250k followers

Sup nerds,

Today’s post is from my homie Edward Sturm.

Maybe you’ve seen his 100s of viral videos on growth hacking or the ones he’s made about me and my memelord adventures:

Edward is a certified evil genius growth hacker. He’s posted daily to TikTok and Instagram Reels for 850+ consecutive days so far.

If you want to start on these platforms, here’s how straight from Edward:

“Give it 30 days.”

Give it 30 days.

I’ve used social video to get customers to my products, invites to crazy tech and business events, and access to people who were much harder to reach before. But this isn’t about that. This is about how you can do it, too.

Hopefully, by seeing my progress, if this is something you want to do, it will not seem out of reach.

We’ll jump into exactly how, but first a quick thank you to this week’s sponsor.

I started making daily videos on TikTok on Nov 1, 2022.

When I started, I said, “I’m going to give this 30 days and see how I feel after the 30 days. I’m committing to making at least one video a day for 30 days.”

I was making videos only in the TikTok app, so it was insanely easy and fast.

It would take me anywhere from 3-20 minutes usually to make a video. The average was probably under 10 minutes. Super basic format - I record a few shots in the TikTok app, TikTok automatically stitches them together, I remove pauses before I speak, I add in auto-generated captions, I correct the captions, I post the video.

That’s it.

All my social accounts were new. I was living in Barcelona at the time with a SIM card I bought the month before in Italy. My content wasn’t going to be pushed out to anybody who knew me. I could afford to f*ck around. I could put out CRINGE content and my social circle from NYC, SF, Miami would not see.

But I wish they did. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Everybody says you need an American SIM card to do this. My videos were originally seen by people in Italy and Spain. Now, my audience of 350,000 across platforms is mostly in the United States. The algos learn who likes your stuff.

After the 30 days

By the end of the 30 days, I was having fun.

There was no pressure. I was barely getting views - 100-200 per video, but I decided to continue. I was originally making content about my apps, but soon needed more stuff to talk about.

My first video that surpassed 1,000 views was 1.5 months after starting right when I had moved to Warsaw. I made a video about something Chamath Palihapitiya said. It got 10,000 views. To me that was a ton.

It took me 2.5 months from starting to have my first viral video. The video got 2 million views. I had made 6 other videos that day. A friend traveling with me was trying to get on TikTok and spending an hour+ per video. I made 7 videos that day as an example to show him how easy and fast it could be.

The video that went viral took 5-10 minutes to make and post. My automation also has my videos come out to Google Drive so every now and then I repost that video - it always goes viral. It’s probably gotten 10-15 million views over its lifetime now.

I had different inflection points across the way that made my average video performance increase a lot:

• Focus on hooks

• Use trending topics

• Focus on giving value vs. just being entertaining

• Switching to a more advanced video editor

• Not worrying about what my social circle thought

“But what if my peers see my cringe content??”

A year and a half later now.

I still hadn’t missed a day of posting videos. Even when I was sick with the Norovirus while on vacation with my girlfriend, I still got out a video. My #1 priority became not missing a day. Even if the video wasn’t great, it was always an opportunity to learn something.

My biggest improvement was Early 2024 - when I stopped worrying about what my social circle thought.

I was posting all my videos to TikTok, but on Instagram I became followed by my social circle. The people who knew me IRL. And I’ll be honest, I didn’t want them seeing my cringe content.

I had a call with a close friend who was blowing up on IG and TikTok.

He told me, “F*ck what they think dude. Just share. I don’t even read my comments anymore.”

I thought about it. If I don’t post everything on IG, which is a super valuable marketing channel, I won’t grow fast (I was only posting videos that first did well on TikTok).

Even if my frequent videos, some of which will be cringe, annoy people I know, they will seek my validation once my average views per video and followers increase - that was my thought at least.

My IG growth was stalling hard when I decided to bite the bullet. “I’m going to post everything.”

I should have done it sooner

First, people started admiring me for putting out BAD videos.

They wanted to do it too and seeing me do it gave them permission. It’s like this video, how to start a movement.

Second, the people who knew me IRL who unfollowed me (this actually happened) refollowed me and reached out to say how much they liked my videos, lmao.

Third, after posting EVERYTHING to the people who knew me, I entirely stopped caring what people thought. In fact, I unfollowed everybody who I wasn’t close with IRL. I just only wanted close friends and family in my feed. I accidentally trained myself to stop caring.

Fourth, everything grew so much faster. I drove a lot of traffic to my products. I came out with new products that my audience told me they wanted. I started getting recognized. When I visited new cities, people saw me share a story in their city, and invited me to cool activities.

I should have done this sooner.

How you can start now

Lots of big business and marketing accounts got their starts reading or hearing about how I was doing it. A lot of them are way bigger than me now, in fact.

A year ago I had a call with Chris Koerner. He had been reading my newsletter. He only had his private IG and hadn’t yet started his new one.

He was already big on 𝕏, but wanted to do the same with video. I shared my experience, the same experience you’re reading here. Less than a year later he’s at over a million followers across platforms, holy moly.

Or Michael Taylor who just emailed me to share this—he built his entire audience over the last six months using things I wrote in my newsletter and articles.

What’s so impressive with him is the only channel he posts manually to is TikTok. A year ago videos posted automatically to Meta properties were suppressed in reach. Now this is not the case. With videos posted through his automation to IG, in 6 months his IG is at 150,000 followers.

But what about you?

Do you need a call with me to start and get big? Nope.

Do you need to read my articles or my newsletter to get big? I’d like you to check them out, but nope.

All you need to do is these four things:

• Find something you like talking about. If you don’t know, do what I did and talk about anything until you figure it out.

• Make and post at least one video daily. Making a video daily (vs. batch shooting & editing) lets you get more feedback in between iterations to increase learning speed.

• Keep production really easy so you can stay consistent. Start with the TikTok or IG apps because they are braindead simple and fast.

• Use automations to make it so your videos come out everywhere. I’d recommend doing what Michael Taylor did - have your videos come out on TikTok then automatically post to all the other channels. The automation I and Michael Taylor use is Repurpose.io - disclosure I’m their biggest affiliate because I recommend it so much.

If you’re worried about your social circle seeing, you can also buy a cheap used phone and new SIM to post from.

But my advice here would be just starting fresh accounts and going hard - people who know you might discover your content and think you’re weird… but they’ll also admire you for trying and admire you even more when you’re big.

Now is the best time to start

Jason was kind enough to allow me to share my story and advice on his newsletter.

He’s now posting daily and wrote me saying, “Bro I’m like 19 days straight on Edward mode.”

I actually started making videos over 10 years ago. This was one of my early viral videos. But back then you had to email press and post on Reddit for people to see your videos.

Now you just post and if its good, it gets pushed out for you. If it’s boring or super cringe, nobody sees because the algorithms don’t push it out.

Now is the best time to start because there has never been so many people watching short form video, the algorithms have never been so proficient at giving niche audiences content they will like (meaning more chance you are discovered organically), and there’s automations and easy editing which makes your job simple: create.

Try for a little bit and see how you feel.

Give it 30 days.

Memes of the Week

Another big week for memelords.

Thank you Memelord Technologies!!

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Founder of Memelord Technologies, Author of Memes Make Millions, Memetic Advisor to beehiiv