A creator with 1.7 million Instagram followers throws out bio-wording, hashtags, and 'post to your friends first' advice in favor of an AI-fed research system built from a brand strategy document and a saved swipe file.
Posted
1 weeks ago
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
Views
46.8K
982 likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Growing an Instagram account from zero starts with a written, AI-readable brand strategy and a habit of reverse-engineering proven posts, not surface fixes like bio wording, hashtags, or account age.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
Someone starting or restarting a personal Instagram account from zero followers who wants a repeatable system instead of scattered tips.
A creator, coach, or founder who already uses AI chat tools and wants to feed them real market research instead of generic advice.
Someone stuck overthinking their bio, profile picture, or first post instead of actually publishing.
SKIP IF…
You're already posting consistently and know your content pillars, this is a first-weeks framework, not an advanced growth playbook.
You're looking for algorithm-specific hacks like hashtag strategy or posting times, the video argues those don't matter.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
A creator with 1.7 million Instagram followers argues that most Instagram growth advice, optimizing your bio, launching to friends and family first, chasing hashtags, worrying about account age, is a waste of the first weeks. What actually works is four things: a written personal brand strategy an AI can reference, a saved 'idea museum' split between validated and favorite ideas, treating research and reverse-engineering viral posts as a full-time habit, and posting consistently through an awkward first 15-20 posts nobody is watching yet. He walks through building a brand strategy document, reverse-engineering a specific viral carousel, and ten attention principles that show up in almost every hook that works.
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01 · Cold open: credentials and the AI advice that started this video
States his follower counts across platforms, then recounts his girlfriend asking Claude for her first Instagram post idea and getting generic, useless advice back.
01:00 – 04:44
02 · Four pieces of growth advice he disagrees with
Argues against optimizing your bio and searchable name first, launching to friends and family, over-indexing on reels and carousels over images, and worrying about hashtags or account age.
04:44 – 06:12
03 · Treat your first 15-20 posts as practice, not a launch
Says a near-empty profile stops people from following, so the first posts should be treated as a tutorial phase nobody is really watching.
06:12 – 07:05
04 · The four things that actually drive growth
Names the real levers: a 90-day-to-1-year strategy, quality of ideas over hooks and format, research as a full-time habit, and consistency.
07:05 – 09:02
05 · Step 1: build a personal brand strategy document with AI
Shows an AI workflow that interviews you and produces a positioning and topic-tree document that other AI chats reference before writing anything.
09:02 – 12:21
06 · Step 2: build an 'idea museum' swipe file
Explains saving both validated (proven) and favorite (personally unique) post ideas to boards, and where to find the unique ones nobody else is looking.
12:21 – 15:58
07 · Step 3: reverse-engineer a viral post with AI
Walks through breaking down a specific viral carousel (Zach Pogrob's 'Surround Yourself') into its macro structure and beat-by-beat psychological tactics.
15:58 – 19:43
08 · Turn a breakdown into your own script and design
Shows feeding the brand strategy and the breakdown back into an AI chat to generate a new carousel idea, then designing it in Figma or Canva.
19:43 – 25:58
09 · The 10 commandments of engagement
Runs through ten attention principles that recur in high-performing hooks and posts, from specific numbers to warning or caution.
25:58 – 29:11
10 · Two manual ways to research validated ideas
Covers scrolling a Discover/outlier feed for breakout accounts and studying your own top-performing posts as free, proven source material.
29:11 – 34:05
11 · Two AI ways to research, then pick your content style
Demos an AI research chat that searches real social posts for viral patterns, then closes on choosing a personal content style (unscripted, scripted, or written) and the bootcamp offer.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Bio wording, profile pictures, and account age barely affect follow decisions, the content posted consistently is what actually builds a brand.
Launching a new account to friends and family first doesn't work because they aren't the target audience and their support doesn't translate into growth.
The first 15 to 20 posts on a new account should be treated as practice, not a launch, since an account with only one or two posts reads as empty and nobody follows an empty page.
AI chatbots can't give good social media advice on their own because they have no access to real post data, they only get useful once fed a brand strategy document and real examples.
Quality of idea matters more than hook formulas or post format, most creators over-index on whatever format is trending instead of the strength of the underlying idea.
An 'idea museum' should mix validated ideas, proven concepts pulled from what's already working, with favorite ideas found by reading books, niche newsletters, and small accounts nobody else is studying yet.
Reverse-engineering a post you admire and reading the full breakdown teaches you to write that kind of content yourself, it's a form of intelligent imitation, not plagiarism.
Slightly exaggerating a claim so it reads with more confidence and conviction gets more people to act on it, even if it invites pushback in the comments from people it doesn't perfectly apply to.
Hashtags, account age, and starting a fresh account versus reusing an old one don't meaningfully affect Instagram growth.
Growing on one platform gets easier by pulling ideas from a completely different platform, Substack or YouTube ideas brought to Instagram stand out more than ideas copied from other Instagram accounts.
Ten repeatable attention triggers show up across high-performing hooks: specific numbers, pattern interrupts, negativity bias, calling out a specific reader, naming the problem, readability, confidence, potential benefit, social proof, and warning or caution.
Social proof works, but if you don't have any yet, that's fine, because posting content consistently is how social proof gets built in the first place.
Takeaway
Growth starts with a document and a swipe file, not a better bio.
WHAT TO LEARN
A creator with 1.7 million Instagram followers replaces bio-tweaking and hashtag chasing with a four-part system: a written brand strategy, a saved swipe file, reverse-engineered breakdowns, and consistent posting.
02Four pieces of growth advice he disagrees with
Bio wording and a searchable name in your handle barely move follows, people learn what you do from your content, not your bio.
Launching a new account to friends and family doesn't create growth, they aren't your real audience and their support doesn't compound.
Reels and carousels aren't automatically smarter than a single image post, a strong idea in any format can outperform the trendier one.
Hashtags, account age, and starting a brand-new account instead of reusing an old one don't meaningfully affect whether you grow.
03Treat your first 15-20 posts as practice, not a launch
Treat your first 15 to 20 posts as private practice, not a launch, since nobody is watching yet.
An account with only one or two posts looks empty to a visitor, so a thin profile actively stops people from following you.
04The four things that actually drive growth
A 90-day-to-one-year content strategy gives every post a long-term theme instead of disconnected one-offs you hope will land.
Idea quality matters more than the hook, the format, or any trending style, chasing this week's viral format is a weaker lever.
Researching what already works has to be a full-time habit, not an occasional one, so you can study why posts succeed and reapply the pattern.
Consistency compounds: post ideas that could realistically spread while adding something genuinely different from everyone else.
05Step 1: build a personal brand strategy document with AI
A written brand strategy document is the foundation everything else depends on, without it an AI chatbot has no context for what 'good' looks like for your brand.
AI chat tools have no built-in access to real social posts or performance data, so their default advice stays generic until you feed them your own strategy and examples.
A brand strategy interview should surface positioning, a topic tree, proof points, and a baseline for your first posts, not just a vague vibe statement.
06Step 2: build an 'idea museum' swipe file
A useful swipe file balances validated ideas pulled from posts already proven to work with favorite ideas that reflect your own taste.
The differentiating ideas come from places most creators skip: books, niche newsletters, small accounts without traction yet, and platforms before they go mainstream.
Save an idea the moment you find it, even as a rough note, an auto-tagging system means you can find it again later.
07Step 3: reverse-engineer a viral post with AI
Reverse-engineering a post you admire, reading the full breakdown of its hook, structure, and tactics, teaches you to write that kind of content yourself.
This is intelligent imitation, not plagiarism, the same way an apprentice studies a master's technique before developing their own taste.
Doing this breakdown exercise repeatedly builds your own personal course in what makes content work, based on real examples instead of generic advice.
08Turn a breakdown into your own script and design
With a brand strategy document and a breakdown document for a style you like, AI can turn your own idea into that same high-performing structure.
Treat AI-written drafts as a prototype to react to and rewrite, if you accept the default output as-is, it stops being something you made.
Consistent, on-brand design matters more than which tool you use, and AI-generated carousels are often visibly identifiable as AI-made, which cuts against standing out.
09The 10 commandments of engagement
Ten repeatable attention triggers show up across high-performing hooks and posts, from specific numbers and pattern interrupts to social proof and warning or caution.
A pattern interrupt only works while it's still unusual, once a technique saturates a platform, doing the opposite becomes the new pattern interrupt.
Speaking with more confidence and conviction, cutting hedge words and using absolutes, gets more people to act on a post even if it invites pushback.
If you don't have social proof yet, that's fine, growing your audience is how social proof gets built in the first place.
10Two manual ways to research validated ideas
Manually researching validated ideas means studying platforms other than the one you're trying to grow, ideas brought over from elsewhere stand out more.
A discover or outlier feed surfaces smaller 'breakout' accounts suddenly performing well, letting you spot a trend before it goes mainstream.
Studying your own past top-performing posts is a free source of validated ideas, since they're proof of what already works for your audience.
11Two AI ways to research, then pick your content style
An AI research tool that searches real social posts can surface the pattern behind a batch of viral posts, which is more reusable than any single hook.
Picking a content style, unscripted talking, a read script, or text-only image posts, is a personal fit decision, consistency inside it is what matters.
Repurposing a proven post from one platform, like a tweet that already performed well, into a script for another is a low-effort way to reuse validated ideas.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Idea museum
A personal swipe-file board where a creator saves and organizes both proven, validated post ideas and personal, favorite ideas, for later reference when writing new content.
Validated idea
A content idea pulled from an already-proven, high-performing post, useful for confirming that a format or angle works before creating your own version.
Bottom of funnel
Marketing shorthand for selling to someone who is already close to a purchase decision, as opposed to a cold audience seeing your content for the first time.
Reverse engineering (a post)
Breaking a specific piece of content down into its hook, structure, and psychological tactics to understand exactly why it performed well.
Breakout account
A smaller account whose content is suddenly performing unusually well, useful for spotting a trend before it goes mainstream.
“If we say that the sky is blue, people get the point.”
compact defense of confident, slightly-exaggerated writing→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
30:32
“I'm so locked in, I haven't blinked in 21,600 seconds.”
example hook the AI tool surfaced as a viral pattern, good demonstration of the hyperbole device→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
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See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
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Welcome back to the Eden channel where we talk about social media growth, unique content strategies, standing out online and not blending in with the herd, and actual useful ways to use AI that gets results and doesn't ruin your brain. Today we're going to go over something special. It's how to grow on Instagram even if you have zero followers.
Now personally, I've grown my Instagram to 1 .7 million. I'm almost at a million on Twitter. On Substack, I'm the number one bestseller in philosophy, which is pretty cool even though I don't talk about philosophy too much.
And across all of my social accounts, my smallest account is LinkedIn with 180 ,000 followers. So I know quite a bit about content and I do not agree with a lot of the content advice that is going around online.
And so what you hear in this video may not be something that you've heard before because I want to focus on the thing that actually matters. I don't want you to just drown in advice and drown in tutorial hell. I want you to have the things that you know you need to focus on and know you need to get right so that you can ignore.
everything else. Now, what sparked the idea for this video is my girlfriend came to me today and she is a nutrition coach and she's going to start posting on Instagram. And she went to Claude and asked, hey, what should my first post be?
Which is a reasonable thing to ask for anyone who is looking to start on social media. And it said. oh, you should just introduce yourself and what you talk about.
And that is horrible advice. I thought AI was supposed to be intelligent, but as we have learned, not only on this channel, but in general, AI is only as intelligent as the person that is using it because it's like a bag of water. You need to be able to mold it.
It's intelligence on tap, but you need to direct it. You need to give it the proper context. And Claude and ChatGPT don't have access to social media posts or data.
They can't read social. posts. They can't access them.
So how do they know what good looks like? They don't. Now, in preparation for this video, I watched a few other how to grow on Instagram guides, and a lot of them had a ton of views.
And I was surprised because I do not agree with quite a few of their points being one profile set up. bio and having a searchable name as your name like nutrition coach inside of your name and that's the first step that people focus on when i think that should be the last thing you focus on because you'll just get stuck on it and you won't start posting which is the only thing that matters yes you need a profile picture that represents you and your vibe and your brand but honestly it doesn't matter you can find social media accounts everywhere with just nothing as a profile picture or an anonymous profile picture or a selfie of them it doesn't matter the vibe your brand comes across with the content that you post consistently over time your bio honestly doesn't matter either but yes it's wise to include what you do and what you can help people with in there but people are only going to see it once or twice they see your content they click on your profile they read the bio but that's not going to be a huge decision and whether or not they follow you or even reach out to you you're not supposed to sell in your bio you're supposed to sell
bottom of funnel and having the nutrition coach in your name may get some people to DM you and that's okay, but still most of them are already going to learn that from your content. And frankly, personally, it's just a taste thing. I think it looks corny when you have that in your name and it makes me feel like you're not a real person behind the count and that you're trying to sell me all the time.
People can smell that. The second thing that I think is just BS advice is launching to your friends or family first. They're not your audience.
They don't care. They may support you here and there, but it's not going to lead to any kind of growth in the slightest.
The third piece of advice that I disagree with is to post more reels and carousels than just plain images. That does have some weight to it though. I feel like reels lead to a lot more follower growth.
So yes, focus on more reels. Carousels can get spread more simply because people can swipe and then like a specific slide. You're giving people more reasons to like and share to their story so it gets exposed to more people.
But I'll actually show you an example today of one single image, not a carousel, not a reel, that went super viral and probably led to a lot of followers. And the fourth thing that I disagree with, and I don't think I need to say this, but hashtags Do not matter.
Neither does the age of your account or whether or not you should start a fresh account. And people will create reels about this saying that it's meta's policy or they'll say something and it just ends up confusing you. You can grow whether or not you have an old account or not.
Now, the thing that I do agree with and that I think most people should do is not worry about their first 15 to 20 posts. You use this as the tutorial phase of your brand so that you can practice and learn content. think about it.
Stop worrying so much about your first post because if people see that and visit your account and they just see one post there, do you think they're going to follow you? It's an empty page. They don't even think that you post.
Of course, they're not going to follow you. So you need to fill the page up and treat this as practice because nobody's watching anyways. This is where you should mess up and embarrass yourself.
And if you focus on the principles of good content, once you get past that initial period of not having any posts on your account, then you're much more like to grow over time. So what I'm saying here is to just stop overcomplicating it and think about why you follow an account, why you like posts.
You have an entire course in your head by just reverse engineering your own psychology and how you interact with profiles and posts on social media. You see a good piece of content that you like, you click on their profile, you maybe scroll a bit and you follow them. And then once you see more of their posts, you kind of become ingrained in their head or they become ingrained in your head and you start to like them.
more and more. That's just how social media works. So to actually grow your account, we're going to focus on four things and I'm going to walk you through how to do them.
The first is that you just need a strategy. 90 days to a year, you need to understand what your content is going to look like over the long term so that you actually have a theme. You have something that you're working towards.
You're not just posting one -offs and hoping that they do really well. The second point is that the quality of ideas matter more than anything else. It matters more than hooks.
It matters more than the format, the viral formats that everyone obsesses over. Quality of ideas. We'll go over that.
Point number three, you need to treat research and learning as your full -time job. By research, I mean you need to understand what is working on Instagram or other platforms today so that you can study the principles of why those posts work. That's when the hook structure comes into play or the body structure or the format.
And then you apply your own idea. to that, which I'll walk you through as well. And the fourth point that we're not going to dig into too much is that all that really matters is that you're posting consistently.
You're posting ideas that have the potential to do well so that they can get spread to more people and that you're adding something unique to the conversation so that you are differentiated from everyone else and you actually have a brand. You aren't just blending in. Okay, so diving into it, here's everything that we're going to go over.
But as I mentioned, point number one is your strategy, your personal brand strategy. That is a big topic. We're not going to go over it in detail here, but it is very simple, especially with AI that can act as a coach to interview you and then create a brand strategy document that you can reference with AI at any other point.
That is very important. You need a brand strategy document that you can feed AI so that it has the context of what you're doing. trying to do so any ideas you feed it or content you try to write or strategy you try to create goes through that document the last video on this channel was all about that and how i redid my own brand strategy so you can go and watch that but the gist of it is there is a personal brand strategist link in the description and it looks like this and all you do is click build my personal brand strategy from scratch and then it will interview you and ask you questions and then spit out a document that you can reference and it is very thorough it has 12 sources in here that you may or may not be able to see and it's just personal branding principles galore based on what has worked for me and just what works in general as a brand and if you don't want to use eden you can use clod and you just go here there's a link in the description eden .so workflows and then all you do is you copy the setup prompt this little sentence paste it into clod and it'll walk you through everything and the reason you do it through here is because
It can research the market for you if you connect to the Eden MCP, which no other MCP can do because all social media MCPs right now are just scrapers. You scrape individual accounts or connect to your own account, but they can't access all creator profiles, all social media posts or research the trends and what's doing well.
That's what the Eden MCP is for. It is foundational. If you're doing anything on social media, you need the Eden MCP.
Now, after you have the brand strategy, what I want you to do. is a bit of manual research. I want you to build an idea museum.
And the way you do that is you find your favorite creators accounts. You look for posts that you really like, and then you save them to an inspiration board or a swipe file board. And what that looks like, this is like a free form canvas view, but we're going to go over a few examples here.
But you can create a board and then name it something like YouTube swipe file, or in your case, it'll be an Instagram swipe file. And then you can come into here. you need inspiration think of it as like a vision board for your brand the designs you want to go after or if you only want written posts or what kind of reels you like because then you can always come in here chat with this or chat with any individual post and then reverse engineer it and apply it to your own idea which we will go over now a way you can do that inside of here one of course you can go to instagram you can scroll on instagram and then you can paste links into here or paste them wherever you want but obviously if you paste them in to notes it's just going to be a link it's not going to actually show the post or you can come up here to the discover tab Open that, go to the creators tab, and then make sure Instagram is checked on so you can see Instagram accounts.
But you can save any kind of idea. Ideas are ideas. But then if we go to the actual page, you can filter the creator by top liked and then look through their posts and then save any of them to a board using this plus button.
And if you don't know what creators are in your niche, then a good way to research them is just by typing in a topic. here in the search or using one of these filter chips or you can just ask the AI chat or if you connect to the Claude MCP with Eden, it can search for creators and find ones that post in a specific niche and you can do your research that way.
But as an example, if I select productivity, you can see that productivity creators come up here and I can discover. top creators in that niche and start saving their posts to a board so that's the first part of the research phase is just start to fill a board with ideas and designs and structures and posts that you like so you can start to develop this vision for what your page is going to look like and what type of ideas you're going to include now before i show you how to reverse engineer one of these posts so we can actually get the post structure and learn how to write better scripts or better for Instagram.
One important thing here is that you need to balance favorite ideas and validated ideas. Validated ideas are the external ones, the ones you research, the ones, the trends, the ones that are going viral. So you know what works, but you need to differentiate yourself.
So you also need to capture and write down ideas that you love. But where do you find those ideas? Where do you find the unique ideas that separate you from everyone else?
Well, you look where nobody else is looking. You read more. books.
You follow niche accounts that haven't gained much traction but put out great ideas. They haven't studied the validated posts so they don't know how to grow, but they still post great stuff. You need to find the niche articles that people are passing around in group chats.
You need to read book summaries. You need to get on Substack before it turns very mainstream because that's where a lot of unique writers are and a lot of unique ideas. And then what you do then inside of Eden or on the mobile app is you capture the ideas.
So you can save the links inside of here just by pasting them or hitting new link. And then the thing that I like to do is to just create a card and then I can jot down the idea inside of here. It's just a quick idea.
And the thing about the library is that this auto categorizes and tags everything for you. So if you ever need to find it later, you kind of just drop it here and forget about it. And then when you ask the AI chat for novel connections or novel ideas related to a specific topic, it can find it.
And if you do want to organize it then of course you can put it on a board and this is what most creators skip right they skip the unique ideas that they love and another thing you can do is you can connect to kindle or sniped or rss feeds or you can capture emails or connect x bookmarks or substack bookmarks so that these are auto imported so that your library grows with unique ideas that you don't need to worry about because you know you can find them later when it's time to actually sit down and create so before we get into what the principles are as like a mini course and how to actually research the market to find validated ideas that if you take them and apply them to your own brand you will grow faster i want to show you just how to reverse engineer something so how to take something that works and turn it into your own so what you can do is you can break down a specific post you can reverse engineer how it works and you can do that inside of here by clicking
the boost button on any post and just hitting reverse engineer and then that will open a chat and start reverse engineering why the post works or you can just ask a chat to reverse engineer it for you and what I would type in here is something like hey can you reverse engineer this post and tell me exactly why it works act like you are teaching me how to write the post give me the psychological tactics the hook breakdown and why it went so viral and then what that will do is it will spit out a breakdown like this that has the macro breakdown of the entire post the structure of why it works and you can open this if you'd like to read through it but it breaks down exactly why it works the hook the line levels the psychological tactics everything of that nature and what i would highly recommend is when you break down a post that you like of your own to actually read through the breakdown because what you're doing here and what most people don't realize is that you're creating your own course on how to create content.
You're creating your own education based on something real. And so just by doing this multiple times, you're learning how to write the content yourself. And this is also how you avoid just copy pasting other people's content.
This is a form of intelligent imitation. When you think in the past, in the Renaissance era, what did the apprentices do? They imitated the master.
until they develop their own experience, skill, and taste. Because as a beginner, You don't have taste.
You don't have experience. You have to ride the bike with training wheels until you can take them off. That's just how the world works.
That's how education and learning works. So now not only do you have a document of one of your favorite posts that you can reference in a chat at any time when you want to turn your own idea into a high -performing structure, but another cool thing that I recommend beginners doing is typing something like this. I want you to interview me for content ideas.
based on my brand strategy. And you can just add that or at mention it if it is inside of Eden or paste it inside of here. And once I pick an idea, apply the principles of the breakdown to it, this breakdown.
That way we turn an idea from my brand into a high performing carousel structure because the post that we broke down was a carousel. And then what it did is it read through my brand strategy. It saw what I talk about.
It said that this creator's formula is a perfect fit for this. And then said to narrow the target, here's four questions. Which pillar, my content pillars, do you want this carousel to carry?
What's the identity you want the reader to walk away wearing? What's the specific discomfort they're feeling right now? What's...
the in -group vocabulary word so i could answer all four four of these and get four carousels out of it or i can just answer one and get a pretty solid post out of it now the thing with ai in general is that you still have to apply your judgment and taste i am not for i'm actually heavily against having ai write everything for you i think ai should be treated the output of ai or the post that it would write here it should be treated as a prototype a first draft inspiration something that you question something that you think about you don't just accept the default output you take it and then you write your own completely until it feels like something that you resonate with and you would write yourself because it is something that you wrote yourself because you're treating the AI just like any form of text it's not something that you wrote it's a form of inspiration and so you can walk through this and I'm not going to show you how to actually create posts
in something like canva or figma i'm sure there's a ton of templates out there and even some claude skills can create carousels now even though everyone can tell that claude created it so i would stay away from that if you want to be unique but as an example of what i have i use figma which is just a kind of like an illustration or design software and i just i i don't Mine's messy, right?
It's chaotic. It's unorganized. But my brand vibe is just black and white.
So I have something super simple here. I have a frame that is the size of an Instagram image or post, 1200 by 1500. And if I want to turn it into a carousel, I just duplicate that.
And I add the text inside of here. It's super simple. So it's really dependent on the vibe that you're going after and what you want to create.
But you're going to need a software like Canva or Figma or you need to learn how to create really good images or carousels. And of course, if you want to create reels, then that's a completely different ballgame. But what I like to do is I like to write the script first so you could break down or reverse engineer a reel or multiple so that you have a breakdown document with those reels.
in them and then you can reference that breakdown document whenever you go to ideate things inside of an AI chat. So now you have two things that are very important. You have your brand strategy document and then you have a breakdown document with the type of posts that you like.
And if you're already a creator, then you break down your own top posts so that you can reference that in how you write. And so whenever it comes time to create using something like AI, then you give it the brand strategy. document and the breakdown document.
And again, if you connect the Eden MCP, then Claude can just find those things inside of your Eden and create new documents inside of Eden for you if you want it to store your documents where you actually do this work. So now before we actually get into how to research top performing content, I want to give you a bit of education.
I want you to understand what the principles are so that you can understand them and apply them to your content so you aren't just going about this blind. Because if you don't know what you're doing, then you don't know whether the AI output is good or not. So I call these the 10 commandments of engagement.
And it looks like this. The first is just specific numbers. You see this all the time in hooks and it catches attention just because it's a pattern interrupt.
So things like statistics. There are 7 billion people on this earth. Dollar amounts.
Apple's new $1 ,000 iPhone has this new feature. Metrics. I sent 322 cold.
emails. or after 293 days, or lists seven bad habits that are preventing you from achieving the life you want. You see these all the time in hooks and content and sub stack titles and YouTube titles because it just works.
The second thing is pattern interrupts. And so a pattern interrupt is anything that breaks people out of their normal condition patterns. The way to think about this is on Twitter.
I personally now write my posts as just blocks of text because everyone is spacing out their text. and creating lists and trying to make it super readable. But when I look at it, I see that everywhere.
So I know that it's just becoming tiring and people aren't paying as much attention to it anymore. So I have to do something different. And it's interesting because my posts on Twitter do extremely well simply because I'm doing what you shouldn't do in content by just creating a block of text.
So another thing this could look like is if everyone's talking about one thing on Instagram, like, oh, download this new. Claude's skill, then take the contrarian approach and say, oh, all these Claude's skills are just like collecting notion templates. You aren't doing anything with them.
And a lot of people are going to resonate with that because they're tired of all the Claude's skills content. And that also leads into negativity bias. So if you can flip something from positive to negative, something in people's brains causes them to pay more attention to that.
So an example, you are going to achieve great things compared to you will never hit rock. bottom again. That is obviously the one that is going to capture more attention.
Another way to capture attention in your hooks or just content in general is calling out your specific target. If you've been on YouTube in the self -improvement space at all, if you are in your 20s or I'm 28 or I'm 42, here's how I turn my life around. People resonate with that and that specific type of person goes and watches it or calling all creators, coaches and freelancers if you're promoting something so that people can sell.
qualify, and they're going to pay attention because it applies to them. Or as an example, fathers are a gift to humankind and more fathers or mothers are going to pay attention to that and resonate with it. The next thing is just calling out the problem.
This is one that I fall back on all the time. If I don't know how to start a post, I just think, what is the pain point? What is the problem here?
Because most people have encountered the same problem or pain as everyone else throughout their life. Most people can just resonate with a problem. And the two ways I like to start this, if you want a way to start a post, is either most people.
So most people struggle with this, or if you, if you struggle with this, those have just been proven for me and they work. quite well now the sixth thing that captures attention is readability and aesthetics so using line breaks or short sentences but as i just said if this saturates the market and everyone's doing it then the way to pattern interrupt that is by going against the opposite but i do think aesthetics still matter and thinking about that when you post is a good thing the next thing is just confidence and conviction and the way you can sound more confident is when you go and look over your post you want to eliminate words that imply uncertainty or speak in absolutes when possible obviously don't overdo this or exaggerate your point to add energy so rather than saying it may be wise if some people developed their skill set or this skill you say it is crucial that everyone on planet earth develops their skill set i'm way over exaggerating there but i think you get the point and i personally use this in my content because it adds impact right i'm not saying it because it's absolutely 100
true. I'm saying it because then it gets people to act and change their behavior for the better. Slightly exaggerating your idea.
Even if that makes it slightly not true or true 100 % of the time, you're going to get people in the comments where they're like, well, this isn't true for this specific type of person at this specific time. It's like how the sun isn't blue when it's nighttime. Yeah, we understand that.
But if we say that the sky is blue, I think I said sun. If we say that the sky is blue, people get the point. And that's what I think has made my content stand out quite a bit is I try my best to just get the point across.
so that people get it. Now, the next is just potential benefit. So the opposite of calling out a problem.
So when you read over your post or you're going to generate a post idea, you need to think about what's in it for the reader. Why should they care? Because if you don't hit on that point in your content, then they're not going to care.
They're not going to read or like the potential benefit or why it matters to them. Simply answering that question is what locks in the like and share. you nail that on the head, then you will grow just fine.
The next is just social proof. So if you can subtly or humbly flex any of your results or credentials and what you've done, like I did at the beginning of this video with mentioning how I have a few million followers, it's going to get people to pay more attention, obviously. But if you don't have any social proof yet, that's fine because growing your audience is how you build social proof.
It's the chicken and the egg problem, and you should just focus on putting out the content, whether you have social proof or not. is just warning or caution. So if you can warn people about something that's going to happen in their lives or in the future, or you caution them of something that's very powerful.
So now how do we actually go about researching content? And there's two ways to do it. There's the manual way, which is still very beneficial.
And then there's the AI way. So the manual way is you use an outlier tool like Eden or one of 10 or Sandcastles, but those two platforms only cover YouTube. and Instagram.
They don't cover Substack. They don't cover where you can get other ideas from. And a lot of the times you're going to grow the most on social media and stand out the most if you pull ideas from a different platform that you're trying to grow on and bring it to the platform that you are trying to grow on.
So for me, I would bring an idea from Substack or YouTube or Twitter to Instagram. And if I'm growing on Twitter, then I would do the opposite. And that's what's going to help me stand out.
If you're only studying Instagram and you're trying to grow on Instagram, then you're more likely to just blend in with everyone else. So in the discover feed, what I recommend doing is just making it a habit to scroll this maybe once a day, once in the morning, come through here, add some filters, click on breakouts and breakouts is smaller accounts that are doing really well.
So you can get ahead of the trends before they actually happen. And that's an advantage against other people. But you come into here, maybe you search some stuff, but you just scroll.
and you see things that you like, and then you save them to boards so that you can reference them later. Or what I like to do, as I mentioned in the last personal brand strategy video, is if I write on Twitter. and other platforms so if i'm writing i will quite literally scroll through here to see validated ideas it'll spark an idea for me and then i'll write it inside of here and then either save it as a draft or save it to my schedule to go out and you can also schedule on instagram inside of here and have it go out to instagram but you need to create the video first you can create image posts so like a postcard image or a text only image but for videos and reels you just have to upload them into here and add it to your Instagram schedule.
And you can also do this while you are scripting. So if you create a board for your scripts and then you open the note, so I could open the Eden content here and look at my little guide for this video and I could write scripts as I'm actually searching through inspiring ideas or looking through my library for ideas that I saved previously.
Now, the next thing I would do for finding validated ideas or researching the market is just by. searching for top creators in that space so if i go to my own account here all of my top content is validated right this is all something that i can take and get variations on and create my own ideas around or since this is my own content i can just repurpose it and rewrite it in a better way so those are the two manual ways to research content ideas like if you're on youtube obviously you're going to look up a creator in your niche look at their top posts look at their thumbnails look at their titles save them to a board and then you can chat with a board when you need title ideas for your own script based on high performing title ideas.
And the same thing with Discover. You use Discover so you can see posts that are breaking out right now, Instagram posts, tweets, ideas, or thumbnails and titles. And then you can save these as you scroll here every day so that you're not missing things that you could use.
So now there are two ways to actually do this with AI. The first is the real script studio. And there is a link to this in the description.
But what this is going to do is it's going to help you turn. a rough idea into an actual script or an idea that you can take and run with, and it can research the market and what's working on Instagram for you. But if we just open a normal AI chat, I typed in here, I want you to find top performing posts on X and Instagram in the productivity niche with some that talk about monk mode, because that's kind of what I want to write about right now.
But I can also attach my brand strategy here and say, hey, find top performing posts relating to the ideas that I personally talk about. one thing you can do here is you can turn on the deep social research and then you can set it to quick standard or deep so that you can control how much research it does. I'm going to stick with standard right now just so it doesn't run for a long time.
So I sent that and now what it's doing is actually doing the research and showing you what it's searching. It says it takes usually a minute or two. You can see the searches it's doing inside of our social corpus that no other AI has access to.
And so we're just going to let this. finish really quick all right this one's kind of funny it found a hook or read a piece of content from someone i'm so locked in i haven't blinked in 21 600 seconds it's a pretty good hook right so you can even just read through these and what it's reading and start to get an idea of good ideas all right so the results came back And it is giving us a structured output and the ideas.
So the first idea that's worth talking about is isolation as the ultimate productivity hack. So it's giving you the posts. So you see the high performing structures, but you're also seeing the idea behind it, which I think is more important because then you can save these ideas to talk about and turn them into a post based on how you want to write it with a different hook from these people, a different body, however you would.
specifically write it the second idea the phone not laziness is the named villain so it's not you're not lazy it's it's your damn phone as people have talked about before and it gives you these posts and you can save these to any board or just tell the chat to create a new board and save them to it as like a swipe file or your weekly set of ideas that you can write about the third idea is monk mode as regret not aspiration interesting so a contrarian take on monk mode or disappearing or lock in the hyperbole hook I'm so locked in I haven't blinked yep we saw that one but the through line across all of this is externalizing the enemy permission over prescription so on and so forth and now what I can do with this if I want to is tell it to save everything to a board and a document that summarizes everything or I can say okay look at my brand strategy document and let's see how we can apply some of these high performing structures to my own ideas or just output a bunch of ideas based on my own brand strategy.
And then just like that, you have a week's worth of posts or a month's worth of posts. Now, the last thing I want to mention here is just thinking about your style, right? There's a lot of yap video content where you just pick up the phone and start recording yourself and talking to it.
And that's the easiest way to do things because you just write a very soft script, very. soft outline, open it on your phone and then turn on the camera and just. yap or you can sit in the front of a camera like this and have the script pulled up here look at it and then say it to the camera or you can do written first posts like just text on an image like i showed you earlier or you can have a mix of them right i personally have three types of posts that i do i have the tweet style post which is just an image i have the carousel and then i have my reels which what i do for those is i just pull up my twitter look at my tweets say them to the camera and add a bit more onto them and since the tweets I know have performed well because I'm good at writing tweets.
It's just a natural hook. It just works. And then my expansion on it is just me ranting, which people also like.
And then those can go out to Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, or TikTok. So that is really it. Those are the things that you need to focus on is writing good content consistently and posting it, not any of the other things.
And that's how you grow on every single platform. If you do want more advanced growth strategies, I can probably talk about them later in later videos, or we have the creator bootcamp.
So if you're interested at all in Eden, which I just showed you the research tool, there is a welcome offer to get 33 % off and the bootcamp comes with it. And that's just everything I know about branding content, social growth, short form and long form. And of course the links to everything that I mentioned, the personal brand strategy, the real script studio, that's all in the description as well.
So if you want more videos, I'm going to be posting more like. this for how to grow on every platform and how to write different types of content in an engaging way so like subscribe i'll see you in the next video thank you for watching
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
He opens by flexing the receipts, 1.7 million on Instagram, near a million on Twitter, the top philosophy bestseller on Substack, then uses his girlfriend's bad first-post advice from Claude as proof that AI alone can't teach you to grow.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
19:43list
The 10 Commandments of Engagement
Specific numbers (statistics, dollar amounts, metrics)
Pattern interrupts (break the expected format or style)
Negativity bias (flip a positive claim negative)
Calling out a specific target reader
Calling out the problem (pain-point framing)
Readability and aesthetics (line breaks, short sentences)
Confidence and conviction (cut hedging, speak in absolutes)
Potential benefit (what's in it for the reader)
Social proof (results or credentials, stated subtly)
Warning or caution (forewarn of a risk)
Ten recurring attention triggers he says show up across almost every hook or post that performs well, meant to be checked against a draft before publishing.
Steal forauditing a hook or caption draft line by line before posting
12:21model
Reverse-engineer breakdown template
Macro (format, job, implicit reader)
Structure (beat-by-beat escalating arc with a job for each beat)
The template he uses to take apart someone else's viral post: identify the format and who it's really written for, then map each slide or line to the specific job it does in the escalating structure.
Steal forbuilding a personal swipe-file breakdown doc for any post worth studying
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
33:27product
“there is a welcome offer to get 33% off and the bootcamp comes with it”
Soft pitch placed after the full value delivery, near the very end, framed as an add-on for viewers who want the tool he already demonstrated rather than a hard sell up front.
Add Modern Creator as a preferred source and Google shows you more of our breakdowns in Search, Top Stories, and AI Overviews. It only changes what you see, and you can undo it in your Google settings anytime.
Add to Preferred SourcesOpens your Google source preferences with us pre-loaded. Tick the box and you're done.
A 34-minute screen-capture walkthrough of turning a research tool and a five-post swipe file into a finished Substack outline, using AI for structure and never for the actual sentences.
A four-step system for building an Instagram account from zero: set up the algorithm once, pick one easy format and stick with it, build a reusable AI brand kit, then run the same weekly loop until it compounds.
A stalled Instagram account went from a few thousand views a post to 30,000 new followers and roughly $10,000 in revenue in 30 days, using one content format, one topic, and a two-step comment funnel.
A creator breaks down the exact Instagram trial-reel system — recycled winners, hook testing, and a comment-CTA flywheel — that took his account from 480 to 21,000 followers in 97 days.
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