John is the founder of MarsX Inc, the 'Operating System' for software development. He has built 20+ products and scaled to 10M+ users on b2b2c with $2M+ ARR.
Guest Author: John Rush
I was invisible on the internet a year ago.
No followers, no views. After earning 50 million views and 40k followers on all platforms combined, I have a few lessons for startup founders building an audience.
Today, I’ll Share My Full Playbook:
1. Put 100% of your focus on one platform!
Until you reach several thousands of followers and good content quality levels. Creating content, engaging with people, and understanding the algorithm takes hours daily.
2. Learn to write by writing.
It’s not about hacking the algo or copy-pasting memes. Good writing skills are an asset that will help you win all other platforms later. So, the first platform you pick is your training camp.
I suggest going with Twitter since it has the shortest feedback loop, and you can create 10 daily posts to practice.
3. Follower-Count is your critical KPI.
Don’t focus on pure views. Focus on followers. Why? Users will give you a follow if your content creates respect for the author. A random meme you repost from another platform here won’t make people interested in you. Also, avoid negative stuff.
It quickly gets many views, but again, your goal is to use “new followers” as a critical measure of the content quality you produce.
4. Hit on the same target until you crack a hole there.
The most typical mistake I see around is people trying to throw all sorts of topics, hoping to get lucky and viral with one. Even if this happens, you won’t be able to reproduce it later.
5. Know far more than the average.
When you picked the primary topic, you must add your own takes, experiments and experience to it. Can’t just repost known theory. Add your own personal practice to it. This makes the information valuable.
To do this, you’ll have to spend many thousands of hours actually digging into the topic and become top 0.1% experts on it.
It’s not easy, but there is no other way, unless you wanna get followers for short cat videos or dancing tiktoks.
6. Not every follower counts.
If you’re a b2b founder, your goal is to eventually create a distribution channel over social media. People who consume short entertainment content won’t be helpful at all.
I have a friend with almost million followers who launched saas tools and got less than 10 sales because nobody gives a fu*k in his audience.
I launched all my product via social media and got way more than 10 sales instantly, while having 20x fewer followers than him.
– produce content for your followers, not everyone else – learn from creators with the audience that you want to.
There is nothing you can learn from Mr.Beast
for example if you wanna get b2b audience. In fact, you may end up doing exactly the opposite of him to win.
7. The ideal post/article
– high effort
– based on a mix of theory & practice & facts
– grabs attention from the start
– keeps reader on it til the end
– easy to scan instead of reading
– has clear audience
– has some intersection with popular topics or views
– relevant to your persona (don’t speak about VC money if you never raised it)
– has a killer headline
8. Avoid this
– talk about things you have no proven track record at.
– being negative
– memes (unless you actually invent them like Dago)
– low effort post (if it takes less than an hour, it’ll be sh*t in 99.9% of the cases)
– talking about random topic: js, politics, dogs…
– talking about yourself, your habits, your opinions
– asking questions – asking friends to add fake likes & replies
– buy fake engagement
Drop your profile and the audience you wanna target, I may reply with an actionable advice.
Check out the original tweet here.
