Outliers

This year I learned the online game for real. A bunch of my friends went viral in the last twelve months. So did I.

I started nerding out on how to turn these experiences into rules for the future, and what I found out was fascinating.

Showing up and posting consistently online will get you slow, steady, gradual growth.

Which isn't that interesting.

It gets interesting when you hit upon a formula that doubles, triples, or quadruples your entire account.

My friend Dorie's Instagram grew from 22,000 to 166,000 followers in the last few months. She posts every day, but two reels were responsible for most of that jump.

My friend Meg grew from a few thousand to 15,000 in the same time. Daily reels. Nearly all the growth came as a result of one.

Outliers.

Simon has 185,000 YouTube subscribers. Almost all of them came from one video that has 4 million views. The outlier.

Now, countless other accounts have copied Simon's outlier.

They published a similar video with a similar title, thumbnail, and opening line.

(There were 10+ more pages of these)

And they grew their account by a similar amount.

In his 2019 blog post "How to be successful," Sam Altman said this of his next move:

I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote. 

That year, he joined OpenAI to become its CEO.

In social media and in life, find the move that makes the rest look like a footnote.

Ready to go? I got you.

Here's a prompt to use in Claude Cowork.

It will analyse your account (LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc) and then analyse some in your niche that have recently grown.

It will dig into their outliers and give you recommendations for experiments to run to find yours.

Analyse my online presence at [your account link] and get a sense of my niche, style and current content. Then find 3-5 accounts in my niche that have grown fast in the last year, on this platform, and confirm the growth before you use them. For each one, find their outlier: the post(s) or video(s) responsible for a disproportionate share of their growth. Work out why this worked. Look at the title, the hook, the format, the topic and the emotion it triggers, and identify the pattern behind their outliers that could transfer to my account. Then give me 5 outlier concepts for my account, inspired by what you found but true to my niche and style, ranked by potential. For each concept, give me the title, the hook and why it could be the post that makes everything else look like a footnote. Ask for more detail if required.

Copying other people is not your style.

Being inspired and doing your own thing could make your online presence unrecognisable within a few months.

Start your experiment. Play the game.

Find your outlier move.