t have been golden. Now, I got lucky by being into something hundreds of thousands of people are also into and happened to create an Instagram account for it. I probably got lucky with the timing too.
Nevertheless, the core idea of the account is the key to exceptional growth. How you execute it is almost as important. Being strategic with growth is important, but secondary.
When you truly have an account people want to follow, Instagram will help you out too. They’ll suggest you to new followers whenever someone follows an account that’s related to yours, and your posts will often be featured on the explore page.
# Can This Be Recreated?
Is it still possible to grow any account to almost 200k followers in a year? Sure it is. There’s nothing that’s stopping you. The growth strategies I wrote about still work in 2021. If you have the drive to hustle, you can do exactly what I did. The Minimalist Wardrobe actually got me a bunch of interesting consulting and advisor gigs for helping businesses and even some minor celebrities with their Instagram strategies, and rapid growth is still very much possible even if you sometimes see people saying the opposite.
(I’m not taking on new clients for the foreseeable future, so this is not an advertisement for my services. I do however write a free newsletter about what I keep learning about Instagram strategy, so if you’re interested in that, feel free to DM me and I’ll give you a link.)
The challenge is coming up with — or stumbling upon, as I did — an interesting idea for your account. That’s really the message I’m trying to send here. After that there’s the additional challenge of monetizing the account, which I’ve been focusing on the last couple years now with The Minimalist Wardrobe.
*“Build it and they will come”* is bad advice. You need marketing to grow — at least initially, before word of mouth kicks in. The thing is, the methods to accelerate growth aren’t rocket science. What I did wasn’t particularly sophisticated, and the results were tremendous.
Good luck with your accounts 🙂 —Sebastian
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17 Replies
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All new posts need a flair going forward
byu/JonODonovan insocialmedia -
Congratulations, did you profit from any of this?
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Excellent. Thanks for sharing.
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Great insight. Do you think this approach works for brands selling products? If so, how do you balance creating content people want to see and content you want people to see?
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These don’t work on a professional level for a few reasons:
* What about the content? Were you just taking and publishing photos without rights? Or were you shooting the minimalist looks? Ownability matters when you do this for real.
* Hashtags are for bots. It looks like all you cared about was growth, but what was the quality of the engagement? Could you activate an audience and have them do a thing?
* Tell me about your blog. What was your CTR? How many visitors? This is probably where you were closer to being a business, but it’s an old model for social. No one visits blogs anymore, because we know we’ll be spammed by shitty ads for the click—but that’s your revenue, and how you pay writers. Even The Shade Room is treating their profile like a blog now.
Ultimately, you really just gamed the system without a real “why” to it. You just went for growth, which is a cool stat but that’s not a strategy. These are a series of tactics that only work when you don’t have a strategist, creative director or legal department.
All this to say, these kinds of profiles are not a benefit to the platform or the people. They only contribute to the noise with nothing to say.
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Big up man! It was so good to read this! 🙂 I’m so small, 720 followers, but already implemented a couple of things. This makes me push on it. Wohoo! ??
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Thank you for sharing your experience, very helpful to understand.
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Congratulations on starting your business and well done. 🙂
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Wow thank you so much for your post – this was really inspiring and I wish there were more posts like this!
I am on a very similar journey at the moment, and I would love to get my content reposted on bigger feature accounts. Did you use this particular method? I come across many big feature accounts in my niche that say ‘DM for paid features’ in their bio – would you recommend actually paying to be featured?
I personally wouldn’t pay to have my content featured because I would like to know that my content was simply good enough to be reposted, but the hardest part is getting these accounts to see my work. I have considered just dming them and asking for a feature but I worry that that would be considered rude if I’m not willing to pay them.
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Congrats on the growth, you should be proud of what you’ve built!
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what’s the newsletter please?
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This is amazing and congrats! Thank you for such great advice. 🙂
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I thought I recognised this story, it was posted like 6 months ago as well? What’s that about is it part of the advertising for it
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Problem is that I have an account that has crazy engagement and 50k followers— I just don’t have the time to manage it. It’s full side-project status and wish I could allocate funds for a SMM or other to help grow it.
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I think as you said first 4000 or 10k is difficult and most people miss on elaborating on those.
The amount of failures during that phase and learning are way more and difficult to get through.
Most people give up there.
As requested by many, please share more during that journey related to content, hashtags etc. How certain content be it images or copywriting did or didn’t work.
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