How I gained over 1 million Instagram followers in less than a year
This is the story of how I gained over a million Instagram followers in less than one year
the lessons that I learned from that
and how I would approach a similar goal in today’s social media environment.
currently, my instagram looks like this:
But it was a long journey to get here.
Let’s start from the beginning.
The Backstory
Every over-night success is a story years in the making. I’ll try not to bore you with too many unnecessary details of my origin, but it has to be covered.
Before social media was all short-form video content, I'd been slowly getting more and more into photography since about 2016. It started as a hobby, but I quickly realized that this was my passion.
Shortly after I started my Instagram page just to share my work with others.
I developed kind of a recognizable style even at the time, and I gained some followers. I went viral online and on Reddit a couple times, and on Instagram itself. The account grew slowly, first to 10k, 15k, 50k, and eventually I quite distinctly remember being stuck at around 83,000 followers for a couple years. This was before short-form video content became the thing that Instagram and TikTok were known for.
I found this one screenshot back from those days.
Around 2020, my Instagram had basically gone stagnant. I had started losing followers, and my engagement was going into the absolute gutter. Two years later, it would blow up way beyound what I could ever have expected.
So while the explosion that happened later might have seemed sudden, I wasn't totally new to the platfrom. I already had years of experience taking photos, I had developed a visual style, I had the skills (somewhat), and I had the equipment. I was positioned pretty well for what was about to happen, even if I didn't know it yet.
Here’s an example of one my early viral images that gained me some recognition and followers around 2017-2018.
The funny thing is, I actually did occasionally make short-form videos even as early as 2017 or 2018. But back then, those videos didn't do too well on Instagram because it just wasn't designed for that kind of content.
I always liked the idea of making short, atmospheric visual pieces in this kind of distinct style that I later became quite known for.
I love photography, but I always thought videography or filmmaking was kind of the next challenge, because there are so many more things that you can communicate in a video as compared to just a still photo.
Finally, 2020 rolls around. The world's in a lockdown, TikTok becomes very popular, and Instagram copies TikTok a little bit in the form of Reels.
The problem for me at the time was that I was locked down, stuck outside my usual environment, and I wasn't really able to shoot new stuff. I also distinctly remember disliking Instagram Reels when they first came out.
A lot of people, especially in the photography niche, were posting reels content that frankly was not interesting to me at all. Every time I would open Reels, it was just people giving these very simple beginner tutorials. People that I'd followed for years, who were taking beautiful photos, were now just teaching me how aperture works. I HATED reels when they first came out.
The Switch
By 2022, I almost considered stopping Instagram altogether and just focusing on YouTube, because I was really getting into making videos. Instagram seemed to be dying as a photography platform. In hindsight I was wrong.
But at the time I decided to give it one more chance because I'd been seeing people do well on Reels. And I finally stopped caring enough so ironically that allowed me space to just experiment without caring about what happened or how many of my existing follower base I would annoy.
So I took some of my old content and threw it out there.
I didn't actually consume a lot of short-form content myself, because perhaps I was mistakenly judging it as only this one thing that it was. I didn't see what it could be.
Anyway, I threw out one video clip that I shot in Korea for my YouTube video as atmospheric B-roll. I put some good music on it and posted it as a Reel, and the next day it had gained, I think, almost a million views. Here’s the exact video, although now the audio has been deleted:
It was basically an instant success, at most I was expecting 10k views. Not over a million. It seemed absurd. And I thought, wait a minute.
This is exactly the kind of video that I had been shooting for quite a while back in 2018, when there was no real good way to post it.
The reason I stopped doing it at the time was because it was cumbersome and time-consuming. I couldn't edit on the phone. I had to pull out the laptop, and I couldn't really post it anywhere. It just didn't seem like it was worth the effort to do it more than every once in a while. I made some montages on youtube, and they did well, but it wasn’t really the right platform.
But the solution was sitting right in front of me now.
I could finally shoot short-form atmospheric content focusing on a certain kind of visual and a mood without having to make it into a long-form video on YouTube with a whole plot and everything. I could finally use pretty much any music that existed without getting into copyright trouble because of how TikTok and Instagram made that possible.
Mobile phones had also gotten good enough that I could shoot good, clean video handheld, even at night. I actually bought my first iPhone (the 13 pro max) specifically to do this because of the video quality and stabilization, and that made the whole workflow much easier.
I finally could pursue this old hobby of mine, and it seemed like people were responding to it well.
There were a couple people doing this kind of stuff, but for me, I focused a lot more on the rainy season. I was living in Seoul, South Korea at the time, and I just started going out in heavy rain, recording these atmospheric clips and really enjoying this new type of creativity.
Now, before this, I tried posting a few reels that just showcased my photography, and they did ok. You might have seen me talk about it on youtube at the time even. But this format was the real breaktrough.
I spent endless hours in 2022 and 2023 walking the rain soaked streets of Seoul. I loved every minute of it.
Almost immediately in mid-2022, my IG started gaining so much traction that it was honestly overwhelming, but also exciting.
But that wasn't all there was to it…
One of the biggest advantages that I figured out was understanding that even though I had pretty decent vision and a pretty decent grasp of what worked on social media, I wasn't perfect. I needed a system. Something that ensured I didn’t bore my growing audience with too much spam.
So I simply created a brand new TikTok account without telling anybody.
Every time that I would go out and make these short video clips or edits of stuff that I saw, the next morning I would sit at a coffee shop and literally post 10 or 15 videos on the same day on TikTok.
These videos had slightly different variations, slightly different color grades, or slightly different scenes. My theory was that I would start seeing patterns in the engagement between each one of these videos.
And that was indeed the case.
This is what really supercharged my growth on social media.
The TikTok account itself went from absolutely zero to 100,000 followers pretty quickly and eventually settled somewhere around 400,000.
But I never cared that much about TikTok itself. It was always an experimental platform for me.
In hindsight, I think that was the right choice because TikTok engagement is extremely fickle and wasn't as reliable for me as Instagram. I also had a Korean TikTok account because that's where I was based, so I couldn't monetize it in the US, for example. Today my Tiktok engagement is absolute trash, but I never cared about the platform much.
What mattered to me was what I could learn from it.
a random early tiktok screenshot I found - nostalgic to look at lol
Anyway - the process of making drafts without that much pressure on an entirely new TikTok account made me stop overthinking. It allowed me to post videos that maybe weren't completely ready, but were 70% there.
I could post them, forget about them, and then look at the results later.
It would become much more obvious which adjustments needed to be made to make the videos perform better and, frankly, just make them higher quality and seem a little bit more professional.
Whenever I had a theory, I would implement it, repost it, and observe the results.
For example, maybe I had nice visuals on a draft video, but my cut pacing was off or I was using the wrong kind of music, or maybe I should have started the video a few seconds earlier - or later. I’d make those edits and see what happened.
Then I would simply take the highest-performing videos and post them on Instagram (with some final fine tuning)
Usually this worked better than just posting on Instagram blindly.
There were some nuances between TikTok and Instagram that I had to pay attention to, such as video length and especially trending audio. At the time on Instagram, trending audio seemed important. (I don't know if it's as important anymore, my theory is no but I have no data to support that)
But in any case, I think that the algorithms aren't magic. Ultimately, they're based on what we like as humans.
So I had a system.
Make a lot of variations.
Post them.
Observe the patterns.
Make adjustments.
Test again.
Then take what worked and put it on Instagram.
But the key to my success wasn't just this trick.
It was the combination of having a unique niche, already having the skills and the equipment, having a genuine interest in what I was making, and then being willing to aggressively use data and recognize patterns.
And I also think I needed that ability to let go of perfectionism. It’s what so many artists struggle with. If I had overthunk every single video I ever recorded, I probably would not have ended up posting so much of the videos that later ended up blowing up. I had to learn how to baby-step my way into a video that was “good enough”, and then learn from it. This process continues until this day, I try not to be too harsh on myself because if I were, nothing would ever get released.
But anyway, I now had a goal and a system.
Once all of these things were in place, all I really needed to do was more of it.
And that is when the compounding snowball effect started.
If you have one video on your account going viral, that is one way for somebody new to discover you.
But if you have five related videos in a similar style all going viral at the same time, suddenly people are discovering one video, going to your page, watching another one, sharing another one, and getting shown another one later.
That is exactly what started happening.
I went from around 80,000 followers to 100,000 in the first two weeks. Then I went from 100,000 to 200,000 in about a month.
It was quite incredible how well this was working.
Videos that might have gotten one or two million views seemed to suddenly have the potential to get five million, 10 million, or more because there was so much similar content on my page gaining traction at the same time.
My most popular video around that period reached about 36 million views.
I don't think that video on its own was necessarily special enough to get 36 million views. I think it was the culmination of having so much similar content on my page blowing up at the same time, and then something about that particular video resonated with a lot of people.
My account was blowing up so quickly that it became almost like a kind of a weird fever dream.
My DMs were literally impossible to keep up with. I got followed by Andrew Tate right before he got banned from Instagram. (I didn’t even see that notification or did I ever interact with him, but this is what multiple people told me. They all wanted access to him lol).
I got followed by Skrillex, The Chainsmokers, all kinds of other celebrities and public figures. Some of my favorite comedians followed me back which were my biggest fanboy moments (I blew it).
At the same time, I was just kind of having the time of my life recording these videos.
Once I realized that I could grow this quickly, I made it a personal goal just for fun to see how quickly I could get to 1 million followers.
Maybe I should have documented the journey a little bit more carefully.
But basically, I just kept doing the same thing. Well, not exactly. The lockdown started easing and I took some trips to different countries to shoot as much video and photo content as I could, whenever I had a chance. I flew to Japan many times, Singapore, Dubai, Istanbul, I continued to explore Korea - I was having the time of my life.
It only took eight or nine months for me to reach the 1 million follower barrier, and by the end of 2023 I was at around 1.2 million followers on Instagram.
So in that year alone, I had gained over a million Instagram followers.
Of course, when something like that happens, people take note. They notice what is working, and they start doing the same thing.
A lot of my stuff got basically copied, sometimes frame by frame, sometimes just conceptually. It still happens to this day. I try not to take offense, it’s just the nature of the game.
Any single time that I figure out a nice new angle or a nice unique hook, people are inevitably going to start using it. Which is fine. I started stealing hooks too. But I always try to adapt them to my own style.
And I would encourage everyone who is trying to do this for themselves to not just blindly copy what is working.
You have to try to understand why exactly this particular person is good at doing this particular type of content.
For me, it wasn't totally about just making flashy visuals.
It was about exploring this interesting set of seemingly conflicting feelings and making them into interesting visual pieces.
I love rainy days and particularly rainy nights. I've gotten a lot of feedback that people can really tell that I love it because of the way that my footage looks. I’m not just doing it for attention.
It was about communicating a certain kind of feeling that juxtaposes these chaotic, almost overwhelming, visually powerful scenes of nature and cities, storms and such, with the feeling of calm.
That is what really kept me going, trying to explore and kind of unpack that mood.
And that's the journey that still keeps me going to this day.
My content has never stayed completely the same from year to year. There are similar elements to it, but it always evolves.
If you check month to month, it probably seems not that different. But if you look at my content two years apart, there are definitely differences.
Sometimes people critique me for always doing the same thing, but I think these people are just failing to zoom out, and they don't necessarily understand exactly what I'm trying to do.
What is interesting is that I sometimes catch myself just trying to “do a viral video” instead of genuinely being excited by what I’m recording - and people can tell. Those videos never do so well. Because I lose that extra bit of passion and somehow it just becomes appartent.
To me, the important part is that this was my genuine passion, and I figured out how to share it with the world.
The tiktok trick helped, but the trick wasn't everything.
What makes me proud is that a lot of people to this day will message me that my photography and my short videos help them calm down and help them sleep, or that they inspire them.
And that should be the goal.
If you're thinking about doing something like this, you gotta be able to combine the knowledge of social media, the algorithm, the hooks, and all the technicals with figuring out what is actually your uniquely suited passion or skill that can make you stand out.
You're never really going to be notable if you're just following a trick over and over again, even if you get big numbers.
If you don't have a distinct style, no one's going to know whose video that is without actually looking at the username. The numbers alone may seem tempting, but do not make the mistake of building a following that is all over the place without establishing your own brand.
The goal should be to establish such a strong visual style that people know who shot the video even if they don't see the username, or who shot the photo without seeing the username.
I'm pretty proud of the fact that this seems to be the case for me.
But of course, I have a lot of room for improvement still.
Trial Reels
It's been a while now since I blew up on social media, and we don't even have to use TikTok for this kind of experimentation anymore.
Now we actually have trial Reels built into Instagram.
It was kind of incredible when they came out with that, because using TikTok as a trial Reel pipeline had basically been my secret for the longest time, and now something very similar was integrated into Instagram itself.
I'm still surprised how many people just don't utilize trial Reels or seem unaware of them.
So for my next project, what I'm planning to do is see what I can do on my personal account.
I want to see if I can make a slightly different type of content go viral by utilizing all these same strategies, but in a slightly different way.
The goal is still to find something you're unusually suited to make, something that is actually your passion, while also not ignoring the technical side of social media.
Test aggressively. Recognize the patterns. And once you do find something that works, go hard.
This time, I want to document that journey a little bit better and share it with you guys to help you guys gain some recognition on social media.
So that is what is coming up next.
