Have you noticed that big accounts seem to grow on autopilot, while yours feels like Sisyphean labor? It’s not your imagination. It is a known mechanic - get familiar with it, and you can make it working for you instead hindering your progress.
It’s all related to people acting in their own best interest.
A short story from my beginnings
When I started growing my online presence, I was publishing a lot - and most of it was sent into the void. That produced a certain level of frustration, because everything thrown into my feed had 100+ comments, while I barely got a single like.
I would publish a post that got no recognition, and a few days later a similar — or exactly the same — one from another person would get a flood of likes and comments.
I started to wonder: Why? What am I doing wrong here?
While there are many answers to that, one particular thing I found interesting, because it can be replicated. It’s one of the compounding types: compounding people’s incentives.
When you’re small, people can only HOPE
I can write sth useful. The problem is, other people can too! Especially in the era of AI, we’re all flooded with content of all sorts. Put yourself in the shoes of a random user who wants to build distribution online - and with limited time. Who will you spend your time to integrate with?
Sure, some random interactions happen, but the main answer to this is: whoever, that you can benefit the most by cooperating with.
For the audience growth the key is to find the right people - and allow the right people to find you!
If they see a very small profile publishing deep, valuable essays within their interests and goals, they can only HOPE that 3 things will happen:
This account won’t stop publishing great content.
This account will grow over time by doing things right, so the collaboration won’t be a waste of time.
Over time, it will attract an audience related to their activity.
When you’re big, people can SEE and HOPE for more.
Now compare this with a similar profile, but one with a track record of audience growth AND a log of valuable articles. That same user doesn’t need to HOPE for the 3 points above. They SEE it already happening, so they can interact directly, to show their presence to that audience! And hope shifts - towards: “Maybe big account’ll interact back giving them a boost”.
The choice is simple - just straight away:
Interact with the content - the audience will likely see their activity at some point.
Maybe the big account will occasionally react (the hope part), giving them a random boost.
Here is an example, where a much bigger account randomly reacted to my content, after I had been active within their publications.
So what are the implications of this?
As you progress, a growing pool of smaller accounts joins your network - partially in order to grow themselves!
(And yes - what you’re about to do with this button is exactly the mechanic at work :))
And there is nothing wrong with that, it’s just a mechanism that exists, and we can all leverage it!
When I was starting on X, I could only attract profiles practicing strategies like: “subscribe for subscribe, follow for follow”. Worthless: outside of my target group, they’ll never share the problems I’m solving, so they’ll never become my clients nor even contribute to deep conversations on the content I’m publishing.
But as soon as I’ve crossed 1,000 followers on X, things started to change!
Suddenly, when I repeated exactly the same activity within a tech-oriented pool of developers interested in leveraging AI to build and ship products in public - I started to get very different results.
The same strategy, the same activity, exactly the same pattern applied - but with a bigger account. It resulted in multiple days of gaining followers exactly from the audience I aim for.
Here is a screen of the experiment I’ve made a few days ago exactly for this essay publication. To prove the point.
Partially, they’re interested in what I’m making. But a bigger audience makes people thinking that I’m more credible - and they no longer need to HOPE for reach within their group of interests.
They SEE it’s already a fact.
The hidden statistic
As I’ve been writing in my other article: Life is a Badly designed Game, approx only 0,05% of X accounts have more than 1000 followers. That means when you go past that milestone, 99,95% of profiles out there will be smaller than you.
You can read more about it here:
Life Is a Badly Designed Game
The sense of life is to grow yourself through constant sacrifices, while doing it playfully.
This is huge! When you realize where you are in the pool of global it is hard to not get excited!
The Growth Coaching tactics
Coaches on Substack or other platforms that teach you how to grow your account have perculiar thing in common.
Because of how social media works, their strategy is usually a perpetuum mobile.
By the way, if you do NOT know how social media work, here is a simplified version of all the social algorithms in the world:
If post get some traction, it’s pushed towards more people. Ends of story. All the rest are cosmetics, like natural behaviour detection, and such.
So here is how coaches leverage that:
A post with a lot of deep activity under it gets pushed towards more home feeds.
Therefore, coaches encourage people to be active on each other’s posts.
People become active on the coach’s posts, as everybody in the network follows the coach - hoping to be noticed by the rest of the network.
They are active on posts across the network.
Their posts get shown to more feeds, and their accounts grow.
The coach’s profile grows most of all.
There is an unfair advantage in investing in the growth of your Substack profile (or any other platform you focus on) - as well as helping your followers to succeed!
If you’re small today, run the mechanic in reverse
Maybe you’re on the small side of this equation right now. Then this same mechanic explains why your early grind feels so dead - the second engine simply hasn’t kicked in yet.
You publish: “Substack, connect me with AI enthusiast!”. And the same day, an account with 100k subscribers publishes sth like that too. No wonder your post does not perform well.
But you don’t have to wait for it! What you can do instead?
You can run the mechanic in reverse, starting today: engage upward, with intention and strategy!
Find post that already is popular and collects people of your niche.
Engage with everybody there - be useful, answer questions, share your thoughts.
Make yourself known by using the traction someone already got!
That way you’ll help both - them and yourself.
That’s Win-Win-Win situation - the one I love the most.
Be useful in the threads of bigger accounts within your niche. That’s not begging for scraps - as you’ve just seen, the exchange is mutual by design. It’s exactly what my reply-grind sessions above were doing.
Conclusion. Grow your damn account!
All that is to provoke you to think about it. If you’re not investing effort into growing your audience, it’s similar to NOT investing your money. There is not a single reason for neglecting either of those activities.
People generally work towards their own interest. Therefore, if you can provide more benefits to them over time, they’ll be more likely to engage with you.
And reach is the benefit that a lot of people aim for.
Let me repeat the key thought:
As you progress, a growing pool of smaller accounts joins your network - partially in order to grow themselves!
It works like a snowball.
So - will you keep pushing the rock uphill alone, or start building the snowball that others push for you?
Leave a comment or restack this!
After this essay, you know exactly why it’s worth your effort! :)
PS: Why even bother with growing an audience at all? Because one day you may have something to sell — and the distribution part is something I myself neglected for too long. It appears I was not the only one, and most people make this mistake.
If you’re a developer who already shipped something but nobody’s buying, that’s exactly the gap my Ship & Sell Starter Kit closes: launch your first digital product properly in 14 days, and get paid for your efforts!
Worth a read, great tips for anyone interested!